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Climate is the big one this report. Despite our feeble efforts to address the radical changes already taking place, the disaster will explode within ten to fifteen years, due in large part to the depletion of farmlands worldwide from the use of toxic chemical fertilizers and pesticides, soil exhaustion, and encroaching urban population. The results: famine, disease, and mass starvation then triggering political instability in which hundreds of millions will die.

The list went on and on, a list that would render any sane reader numb with despair. But me? I could only smile at it all... You see, the book that I was reading, Limits to Growth, was published more than fifty years ago in 1972.

1972? I remember it well. I was in college and still of a mindset that swallowed much of what my young, hip professors were preaching that spring from this new bible. It was time for the youth of America in post-Vietnam America to mobilize for a new crusade! And of course, like most such movements, if anyone showed the slightest doubt, they were mocked as deniers and cast out into the darkness of their ignorance. The generation of Peace and Love would now work to Save the Planet!

What was happening in 1972 was an existential rethinking of our relationship to this blue marble floating in space that we now found ourselves trapped on. The 150-year run of the Industrial Revolution, the emerging wave of the Technological Revolution that prophesied limitless growth, a world going forward into a better tomorrow, crashed on the shores of environmental despair.

Of course, we believed it. The model, after all, was based on “experts” belonging to the Society of Rome, a mysterious think tank who were the leaders of this new crusade that absolutely, 100% predicted catastrophe unless we took heed of their Cassandrian warnings. It was a time to stop growth, stop innovation, stop evil rampant technology, and head to a brave new world teaching us that there had to be limits to growth.

The dates for some of these predictions were clearly stated in the Limits to Growth: oil will no longer flow by the 1990s if current (1972) consumption continues. Food by the 1980s will plunge to starvation levels and disastrous famines affecting hundreds of millions will be the new norm. The dying off will be upon us by 1985. The climate? Total disaster in the 1990s due to global cooling caused by greenhouse gas and smog blocking sunlight. Every major resource needed for a high-tech world from copper to lithium will be depleted, leaving our world an empty husk.

To make it worse, a book published a few years earlier, The Population Bomb, a NYT best-seller by Paul Ehrlich, really sealed our doom.

Unfortunately, the Club of Rome forgot one thing: the march of technology. Thanks to fracking and injection of CO2 gas, high-pressure steam and special detergent fluids into oil wells, we can turn supposedly uneconomic oil fields into moneymakers. That's how North Dakota became a major oil producer and Texas was able to exploit the Permian Basin.

Whatever the left predicts,,,believe the opposite.

Predicting the Demise of Oil Production by the 1990s?

Such nonsense was rooted in the scientific orthodoxy of 'fossil fuel' thinking rather than the true scientific study of Earth-renewable hydrocarbon lifecycles.

Use of the term 'fossil fuel' is egregiously wrong and a 'tell' into a person's motivations when it is not applied lazily.

It bears little resemblance to the cult of 'climate change', imho, nor to corporate and regulatory undermining of our resilience under continued growth.

I do believe that we are headed towards a major 'correction', but not for the reasons the globalists & cultists portend.