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was still growing nicely, and the United States was looking forward to the end of yet another foreign war. At that year’s Republican Convention, President Richard Nixon crowed that Americans had “more prosperity than any people in the world, [and] we have the highest rate of growth of any industrial nation.”⁴⁷ A month later, the New York Times reported on forecasts of “continued strong general economic growth” through 1973.⁴⁸

      The last thing politicians, economists, or investors wanted to hear about in 1972 was any talk of hindrance, caution, or restraint. So the publication that year of a book titled The Limits to Growth⁴⁹ was about as welcome as a bowl of prune soup at a potluck. Through the remainder of the twentieth century, the book was widely loathed and dismissed in economic, political, and scientific circles; in this century, with climate chaos making its arguments appear more and more on target, it has gained wide respect.⁵⁰

      The Limits to Growth had its roots in a 1968 meeting of what came to be known as the Club of Rome, an international collection of, in their own characterization, “scientists, educators, economists, humanists, industrialists, and national and international civil servants”; the group took its name from the city where that meeting took place. Their broad concern was, as they saw it, the global complex of economic, political, social, cultural, and environment problems.

      In the gender-hindered language of the times, Club members later decided to pursue what they called a “Project on the Predicament of Mankind.” Their analysis employed then-state-of-the-art computer models developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The models predicted the trajectories of humanity’s and the Earth’s vital signs all the way through the twenty-first century, based on several alternative strategies aimed at relieving or circumventing ecological limits and thereby avoiding economic decline or even the collapse of civilization. But every model they tested led to a dangerous “overshoot” of environmental limits. Sometimes it was because of pollution, sometimes resource scarcity, sometimes decline of food production. Any of these, the model predicted, would cut off economic growth sometime before 2100, triggering an irreversible decline. Regarding technology, for example, the book’s authors came to a grim conclusion: “When we introduce technological developments that successfully lift some restraint to growth or avoid some collapse, the system simply grows to another limit, temporarily surpasses it, and falls back.”

      Even in a model that assumed “unlimited” resources, strong pollution controls, increased agricultural productivity, and “perfect” availability and application of family planning, while using every tool at hand “to circumvent in some way the various limits to growth,” the result was still an end of growth, caused by three “simultaneous crises:” soil degradation, resource depletion “by a prosperous world population,” and dramatic increases in contaminants—among which the modelers presciently included excess atmospheric CO₂ (carbon dioxide.) They concluded that the “application of technological solutions alone has prolonged the period of population and industrial growth, but it has not removed the ultimate limits to that growth.”⁵¹

      Finally, they radically altered the model’s parameters to portray a society that chooses restraint. For example, they assumed universal access to fully effective birth control and a desired reproduction rate of two children; limits on production; dramatically increased efficiency of resource use and pollution prevention; emphasis on soil protection and universal food security; and better durability of goods and capital stock. That scenario produced not collapse but a world that ended up in an economically modest equilibrium that was adequate to satisfy human needs.

      The Limits to Growth was full of graphs depicting future rises and declines of population, resource use, agricultural and industrial production, and pollution, and included a stark warning: “We . . . believe that if a profound correction is not made soon, a crash of some sort is certain. And it will occur within the lifetimes of many who are alive today.” For years, the book’s critics enjoyed pointing out that the collapses forecasted in the business-as-usual curves had not occurred. Finally, in the early 2000s, a few analysts decided to compare The Limits to Growth’s predictions with what had actually happened so far.⁵² They found that the world’s vital signs had followed the old model’s predictions quite closely up to that time. The bad news for us, they pointed out, is that if you follow those ascending business-as-usual curves to which the world is still adhering out to the year 2030, they show industrial and food production peaking out and then collapsing.

      THAT SEVENTIES CLAUSTROPHOBIA

      Almost exactly a year after publication of The Limits to Growth, people in the United States found themselves in their first encounter with general scarcity since World War II. It wasn’t the beginning of the collapse portrayed in the book’s graphs, but it was a pretty good preview.

      In October 1973, an already alarming blast of inflation triggered largely by the prolonged U.S. war in Indochina was exacerbated when Arab nations belonging to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an oil embargo on Western countries. World oil prices leaped suddenly and dramatically, and gasoline prices in the United States spiraled to unheard-of heights. As inflation impacted the economy, it was perversely accompanied by recession, bringing a new word into the American lexicon: stagflation. President Nixon ordered that a World War II-style national allocation plan be put in place to ensure that every region had access to adequate fuel supplies. Once again, pleasure driving was discouraged. Nixon also announced cuts in deliveries of heating oil: 15 percent for homes, 25 percent for businesses, and 10 percent for manufacturers. Aviation fuel was cut 15 percent, and on the nation’s highways, the maximum speed limit was lowered to 55 miles per hour.⁵³

      Long lines at gas stations became an enduring symbol of the 1970s. A more alarming development, one illustrating the severe backlash that governments can face when they attempt to deal with resource limits, was the violent strike by independent truckers that first broke out in December 1973. To back their demands for reduced diesel fuel prices, abolition of the 55 mph speed limit, and general deregulation, the truckers not only stopped hauling but also tried to keep all trucks off the road. Many parked their semis in the middle of highways, while others resorted to throwing bricks, puncturing tires, and brandishing firearms. After the first two rounds of protests, one trucker told the press, “When the next shutdown comes around . . . I’m gonna take my goddamn truck and burn it on the goddamn White House lawn.”⁵⁴

      The end of the OPEC embargo in 1974 brought just enough relief from gasoline shortages to calm nerves and shorten gas lines, but what would become known as the “energy crisis” was far from over. Upon taking office following Nixon’s resignation, President Gerald Ford laid out a plan to reduce the country’s dependence on imported oil through taxes and tariffs, but it turned out to be a political disaster for him. And stagflation raged on. President Ford was among those who saw inflation becoming an even greater national threat than unemployment. At one point, he noted that unemployment was “the biggest concern of the 8.2 percent of American workers temporarily out of work,” but inflation was “the universal enemy of 100 percent of the people.”⁵⁵ Any attempt at New Deal–style stimulus to address the stagnation problem would have triggered even worse inflation. Nor was military spending a solution; after all, it was a big part of what had gotten America into its inflationary predicament in the first place.

      The oil crisis calmed for a while. But in 1979, the Iranian Revolution sent petroleum prices skyward again. In Levittown, Pennsylvania, a crowd of 1,500 gas rioters reportedly burned cars, destroyed gas pumps, and threw rocks and bottles at police. One officer responded to a question from a motorist by smashing his windshield, whacking the driver’s son with his club, and putting the man’s wife in a choke hold. In all, eighty-two people were injured, and almost two hundred were arrested. The U.S. media solemnly discussed the possibility of “civilizational breakdown.”⁵⁶ That summer, inflated diesel prices triggered a revival of the independent truckers’ strike. The historian Shane Hamilton described chaos that exceeded that of the 1973–74 strike:

      On June 5, 1979, a convoy of truckers arrived in Washington and circled the Capitol. [Strike leader] Mike Parkhurst seized the moment and called for a nationwide shutdown, not simply to demand lower fuel prices, but to abolish

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