The fundamental argument of Limits to Growth is a simple one, simpler than you're allowing: it's that there are, in fact, limits to growth.
The counterproposition is that there are no limits to growth. This tends to render itself absurd in fairly short order. (Though that fact has done little to dent the propositions's popularity.)
You can find proponents of such views easily.
Julian Simon is among the better-known, having by a mix of chance and a general failure to understand economics of extractive resource economics, won a rather famous wager.
There's M.A. Adelman, an obscure, but influential, M.I.T. economist specialising in petroleum:
Minerals are essentially inexhuastible. Oil, gas, coal, and copper, for example, will never be depleted. Investment in exploration and development creates an in-ground inventory of proved reserves, constantly used and replaced.
This is an M.I.T. economist.
(Simon's arguments are even sketchier.)
An oil company CEO -- I can't recall which -- wrote an editorial in one of the major weekly magazines (I think it was The Atlantic though I haven't been able to turn it up), arguing to the effect that there were no limits to oil. This in the 1950s.
At the time, the US was some 20 years past its largest-ever on-shore oil discovery, the East Texas Oil Field, and 20 years from its own conventional production peak, in 1972. The world's largest-ever oil field, at Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, had already been discovered.
By the 1880s, the general locations of most U.S. oil finds was already well-established: they were betrayed by natural seeps and existing finds, in upstate New York and Pennsylvania, in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, and in California. Guides that rapidly appeared on how to get rich (or broke) quick in the Pennsylvania oil fields, such as Dr. Gesners (below) list out a litany of familiar locations and bearing materials, including, yes, tars, sands, and shales, as well as coal.
Again: the message is a simple one. Unending constant percentage growth is impossible. At some point it has to cease. The limits are so significant that even very crude estimates (such as those employed by the LTG models) are fairly accurate -- most of those showed a peak sometime in the 2020 - 2040 period, a result which seems borne out.
Where history has shown otherwise, it's largely been on either of two bases:
1. The growth trends slowed. This occurred in population after a phenomenal boom in the 1950s and 1960s. This had proved exceptionally concerning at numerous levels.
2. Capabilities have improved, slightly. Most especially in food production. But the improvements have themselves come at a cost of more intensive activity, greater resource utilisation (including of petrochemical fertilisers and pesticides), of topsoil erosion, and of environmental impacts.
Those two developments staved off one of the worst predictions, of global starvation by the year 2000. But the avoidance itself came through mechanisms consistent with the general concept. That is: one trend slowed, another increased, but through increased impacts. The net is a slight time shift, but a minuscule one given the history of Earth, or even of Humanity.
The counterproposition is that there are no limits to growth. This tends to render itself absurd in fairly short order. (Though that fact has done little to dent the propositions's popularity.)
You can find proponents of such views easily.
Julian Simon is among the better-known, having by a mix of chance and a general failure to understand economics of extractive resource economics, won a rather famous wager.
There's M.A. Adelman, an obscure, but influential, M.I.T. economist specialising in petroleum:
Minerals are essentially inexhuastible. Oil, gas, coal, and copper, for example, will never be depleted. Investment in exploration and development creates an in-ground inventory of proved reserves, constantly used and replaced.
This is an M.I.T. economist.
(Simon's arguments are even sketchier.)
An oil company CEO -- I can't recall which -- wrote an editorial in one of the major weekly magazines (I think it was The Atlantic though I haven't been able to turn it up), arguing to the effect that there were no limits to oil. This in the 1950s.
At the time, the US was some 20 years past its largest-ever on-shore oil discovery, the East Texas Oil Field, and 20 years from its own conventional production peak, in 1972. The world's largest-ever oil field, at Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, had already been discovered.
By the 1880s, the general locations of most U.S. oil finds was already well-established: they were betrayed by natural seeps and existing finds, in upstate New York and Pennsylvania, in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, and in California. Guides that rapidly appeared on how to get rich (or broke) quick in the Pennsylvania oil fields, such as Dr. Gesners (below) list out a litany of familiar locations and bearing materials, including, yes, tars, sands, and shales, as well as coal.
Again: the message is a simple one. Unending constant percentage growth is impossible. At some point it has to cease. The limits are so significant that even very crude estimates (such as those employed by the LTG models) are fairly accurate -- most of those showed a peak sometime in the 2020 - 2040 period, a result which seems borne out.
Where history has shown otherwise, it's largely been on either of two bases:
1. The growth trends slowed. This occurred in population after a phenomenal boom in the 1950s and 1960s. This had proved exceptionally concerning at numerous levels.
2. Capabilities have improved, slightly. Most especially in food production. But the improvements have themselves come at a cost of more intensive activity, greater resource utilisation (including of petrochemical fertilisers and pesticides), of topsoil erosion, and of environmental impacts.
Those two developments staved off one of the worst predictions, of global starvation by the year 2000. But the avoidance itself came through mechanisms consistent with the general concept. That is: one trend slowed, another increased, but through increased impacts. The net is a slight time shift, but a minuscule one given the history of Earth, or even of Humanity.
Ghawar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghawar_Field
Oil, as seen from the 1860s:
https://archive.org/stream/apracticaltreat01unkngoog#page/n1...
Some of the cornucopians, and what they've had to say:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1xch1j/bradley...