From the Oil Drum – Are We Reaching Limits to Growth – with scary pictures. Here is a taster…
It looks to me as though 2012 is likely to be a truly awful financial year, with several crises converging:
- Either very high oil prices or recession,
- The US governmental debt limit crisis,
- The Euro crisis,
- The Chinese debt problem,
- Debt deleveraging in the US and elsewhere,
- Further MENA (Middle East/North Africa) political problems, and
- Conflict between need for greater resources and pollution issues.
It seems to me that we may be reaching “Limits to Growth,” as foretold in the book by the same name in 1972. The book modeled the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies. A wide range of scenarios was tested, but the result in nearly all scenarios was overshoot and collapse, with the timing of collapse typically being in the 2010 to 2075 time period.
Figure 1. Base scenario from 1972 “Limits to Growth”, printed using today’s graphics by Charles Hall and John Day in “Revisiting Limits to Growth After Peak Oil”
