In your longer article, and at the original on TOD we have the phrase "Powering Civilisation To 2050".

Of course this begs the question... whose definition of "civilisation".

And it is this unspoken assumed definition that is then examined/promoted/defended.

I got the impression from Stuart Stanifords article that that assumption was of a western technologically driven "growth" economy.

We should remind ourselves that "civilisation" is "just" the sum total of the collective behaviors and institutions in a culture during a particular defined period of time. Use of the term as if there is 'The' or 'A' civilisation that is the goal in many discussions about the future is annoying and, I think, blinkered.

For example, in Stuart Stanifords article, why does he use the term "requirements" instead of "assumptions"?

Lastly, scenario 9 (the one everyone seems to forget) assumes pollution control technology, increasing efficiency of resource utilisation, increased agricultural yields, stable population (growth easing down to replacement rate) and stable industrial output per capita. This scenario (shown above) ends with all indicators stable and above present levels at the end of the century.

The problem I see with scenario 9 (admittedly using my perhaps limited faculties), is that it appears to indicate that by 2000 we had used less than 1/4 of our endowment of resources, indeed just over 1/8 from the look of it. Does this really square with what we are seeing with respect to resource depletion, ie copper, lead, aluminium, rare earth elements, not to mention fossil fuels? Perhaps we really do have 7/8ths of our resource endowment left, but that proportion is certainly not the high grade sources we began this adventure with.

As we move to increasingly lower grade ores we need to move more material to extract the same amount of end resource, so even with a hypothetical 100% efficient earthmoving machine we still need to expend proportionally more energy to get what we need as the ore quality declines. Even moving to electric machinery and renewable sources will require ever expanding infrastructure to supply a constant amount of a resource, meaning the use of the other resources required to make that infrastructure will rise continuously, won't it?

Essentially, what is saved in increased efficiency manufacturing aluminium window frames is lost creating more machinery & energy sources to power them to mine more rarefied aluminium ores?

Thanks for the great review of "Limits". I still have my 1974 copy of the original. It seems that lately I'm seeing increasing numbers of commentators making the same dumb statements about the "failed predictions" in the book. I get more outraged each time and, when possible, contact the author to offer correction. Only one (I forget who) actually acknowledged that he had never read the book.

As I have expressed to the authors of the three books, the problem with the series of scenarios is the inconsistent use of a baseline. The 'business-as-usual" scenario is presented as the baseline for the other scenarios to be compared against. Unfortunately, this is not done in any of the books. While the "business-as-usual" is touted as the baseline, it is immediately replaced with the double resources scenario, against which all other mitigation scenarios are compared. This is not the proper use of scenario construction/use to draw comparisons. The mitigation proposals should have used the "business-as-usual" baseline to draw conclusions;i.e. apply the mitigation steps to the "business-as-usual" run to see their impact. IMO, the reason this was not done was that applying the mitigation steps WITHOUT DOUBLE RESOURCES resulted in collapse for all scenarios.

Not one word so far about humankind's predilection for that most inefficient but inevitable of practices: warfare. All the foregoing assumptions about continuing to increase the efficiency of our industrial processes studiously ignore that facet of human nature which would choose "take" over "make" when times get tough.
Technological civilization gives each of us a power over our fellow citizens that would be unimaginable just a few centuries ago. But like scorpions trapped in a bottle, we're now forced to reign in the very instincts that have made Homo so devastatingly successful over all other large animals. Each of us could destroy others, but none can guarantee safety for himself. Our Cold War incarnation called this MAD - and it worked. That's social civilization, in my definition: A choice to forego the easy defections against our neighbors for the longer view, even if that means accepting a pie that's unevenly divided.
But what happens when the pie shrinks to the point that some here in the West are squeezed out altogether? What red-blooded American guy will choose "Grapes of Wrath" over "Rambo?" IMO it would only take 10% of the population abrogating the social contract to trigger anarchy.
I'm not optimistic that 90+% will choose pacifism with their poverty; That's why I view these models as best-case scenarios - Kum Ba Yahs 1 thru 9.

PNM is in the process of projecting electric energy demand, but maybe NOT fuel supply, for the next 20 years.

