Fifty years ago the authors of the groundbreaking book The Limits to Growth showed that, in any of a series of computer-generated scenarios, world economic growth would end sometime during the 21st century. Using simple math and logic, they pointed out that growth in any material input or output cannot continue indefinitely within a finite system. Since the Earth is a finite system, the effort to perpetually grow human economies (which, by their very nature, extract resources and produce wastes) is doomed to eventual failure, leading to significant declines in resources, industrial output, food production, and population. Despite the fact that the book was a bestseller and its conclusions were well supported, world political and business leaders ignored it and persevered in their efforts to expand resource extraction, agriculture, and manufacturing.

Around the year 2010, it appeared to me that signs of growth’s slowing and approaching reversal were accumulating to the point that a new book on the subject might be timely and helpful. The End of Growth was published in 2011, and attracted healthy sales but few reviews.

Today, indications of impending economic stagnation and retrenchment are arguably stronger still. There will be many articles this semicentennial anniversary year discussing the 1972 Limits to Growth study; I thought it might also be informative to look back at my book, reflecting on whether its message is useful today.

In the book, I argued that modern economic growth is largely attributable to fossil fuels. Energy is essential to all activity, and the availability of vast amounts of energy from tens of millions of years’ worth of ancient sunlight, captured and transformed by natural processes into portable and storable fuels, has made it possible to speed up and expand nearly every human enterprise…

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