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Important to understand is that there is not one single new or original idea in Klaus Schwab’s so-called Great Reset agenda for the world. Nor is his Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda his or his claim to having invented the notion of Stakeholder Capitalism a product of Schwab.

Klaus Schwab is little more than a slick PR agent for a global technocratic agenda, a corporatist unity of corporate power with government, including the UN, an agenda whose origins go back to the beginning of the 1970s, and even earlier. The Davos Great reset is merely an updated blueprint for a global dystopian dictatorship under UN control that has been decades in development. The key actors were David Rockefeller and his protégé, Maurice Strong.

In the beginning of the 1970s, there was arguably no one person more influential in world politics than the late David Rockefeller, then largely known as chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.

Creating the new paradigm

At the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, the international circles directly tied to David Rockefeller launched a dazzling array of elite organizations and think tanks. These included

The Club of Rome;

the 1001: A Nature Trust, tied to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF);

the Stockholm United Nations Earth Day conference;

the MIT-authored study, Limits to Growth;

and David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission.

Club of Rome

In 1968 David Rockefeller founded a neo-Malthusian think tank, The Club of Rome, along with Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King. Aurelio Peccei, was a senior manager of the Fiat car company, owned by the powerful Italian Agnelli family…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Predicting the Future: How Good is the “Earth4All” Model?

April 17, 2024

Predicting the Future: How Good is the “Earth4All” Model?

Jorgen Randers, one of the original authors of the first report to the Club of Rome, “The Limits to Growth,” of 1972. Now, he is one of the main authors of the new report to the Club, “Earth for All”

This post is not meant to be an in-depth assessment of the Earth4All model but a general discussion on how to use forecasting models. I argue that no matter how sophisticated a model can be, it will always have shortcomings and that a flexible approach is normally the best. The Earth4All model is an integrated assessment model (IAM) linked to earlier efforts such as the “Limits to Growth” series of models, but it is a different approach, being more “goal-oriented” in the sense that it defines the policies needed to approach social, economic, and environmental goals. Facing an uncertain future, Earth4All provides a roadmap that we may or may not be able to follow, but it is part of our efforts to manage a better future for humankind.

You surely remember the story of Oedipus, who was foretold by the Pythoness of the Delphic Oracle that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, Oedipus ran away from the people he believed to be his parents and ended up unknowingly killing his real father and marrying his real mother. This story prefigures a problem that we are still facing nowadays: is the future predictable? And, if it is, does that mean it cannot be changed? When the story of Oedipus was written in the version we know today by Sophocles in the 5^th century BC, oracles may have been enjoying the same kind of trust that in our times we reserve to “science.” Hence, the oracle’s words were presented as an absolute and unchangeable destiny.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is it Too Late for Sustainable Development?

January 19, 2024

Is it Too Late for Sustainable Development?

Dennis Meadows thinks so. Forty years after his book The Limits to Growth, he explains why

On March 2, 1972, a team of experts from MIT presented a groundbreaking report called The Limits to Growth to scientists, journalists and others assembled at the Smithsonian Castle. Released days later in book form, the study was one of the first to use computer modeling to address a centuries-old question: When will the population outgrow the planet and the natural resources it has to offer?

The researchers, led by scientist Dennis Meadows, warned that if current trends in population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion continued, that dark time—marked by a plummeting population, a contracting economy and environmental collapse—would come within 100 years.

In four decades, The Limits to Growth has sold over ten million copies in more than 30 languages. The book is part of the canon of great environmental literature of the 20th century. Yet, the public has done little to avert the disaster it foretells.

GRAPH: Australian physicist Graham Turner shows how actual data from 1970 to 2000 almost exactly matches predictions set forth in the “business-as-usual” scenario presented in The Limits to Growth.

To mark the report’s 40th anniversary, experts gathered in Washington, D.C. on March 1. Meadows and Jorgen Randers, two authors of The Limits to Growth, and other speakers discussed the challenges of forging ahead into a sustainable future at “Perspectives on Limits to Growth: Challenges to Building a Sustainable Planet,” a symposium hosted by the Smithsonian Institution and the Club of Rome, the global think tank that sponsored the original report.