PNM updates 20 year projection each 3 years.

PNM is in the process of running Monte Carlo [a New Mexico thing] portfolio simulations.

So.

Let's look at the results of the simulations when they are given us.

PNM is in the process of projecting electric energy demand, but maybe NOT fuel supply, for the next 20 years.

PNM updates 20 year projection each 3 years.

PNM is in the process of running Monte Carlo [a New Mexico thing] portfolio simulations.

So.

Let's look at the results of the simulations when they are given us.

I am struck by how much a discontinuity in the financial situation might distort what would be normal patterns. Theoretically, people can continue to produce even if the financial system is a mess, but I doubt this would happen in practice. Models aren't set up to considers the financial system so will miss this effect.

All the knowledge at peak oil is great BUT!

It is pretty clear right now that the biosphere is seriously damaged. {collapse of west antartic ice sheet a few years ago,and this northern summerś extreme and unexpected loss of ice in the arctic circle are real bad tipping points.

This has been caused by the use of fossil fuels. Common sense - stop using fossil fuels. This will conserve the oil for future use and allow the biosphere a bit of brething space to recover itś composure.

How do we stop using fossil fuel. Everyone just has to stop consuming eveything thst is not essential to basic survival.

Life on this planet is trying to do just that, the US financial system is trying to collapse and is prevented from doing so by a crazy federal bank shoring it up with megabucks. The best thing that could happen would be for the global economy to collapse, and no later than next week.

We need to get this simple message across to those people without äcademic skills to read deeply.

THE PLANET IS VERY SICK, WE HAVE CAUSED IT BY BURNING FOSSIL FUELS. STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUEL.

I am now going to search my house for power outlets, and remove the plugs.
I am going to shut down my ¨Always On Linux Firewall/Server¨
I am not going to make payments on my credit cards till a magistrate orders me to do so.
I am going to take all my money out of the bank and store it in a tin buried in the garden.
I am going to stay at home and not use my car, I will go get groceries on my pushbike.
I am going to reduce my food consumption by 50%. I am going to cut satisfaction spending to zero.
I turned off the telvision years ago.

In short, I AM TAKING BACK MY LIFE, the life that was taken from me by the brainwashing, thought numbing media juggernaut.

If anyone wants to help, feel free to imbibe.

¨Letś do it for Al Gore¨, anyone that optimistic deserves a helping hand.

The late Dana Meadows (lead author of limits to growth) was a friend of mine. We talked many times about the reactions and criticsm of LTG. She said her attic was full of comments of people who refused to suspend belief in their own world view to examine other possibilities.

I have been working with system dynamics computer models with students for 20 years now; working with the late Barry Richmond (who created the STELLA systems modeling software) and Peter Senge at MIT. I have been experiencing the frustration Big Gav expresses for some time now.

One of the problems with systems thinking, in general, is that people are generally pretty good at defining the components of a dynamic system, but bad at deducing the feedback relationships and absolutely horrible at predicting the behavior of a complex system.

Even when you allow people to put in their own assumptions about critical components (as I watched Barry do with Fortune 500 CEOs and CFOs) and the model shows an overshoot and collapse regardless of the change in variables, people refuse to acknowledge the possibility of a real overshoot and collapse because it does not fit their mental models of the world.

Many of us are working at the K12 level to try to develop a capacity of the next generation to understand feedback, dynamic behavior and systems thinking in general. The Creative Learning Exchange (http://www.clexchange.org/) has some more information on this effort. In a complex world with less resilience and tighter coupling, this is essential.

I was at a system dynamics conference in Bergen in 2000, listened to Jorgen Randers (coauthor of LTG) and spoke to him afterwards. I haven't seen him since, but he saw no reason at that time to doubt that the main points of LTG were right on track.

http://worldchanging.com/archives/004246.html

Imagine a database of thousands of items all related to understanding how the future could turn out. This database would include narrow concerns and large-scale driving forces alike, would have links to relevant external materials, and would have space for the discussion of and elaboration on the entries. The items in the database would link to scenario documents showing how various forces and changes could combine to produce different possible outcomes. Best of all, the entire construction would be open access, free for the use.

