Environmental Alarmism, Then and Now

FOREIGN AFFAIRS 2012 July/August By Bjorn Lomborg.

Forty years ago, humanity was warned: by chasing ever-greater economic growth, it was sentencing itself to catastrophe. Based on forecasts from an intricate series of computer models developed by professors at MIT, a slim 1972 volume called The Limits to Growth caused a sensation and captured the zeitgeist of the era: the belief that mankind's escalating wants were on a collision course with the world's finite resources and that the crash would be coming soon. The best-selling report told humanity that the only way to avoid a crash was to stop chasing economic growth. The predictions proved spectacularly wrong. But the environmental alarmism they engendered persists, making it harder for policymakers to respond rationally to real problems today. Find the article about the forecasts of the Club of Rome and how the world really has developed the past 40 years at Foreign Affairs.