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March 27, 2023

Oh my God — we’re doomed.  The UN’s Panel on Climate Change came out with a frightening report earlier this month that we are sitting on a global time bomb, and according to CNN, “time is running out,” without immediate drastic action.  The UN report states that if global temperatures reach 1.5 C above the pre-industrial temperature norm of 1850-1900, the resulting melting of the polar ice caps, rising oceans, and unprecedented ecological disaster will follow.

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I read this a few days back on a dark and stormy night while working on my own tome about disaster, the next book in the One Second After series.  One Second After examines what would happen if we were ever hit by an enemy using an Electro-Magnetic Pulse generated from detonating a nuclear weapon in space.  But ecological disaster, which is all but inevitable according to the highly respected UN report, was far more frightening.  Closing off working on my book, I brewed yet another cup of coffee, sat back and pulled out a well-respected study on this existential threat to all mankind.

I started to thumb through the pages of a work that took a team of international experts years to research and has sold well over 12 million copies since publication.

I turned to the chapter on fossil fuels.  The report states we have only about twenty more years of oil out there, we are already at peak oil, which will then start to go downhill and the wells will run dry no matter how much we scramble to get more.  There will be a final rush to pump one more drop of oil even if at the cost of twenty dollars a gallon, but that in turn will accelerate the depletion into a death spiral.  Natural gas will not save us, as we turn to that source as oil runs out, we’ll deplete that as well.  Again, a death spiral. 

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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.