As a result, people around the world could start playing with these scenario elements, re-mixing them in new ways, looking for heretofore unseen connections and surprising combinatorial results. Sharp eyes could seek out and correct underlying problems of logic or fact. Organizations with limited resources and few connections to big thinkers would be able to craft scenario narratives of their own with a planet's worth of ideas at their fingertips.

This is what a world of open source scenario planning might look like.

Sounds like a wet dream for us at TOD. Lots of Stuart Stanifords in every technical area(agriculture, oil energy technologies, economics, politics) contributing to future scenarios for our future and whittling it down to the best possible scenario for all concerned resulting in the end in peace, love and happiness with full bellies, conservation, unlimited energy supplies,etc.- We just have to figure it out in a rational manner on an open source planning wiki. Hmm, well maybe.

I tend to think of a quote from a Peter Gabriel song "Perspective"

http://www.mp3lyrics.org/p/peter-gabriel/perspective/

I need perspective, 'cos I'm facing the wall.
I need perspective, 'cos I'm not that tall.
I need perspective, heard the trumpet call.
Don't trust my eyes, want to know where things fall.

Following above blog post was very pertinent comment made about scenario planning:

http://worldchanging.com/archives/004246.html

Good idea, except the problem with scenarios is that they often border on banality (e.g. Shell's scenarios are famous for their emptyness).
Scenarios are mostly the reflection of scenario-writers' highly subjective and highly culturally determined perceptions of the present, projected onto the future, with obvious anachronistic flaws. They suffer under the same interminable methodological quarrels as all the humanistic sciences do (we've all heard of the Methodenstreit in sociology, psychology, history, economy, etc...). The important thing to ask is: who is writing the future? Who's doing the scenario?

I honestly don't see how any open source strategy or the sharing of tools and methods by a large number of people would improve on this 'epistemic' problem - systematically. It would merely broaden the number of choices and perspectives one can take to write scenario's. It would make them more explicit and probably more diffuse. And it would make the writers more acutely aware of their own subjectivity as writers. Which is a good thing. (But hardly new; our ethnography professor always used to say that self-confession amongst alfa-scientists is the best epistemological strategy around, and the oldest one. "Always start your thesis with: "I'm a marxist historian, I will not write anything in an objective manner, please find the sources I refuse to use, in annex II", ect...).

To overcome this problem ('who writes the future'), I think an experiment would consist of launching a specific topic, with some voting system which will determine which elements become "drivers" and main categories for the scenario; and then do a meta-study to see who has contributed which elements, and made which decisions. You'd have to carry out a survey asking all participants for their political, cultural and academic background, etc...

That could be part of the idea: a continuous "feedback", showing who stresses which kind of methodology or element of it.

In any case, what scenarios need most is self-relativism and some kind of 'meta'-perspective. If the open source idea offers a methodology for this aspect of the scenario-writing business, it would vastly improve the trade.

This also reminds me of the differences that quickly surfaced when Stuart strayed from pure data analysis of facts on the ground in Saudi fields. Many said he was biased towards his own viewpoint and that the whole exercise was therefore worthless. He openly said the same about Kunstler's and others views for example in his piece The fallacy of reversibility-Why Peak Oil Actually Helps Industrial Agriculture - http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3481.

Jeff Vail hit on the whole problem here:
More thoughts on Relocalization
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3554

What are our goals—is it merely to meet our minimal nutritional requirements, or to amass the most material possessions? Who benefits from centralized processes vs. decentralized, and what political structures to they tend to support and accrete? Are we seeking to maximize the mean or median fulfillment of human ontogeny? These are ultimately moral and philosophical questions, and ones that I will not attempt to answer here.

I find it important that we consider what we do with the future, if we intend to have one of course.

I suspect that some sort of default will run its course as the current trajectory has to run out of steam before alternatives are attempted in the sense of the famous quote thats says one does everything else first and then only as a last resort "the right thing". This right thing is of course what ultimately works. It sounds a bit like experimental hit and miss, Edison with the light bulb, not Tesla's true genius, inventing alternating current.

I admit I speculate as much as anyone on what "We" should do or where the world is going to, if X then Y, in politics, in economics, GW, PO, etc.