I spoke with Meadows, who retired in 2004 after 35 years as a professor at MIT, Dartmouth College and the University of New Hampshire. We discussed the report and why he feels it is too late for sustainable development and it is now time for resilience.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Was the Club of Rome & MIT study right about soon-arriving resource shortages and the collapse of humanity? Part 2 of a 3 Part Series

November 2, 2022

Was the Club of Rome & MIT study right about soon-arriving resource shortages and the collapse of humanity? Part 2 of a 3 Part Series

The book, Limits to Growth, published in 1972 was designed to publicize the findings of an MIT study funded by a group of European industrialists calling themselves the Club of Rome. Was this MIT collapse study correct?

(This is Part two of our series on the Club of Rome predictions. It was written by Bruce Nappi, a long-time Job One for Humanity volunteer and a former Sandia National Lab, and U. California Lawrence Livermore National Lab scientist.)

These leaders, a number from the auto industry, were already encountering natural resource limits that impacted auto production. The goal of the study was to anticipate serious future production problems.

The observations made by the book, with the support of the U.N., were initially taken seriously by most world companies. Plans were developed and about to be enacted. The one significant country that did not go along was the U.S. Instead, the U.S. government, academia, and highly impacted companies, led by the carbon fuel industry, launched an effort to heavily discredit the program. They used the same approach and consulting firms that discredited the claims of tobacco and asbestos links to cancer. These same firms, and their approaches, with huge funding from the carbon industry, are currently a major force working to discredit scientific findings about global warming and climate change.

In the early 1970s, a significant scientific study was conducted that addressed the viability of infinite growth in human population and the economy. That study concluded these ongoing assumptions were not viable long term. In fact, the study realized that severe repercussions to the entirety of world society were inevitable in a relatively short time if major adjustments were not started immediately.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years

September 10, 2021

2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years

When Fake News Kill: The 6 Most Stubborn (and Dangerous) Legends in History

December 3, 2018

When Fake News Kill: The 6 Most Stubborn (and Dangerous) Legends in History

Gary Larson’s interpretation of the legend that Queen Marie Antoinette of France proposed that the people of Paris could eat cake when she was told that they had no bread. It highlights the absurdity of a legend which is, nevertheless, still widely believed today. It is the basic feature of a series of legends which are wrong, stubborn, and often kill people.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with the local people of a small Tuscan town in the countryside, when it came out that I am a member of the Club of Rome. At that point, one of them asked me, “Can you tell me how much the Club had to backtrack from their wrong predictions?” I was taken aback for a moment, but then I realized that even in a small town in Tuscany people are not immune from global propaganda. That I was asked that question is simply proof of the incredible resilience of some legends, that we may also call “fake news” or “memes“.

It is an incredibly fascinating subject: why are people so easily fooled by legends which not only have no basis in facts but are also plainly absurd? Yet, it is commonplace, one of the features of our world. So, let me try to put down a list of memes — fake news — which turned out to be extremely resilient, with a lifetime of decades or even centuries, also dangerous legends which often kill people. The list below is not complete, but I chose examples that seemed to me especially fascinating and instructive.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Epistemology of a Dying Empire: How do Our Leaders Make Choices?

November 6, 2018

Epistemology of a Dying Empire: How do Our Leaders Make Choices?

Recently, Michael Liebreich published an article titled “The Secret of Eternal Growth.” I have been mulling over in my head if it is appropriate to spend time discussing one more mishmash of legends, including the one that’s by now a classic, the “errors” that the Club of Rome is said to have made with the 1972 report, “The Limits to Growth.” Eventually, I decided that it was worth a post, not so much because the post by Liebreich is especially wrongheaded or silly, but because it illustrates one basic point of our civilization: who, and how, takes decisions? On which basis?

