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The Post Carbon Reader Series: Foundation Concepts
Beyond the Limits to Growth
By Richard Heinberg
 
About the Author
Richard Heinberg is widely regarded as one of the world’s most effective communicators of the urgentneed to transition away from fossil fuels. He is the authorof nine books including 
The Party’s Over: Oil, War  and the Fate of Industrial Societies
(2003),
 Powerdown:Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World 
(2004),and
 Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last Energy Crisis
(2009). He has authored scores of essays and articles,is featured in many documentaries, and has appearedon numerous television and radio programs. Heinberg is Senior Fellow-in-Residence at Post Carbon Institute.Post Carbon Institute© 2010613 4th Street, Suite 208Santa Rosa, California 95404 USAThis publication is an excerpted chapter from
The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’sSustainability Crises
, Richard Heinberg and DanielLerch, eds. (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010).For other book excerpts, permission to reprint, and purchasing visithttp://www.postcarbonreader.com.
 
B TH LTS T GRTH1 TH PST CARB RAR SRS
In 1972, the now-classic book
 Limits to Growth
 explored the consequences for Earth’s ecosystems of exponential growth in population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion.
1
 That book, which still stands as the best-selling envi-ronmental title ever published, reported on the firstattempts to use computers to model the likely interac-tions between trends in resources, consumption, and population. It summarized the first major scientificstudy to question the assumption that economic growthcan and will continue more or less uninterrupted intothe foreseeable future.The idea was heretical at the time, and still is: During the past few decades, growth has become virtually thesole index of national economic well-being. When aneconomy grows, jobs appear, investments yield highreturns, and everyone is happy. When the economystops growing, financial bloodletting and generalmisery ensue. Predictably, a book saying that growth
cannot 
and
will not 
continue beyond a certain point proved profoundly upsetting in some quarters, and soon
 Limits to Growth
 was pilloried in a public relations cam- paign organized by pro-growth business interests. Inreality, this purported “debunking” merely amountedto taking a few numbers in the book completely outof context, citing them as “predictions” (which theyexplicitly were not), and then claiming that these pre-dictions had failed. The ruse was quickly exposed, butrebuttals often don’t gain nearly as much publicity asaccusations, and so today millions of people mistakenlybelieve that the book was long ago discredited. In fact,the original
 Limits to Growth
scenarios have held upquite well,
 
so much so that even the thoroughly pro-business
Wall Street Journal 
printed a lengthy front- page reflection on that fact in March 2008.
2
In any case, the underlying premise of the book is irre-futable: At some point in time, humanity’s ever-increas-ing resource consumption will meet the very real limitsof a planet with finite natural resources. We the co-authors of 
The Post Carbon Reader 
believethat this time has come.
The Pivotal Role of nergy
During the past two centuries, an explosion in popu-lation, consumption, and technological innovation hasbrought previously unimaginable advances in health, wealth, transport, and communications.These events were largely made possible by the releaseof enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuelsstarting in the mid-nineteenth century. Oil, coal, andnatural gas, produced by natural processes over scoresof millions of years, represent far more concentratedforms of energy than any of the sources previouslyavailable to humanity (food crops, human and animal
 
At some point in time,humanity’s ever-increasingresource consumption will meetthe very real limits o a planetwith fnite natural resources.
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