Limits to growth

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9729000/9729574.stm

'Forty years ago, a self-appointed panel of experts called the Club of Rome published a tract entitled the Limits to Growth, a massively influential report that showed how exponential growth in population and resource use, in a world of finite resources, would end very badly.
Bjorn Lomborg, author of the Sceptical Environmentalist, told the Today programme that the 1970s environmentalists were "spectacularly wrong" because they "fundamentally missed innovation".
"Technology can do amazing things," he said. "We have done a lot better than predicted".
"If we're going to tackle future problems such as global warming we need to focus on innovation," he believes.'

As presented here, Bjorn Lomborg's ideas are rather worrying. He is right that (some of) the specific predictions in The limits to growth were wrong and I accept that he is right that the authors underplayed the benefits of technology, but the undisputable  fact is that there ARE limits to growth as resources ARE finite.

At the end of this short interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme (link above) Lomborg says that the idea of telling people that they have to live with less is a hard sell. This is undoubtedly true, but by playing up the mistakes in specifics, and down the key point about finite resources, he makes it seem as if people shouldn't be told the unpalatable inevitable consequence of finite resources even if it is true.

What is living with less? Superficially it sounds like we're all to tighten our belts and live more frugally. That may be so, but one of the benefits of technology is that it aids the separation of services from goods/products, and enables us to get more service from the same physical resource. This is a key tenet of www.natcap.org / the book Natural Capitalism and www.collaborativeconsumption.org lists an increasing number of ways of arranging to derive service benefits from physical resources.

We win all round by doing this. The obvious example of  taxis illustrates. The driver wants his/her taxi to be reliable, so it is in the manufacturer's interest to make it so. The taxi driver wants his/her taxi to be in use a high proportion of the time. This makes maximum benefit from the investment in the taxi, and also provides maximum capacity to the taxi network.

(The technology has not yet yielded up a unified booking system for private hire vehicles. In the main, they operate as separate companies. It should be possible to tell a system that I want to go from A to B, arriving/departing at time xx:xx and for the system to dispatch a vehicle appropriately for the job. The systems exist, but they ae not comprehensive and we still have to choose which company to contact.)