In the end, I think we have a problem of epistemology, the question of the nature of knowledge. In order to make decisions, you have to know what you are doing — at least in principle. In other words, you need some kind of “model” of reality in order to be able to act on it. It was Jay Forrester, the father of system dynamics and the originator of the “Limits to Growth” report who pointed out that, (World Dynamics, 1971, p. 14)

Everyone uses models all the time. Every person in his private life and in his community life uses models for decision making. The mental image of the world around one, carried in each individual’s head, is a model. One does not have a family, a business, a city, a government, or a country in his head. He has only selected concepts and relationships that he uses to represent the real system.

And the big question is where these “selected concepts” come from. My impression is that the mind of our leaders is a jumble of ideas and concepts grafted from haphazard messages that come from the media.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Durable Goods

October 26, 2018

Durable Goods

Ed. note: The post below is a transcription of Post Carbon Fellow Stephanie Mills’ remarks at the 50 year anniversary of the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Gratitude to Mother Earth, ground of being. Gratitude to Stewart and Ryan and their colleagues for realizing this event. Gratitude to Stephanie Feldstein for her partnership tonight.

The image was taken this summer in a stand of old growth White Pine saved in 1973 from the chainsaws by a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens. The flowers are Bunchberry and Canada Mayflower. Gratitude to all those beings.

Stewart, master of compressed utterance, asked for five minutes on the last and next half-centuries: More than a tweet, less than a tome.

Fifty years is an eyeblink. Yet despite many good faith efforts at every level to prevent waste and ruin, the growth of industrial civilization has ravaged the Earth, depleting soil, water, and biodiversity, contaminating oceans and the atmosphere.

In 1968 Paul and Anne Ehrlich dropped The Population Bomb. There were about 3.5 billion of us then, over seven billion now. Contraceptive means improved, while political calculation, cultural conservatism and patriarchy hampered their widespread adoption.

Sixties temblors of revolutionary change cracked a few foundations. In 1972 from the Club of Rome we got a world systems model forecasting industrial civilization’s inescapable limits to growth. In 1974, Congress heard of M. King Hubbert’s curve mapping the limits to oil production, the end times for a petroleum-driven global infrastructure. Big business as usual has continued. Critical thresholds have been crossed. A late-breaking discussion of degrowth is underway but yet to reach a wide audience.

A half-century ago we thought about living more responsibly. “Access to tools” enlivened possibilities of household, homestead, village, and neighborhood self-reliance. There was hope of stalling the Apocalypse Juggernaut. There still may be.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Eco Crises: Doom & Gloom, Truth & Consequences

October 26, 2018

Eco Crises: Doom & Gloom, Truth & Consequences

Photo Source Sakeeb Sabakka | CC BY 2.0

…We can’t save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to change. Everything needs to change and it has to start today….To all the politicians that pretend to take the climate question seriously, to all of you who know but choose to look the other way every day because you seem more frightened of the changes that can prevent the catastrophic climate change than the catastrophic climate change itself… Please treat the crisis as the crisis it is and give us a future.

— Greta Thunberg, 15 year-old climate activist speaking at the Helsinki climate demonstration, October 20, 2018

When I entered my interdisciplinary environmental graduate program, I already had years of work experience behind me as well as a lifetime of informal environmental education. I recognized the grim ecological picture. Some of my professors, however, were quick to admonish, “We can’t be gloom and doom.” Their other refrain was, “We can’t go back.” They offered no evidence for those two prescriptions with regard to the climate and ecological crises, yet their commands were common among environmental scholars. More than a decade later, we face far more dismal prospects for the future of humanity, but we are still loath to truly address them.

Doom and Gloom

In 1972, the Club of Rome, a consortium of scientists, economists, politicians, diplomats, and industrialists, produced a lengthy scientific report entitled Limits to Growth. Their work predicted a collapse of the human population due to our unchecked economic growth and resource depletion. While their estimates were condemned as alarmist and overreaching, independent researchers have updated the report for the 50^thanniversary of the club’s inception, and have largely found that the conclusions from the original still hold.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Fall of Empires Explained in 10 Minutes

October 21, 2018

The Fall of Empires Explained in 10 Minutes

This is the presentation I gave to the meeting for the 50th anniversary of the Club of Rome on Oct 18th in Rome. The gist of the idea is that the fall of ancient civilizations, such as the Roman Empire, can be described with the same models developed in the 1970 to describe the future of our civilization. States, empires, and entire civilizations tend to fall under the combined effect of resource depletion and growing pollution. In the end, they are destroyed by what I call the Seneca Effect.