Maybe a sum of the subjective assumptions of all humanity weighed according to their particular influence on the outcome at any point in time plus the same for the nonhuman reality (animal, vegetable, mineral, etc) could give us a sense of where we are going. The human reality we attempt to figure out moment by moment in market behaviour (DJI up/down) and through elections/politics but stabilizing the feedback amongst all the people and the natural world to maintain a stable system without collapse (managing earth) is a hard task indeed.

Gav,

I have never come across a rational discussion of what the book actually describes

Does this Simmons piece have the nous you are looking for?

Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could The Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All?

If it doesn't what would you see as its weaknesses?

Gav: "Both of these views are completely false, yet I have never come across a rational discussion of what the book actually describes"

I think Jamais misses another, even more important point:

Most of the people discussing, dissing and representing the book have never actually read it themselves cover to cover.

Some have browsed it, some have read a review, some read an interview with one of the authors, most just happened to use a ReadyMade opinion available from the media ("Doom!Gloom!", "Green Mad Men!" etc).

That's really sad, but most people just don't read books.

Especially difficult ones that require independent thinking.

Some 32 years ago, H. E. Goeller delivered a lecture which he had co-authored with Alvin Weinberg, at Eindhotten in the Netherlands. The lectures title was "Age of Substitutability." Weinberg later explained that the purpose of the "Age of Substitutability" was to demonstrate the absurdity of the Club of Rome study. The "Age of Substitutability" dan be downloaded from the internet.
http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/servlets/purl/5045860-HVRCd7/5045860...

Goeller and Weinberg argued that by using breeder reactors enough energy could be extracted from known supplies of uranium and thorium to support a high energy world wide economy for thousands of years. They further argued that through substitution of common minerals for rare minerals, human material needs could be meet.

Yes, let's grasp at the least probable of all the straws that depends on massive infrastructure changes in our civilization and further, upon massive behavioral changes by the majority of homo sapiens. Then let's assume that this is already ongoing and we haven't already blown nearly 40 years of lead time to make the change. Then we can talk this hypothetical non-occurring set of changes to death as a "solution" while remaining on the same course we have always held. Meanwhile we can ignore any scenario that remotely bears any resemblance to what is actually occurring and which ends in disaster for our species. After doing that we can then raise silly questions of why "doomers" (such conveniently pejorative labeling) ignore the single (slightly) optimistic scenario.

Self-deception - the most essential ingredient of homo sapiens...

Nate Hagens!! Are you paying attention here?

I remember hearing about Limits to Growth and the Club of Rome when the book first came out. It was something of a raging controversy in the popular press, but had very little credibility among academic scientist and economist at the time. My memory is not clear so don't take my word for it, but there is a reasonably brief history under 'Limits to Growth' in Wikipedia. (You think Wikipedia is not a proper reference? Well I think it is at least on a par with the original work of Limits to Growth.) I remember liking it but cautiously. I was at the time a young academic physicist hoping for tenure. It didn't seem to handle the dependence of reserve estimates on the current price at all. And I liked that because I was suspicious of economics. But read Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_Growth
On reading wikipedia, I get the impression that they scaled up their reserve data by 5x in order to account for reserve growth because of price rise - very crude! But maybe good enough for a press release.

The copy of Limits to Growth I have is from 2004. Since then the science on global warming has found many more positive feed back loops. On page 118 it says:

On a warmer Earth the ocean will expand and sea levels will rise. If the warming is sufficient to melt polar ice in large quantities, sea levels will rise significantly, but on longer time horizons.

That has to be seen as too conservative. We may even have abrupt climate change as the Arctic summer sea ice disappears in the next years.

Causes of Changes in Arctic Sea Ice; by Wieslaw Maslowski (Naval Postgraduate School)
http://www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/documents/May032006_Dr.WieslawMaslows...

To take up earlier remarks: yes, the chance of discontinuities is underestimated.

On of the most limiting factors are now:
(A) DENIAL mode
(B) tendency towards BAU
(C) eternal growth mentality

What the book has not covered is what I call "the deadly embrace between peak oil and global warming", that is all our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions (=large scale wind, solar, renewable energy projects and rail electrification) will get stuck in diesel shortages.