The Club of Rome: Act Two

Remember The Limits to Growth? It was the little book that put its sponsor, the Club of Rome, on the futurologists' map just two years ago. Limits properly warned that exponential economic and population growth cannot continue infinitely on a finite planet. But it also predicted that--unless growth was stopped --most of the human race would suffocate in pollution or starve soon after the turn of the century. This forecast stirred international controversy and made the club synonymous with gloom and doom. Then, when critics found glaring faults with the assumptions made by Limits as well as a crucial mathematical error in the computer model on which the predictions were based (TIME, Oct. 15, 1973) the Club of Rome retreated into silence. But not for long.

This week, at a lavish annual meeting in West Berlin, the club-- is presenting its second report, Mankind at the Turning Point; publication in the U.S.

is slated for early next month. The study is a sort of "Son of Limits." Like the first book, it focuses on the intricate interplay of populations, resources and environment, and insists that technology alone cannot solve global problems. It, too, deploys a computer model to deal with the variables. Again, man's prospects seem precarious.

But this time the Club of Rome has tried not to repeat its previous errors.

Mankind's authors (Mihajlo Mesarovic, director of Case Western Reserve University's Systems Research Center in Cleveland, and Eduard Pestel, head of Germany's Institute of Mechanics at the Technical University of Hannover) are subdued in tone and, if anything, more optimistic than pessimistic. Their computer treats the world not as a monolithic entity but as ten interdependent regions, each with its peculiar economic, social and geophysical characteristics.

Further, the new model is used merely to indicate the possible consequences of actions--or lack of them. Unlike Limits, the new book does not use questionable logic or mathematics to support a bleak, inequitable philosophy of no growth. Indeed, it promotes the idea of selective growth: less industrialization in the rich countries to counterbalance more in the poor nations.

Costs of Delay. What the study lacks in stridency, it more than makes up in urgency. Right now, it says, is the time for a coordinated attack on global problems. Delay will simply make things worse. For example, the computer model shows that if birth control programs are postponed for ten years, there will be an increase of 1.7 billion people in the developing countries alone by the year 2000. A 20-year delay would result in 3.7 billion more being born--almost as many as the planet's present population.

At that point, starvation and disease would kill about the same number of people as prompt action on birth control would prevent from being born in the first place. But, the study points out:

"What a tragic difference for individual families as well as for the collective quality of the survivors' lives." The only way to avoid turning present "catastrophic" food shortages in India and Africa into what the authors term an "apocalyptic" famine by 2010 is to tackle at once every aspect of the problem. Population must be curbed, and there must be accelerated planting, economic investment and worldwide diversification of industry. The result would be a truly interwoven global economic system in which all nations helped one another for mutual gain.

Disguised Blessing. In its analysis of the energy crisis, Mankind supports the views of the Shah of Iran and other members of the oil cartel by arguing that higher prices are really "a blessing in disguise." Reason: if the price of oil had remained at pre-embargo levels, demand for the fuel would have been so heavy that known reserves would have probably run dry around the end of the century. That would leave the Middle Eastern countries with resources too meager to finance continued economic development, and the oil-importing nations without sufficient alternative energy sources.

Another scenario points a way out of today's energy dilemma. Oil-exporting countries should price oil at levels competitive with those of other energy sources and then reinvest the revenues in the rich nations. This would establish, the report says, "a real partnership between the economies of the oil-producing and oil-consuming regions." But the authors do not seem to worry about the effects of this strategy on developing nations now being driven to the verge of bankruptcy by high oil prices or how it will prevent all wealth from eventually ending up in the Middle East. Instead, they look farther ahead to international cooperation and interdependence as the key to healthy, diverse growth in the world's economy.

Whether rich nations will in fact make short-term sacrifices for the sake of long-term gains is debatable. Certainly, the traditional response has been for every country to try to maximize its own immediate wellbeing, and the devil take the hindmost. But the Club of Rome insists that altruism is possible if seen not as charity but as necessity. The alternative, it repeats over and over again, is mankind's lemming-like rush toward disaster.

-- Actually an informal group of 85 leading international businessmen, scientists and thinkers devoted to developing ways of dealing with an ever more complicated world.

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