You can find the paper I mention in the talk at this link.

Did the Club of Rome Ever Disavow “The Limits to Growth”? A Story of Ordinary Disinformation

September 24, 2018

Did the Club of Rome Ever Disavow “The Limits to Growth”? A Story of Ordinary Disinformation

Aurelio Peccei in 1969, when he was appointed the first president of the Club of Rome

The Club of Rome is inextricably linked to the legendary report that it commissioned to a group of MIT researchers in 1972, “The Limits to Growth.” Today, nearly 50 years later, we still have to come to terms with the vision brought by the report, a vision that contradicts the core of some of humankind’s most cherished beliefs. The report tells us that we cannot keep growing forever and that we have to stop considering everything we see around us as ours by divine right.

Not surprisingly, the report generated strong feelings and, with them, there came plenty of disinformation and legends. Some cast the Club of Rome in the role of a secret organization with dark and dire purposes, others aimed at the Limits report, claiming that it was “wrong” or, worse, purposefully designed to deceive the public. I wrote an entire book on this subject (The Limits to Growth Revisited) — in short, most of these stories are false but some contain grains of truth and all of them tell us something about how we humans don’t just deny bad news, we tend to demonize the bearers.

So, there is a peculiar legend stating that the leaders of the Club of Rome disavowed their brainchild, The Limits to Growth and, in doing so, they admitted that it had been wrong, or an attempt to mislead the public. It is an old legend but, as all legends, it is surprisingly persistent and you can still see it mentioned in recent times (for instance, here and here) as if it were the obvious truth. It is not: it is a good example of how disinformation works.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Saving the World: Top-Down or Bottom-Up? A Review of the Latest Report to the Club of Rome, “Come On”

April 13, 2018

Saving the World: Top-Down or Bottom-Up? A Review of the Latest Report to the Club of Rome, “Come On”

Come On: Capitalism, Short-termism and the Destruction of the Planet. A new Report from the Club of Rome. By Ernst von Weizsaecker and Anders Wijkman – Book Review by Ugo Bardi

Nearly half a century has passed since the publication, in 1972, of the first – and still the most famous – report of the Club of Rome, “The Limits to Growth.” That first report was heavily criticized but, nowadays, it is turning out that it had correctly identified the main lines of the trajectory that the human industrial society was to follow and is still following. To the authors of this report and to their mentor, Jay Forrester, goes the merit of having identified for the first time the critical problem that we are facing nowadays, that of “overshoot”, exceeding the limits that the planetary ecosphere can sustain and forcing humankind to a return within the limits that could be painful or even disastrous.

Today, the Club of Rome keeps following its tradition of studying the long-term prospects of humankind facing the twin challenges of resource depletion and climate change. The latest report of the Club on these matters is “Come On” by Anders Wijkman and Ernst Von Weizsacker, published with Springer in 2017, in occasion of the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the Club.

Clearly, this is a book which has been thoroughly planned and carefully created. The text is divided into three parts: 1) A review of the currently unsustainable trends, 2) A review of how to look at the situation 3) A discussion of solutions designed to avoid disaster. It is a sort of Aristotelian syllogism structure.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Book Review: Food Scarcity. Unavoidable by 2100?

December 27, 2017

Book Review: Food Scarcity. Unavoidable by 2100?

This is an excerpt from the review by Ugo Bardi published on the “Journal of Population and Sustainability“

Scientific studies that examine the food supply and its correlation to human population have a long tradition that goes back to Thomas Malthus and his “An Essay on the Future of Population“ of 1798. From then on, the field has remained politically charged. Still today, Malthus is often dismissed as a doomsday prophet whose apocalyptic predictions turned out to be wrong. But Malthus lacked the modern concept of “overshoot and collapse” and he never predicted the kind of population crashes that we associate to modern famines.

Another study often accused of having been overly catastrophistic in terms of the future of the human population is the report to the Club of Rome titled “The Limits to Growth”, published in its first version in 1972. This is also a misinterpretation, since none of the several scenarios reported in 1972 foresaw a population decline before entering the second half of the 21st century.

In analogy with the first report to the Club of Rome, the recent book by Weiler and Demuynck, “Food Scarcity” approaches an old problem with a new methodology. While “The Limits to Growth” was one of the first studies to apply system dynamics to the study of the economy, “Food Scarcity” is among the first studies that applies the modern network theory to the world’s food system. The resulting book, “Food Scarcity,” is an ambitious attempt to pack an enormous amount of material into just 150 pages. It starts with a review of the situation of the world’s food supply with extensive data on the different climate systems, cultivation technologies, geographical conditions, and more.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tim Jackson: The High Price Of Growth

October 16, 2017

Tim Jackson: The High Price Of Growth

A finite planet cannot sustain infinite economic growth

Modern society is addicted to and engineered for perpetual economic growth.

Now, a fourth-grader can tell you that nothing can grow forever, especially if you have finite resources. But that simple realization is eluding today’s central planners, despite multiplying evidence that growth is becoming harder and harder to come by.

This week’s podcast guest is Professor Tim Jackson, sustainability advisor for the UK government, professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey and Director of CUSP. Tim is also a full member of the Club of Rome.

He explains why the exponential growth rates of today’s economies, and their associated rates of resource extraction/consumption, will not be able to continue for much longer — and why a pursuit of “prosperity” (defined much more broadly than simple consumerism) is a much healthier goal for humanity.

Anyone who thinks that exponential growth can go on forever on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist.

Those very steep lines that rise very sharply as we approach the 21^st century and show us that we are exceeding our carrying capacity in all sorts of ways are quite compelling. I think people actually feel this to some extent, that having more and more ‘stuff’ going through the system is somehow unsustainable. And not just in environmental ways, but even in social ways.

It’s the classic challenge of the irresistible force meeting the unmovable object. This pervasive idea of prosperity consisting of exponential growth, while the planet is not getting any bigger, is putting ecosystems under lots of stress. The pressures that human society puts on our environment is increasingly obvious.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Investment as a Commitment. Tim Jackson at the Summer School of the Club of Rome in Florence

September 17, 2017

Investment as a Commitment. Tim Jackson at the Summer School of the Club of Rome in Florence

Tim Jackson speaks at the 1st Summer School of the Club of Rome in Florence, Sep, 2017 (image courtesy Daniel Reinhardt)

There have been several interesting talks at the Summer School on Sustainability in Florence, but the one by Tim Jackson has been among the most focused and relevant ones. Jackson is the author of the book “Prosperity Without Growth” (2009) and he goes straight to the core of the problem, which lies in our financial system. We are geared for growth, everything in the system pushes for growth, all the financial structures are rewarding growth. And, as Jay Forrester was perhaps the first to note, economic growth is what’ leading us straight to the Seneca Cliff.

So, we need to re-examine the basics of our economic system and propose ways to defuse the ticking bomb that we ourselves have created. There is much to be discussed about Jackson’s proposals, but one that I noted, in particular, was the concept of “investment as a commitment.” I asked Jackson how this is supposed to be different than the current way of investing, and his answer was that, today, investors tend to see the market as a “gamble” in which they may gain or lose; but their main motivation is for big, short-term gains. Clearly, this is not the way that will take us to a saner and safer world.

The key point of the whole thing, as I see the situation, is in the financial system. If we found a way to divest from fossil fuels and to move financial resources to the transition in the form of renewable energy and the related infrastructure, then there is still hope to avoid the Seneca Cliff, at least in its most brutal form.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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