Club of Rome

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J., Behrens, W.W. (1972) The Limits to Growth. A report for the Club of Rome s Project on the predicament of mankind. Universe Books, New York. 

Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC) (2008). Clean Power from Deserts. The DESERTEC Concept for Energy, Water and Climate Security. Hamburg The Club of Rome, www.trec-eumena.org. 

The publication of the report Limits to Growth (4) by the Club of Rome had a major impact on thinking about the environmental impact of our cultural development. Under the assumption that the five basis elements of this study— population, the production of food, industrialization, pollution, and the use of nonrenewable resources—will keep increasing exponentially, they showed that, if unchanged, this would lead to enormous problems, as soon as the 21st century. The social consciousness of the problems caused by unlimited growth of these elements was greatly increased by this report by the Club of Rome. 

Revolution which made it soar to 40, and finally the publication of the gloomy forecasts of the Club of Rome experts which mistakenly saw oil shortages ahead when, in fact, these had been artificially engineered by the Cartel members—all these facts upset chemical leaders in industrialized countries. And yet some of them still continued to invest in new plants during the stock-building lulls that occurred in 1974 and 1979 through consumers speculating on new price rises. 

The necessity to switch from nonrenewable fossil resources to renewable raw materials, such as carbohydrates and triglycerides derived from biomass, was an important conclusion of the Report of the Club of Rome in 1972 [2]. It should be noted, however, that ca. 80% of the global production of oil is converted to thermal or electrical energy. If the world is facing an oil crisis it is, therefore, an energy crisis rather than a raw materials crisis for the chemical industry. Indeed, there are sufficient reserves of fossil feedstocks to satisfy the needs of the chemical industry for a long time to come. 

Nonetheless, a (partial) switch to renewables is desirable for other reasons, such as biocompatibility, biodegradability and lower toxicity, i.e. renewable raw materials leave a smaller environmental footprint [3]. That the chemical industry has been slow to make the transition, in the three decades following the Report of the Club of Rome, is a consequence of the fact that oil and natural gas are excellent basic feedstocks and highly atom efficient, low waste, catalytic procedures are available for their conversion into commodity chemicals. The same cannot be said for the fine chemicals industry where processes are, generally speaking, much less efficient in many respects and there is considerable room for improvement. 

Club of Rome publishes Limits to Growth. The report is extremely controversial because it predicts dire consequences if growth is not slowed. Northern countries criticize the report for not including technological solutions while Southern countries are incensed because it advocates abandonment of economic development. 

The Silent Spring was a seminal book in the development of the environmental consciousness which is one of the threads leading to the concept of sustainable development espoused by the London and Melbourne communiques. Another seminal work, referred to by several speakers at the 6th World Congress, was The Limits to Growth — the first report of the Club of Rome. If we concentrate on the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of the predichons in the book we miss its principal message that exponential growth in use of resources and environmental emissions is unsustainable. 

The oil crisis of 1973 brought home the fact, anticipated in the Report of the Club of Rome Project , that fossil fuels are non-renewable resources, and that natural gas and oil, which have been the twin pillars of the chemical industry for several decades, will be exhausted before coal. Moreover, the resources of oil are not equally distributed over the world and this makes formation of cartels easier (although it cannot of course guarantee their success). The free-world chemical industry is therefore quite vulnerable and can easily be a hostage to political pressure. Since the resources of coal are estimated to be four to six times larger than those of oil and are better spread over the world, coal utilization received a great impulse in 1973. A modest but important success of the efforts to find alternatives for oil and gas is already observable the lowest economic prices of alternative fuels, and of chemicals from alternative raw materials, now form the upper limit for prices dictated by the oil producing countries. 

There is strong pressure to take remedial action. Its importance and urgency was expressed as early as 1972, when The Club of Rome published "The Limits to Growth" [2]. It is now widely recognised that continued economic development should be accompanied by more appropriate use of natural resources. Just how the economy should be organised to achieve such balanced growth is at present open to a great deal of debate [3]. 

D. L. Meadows, D. H. Meadows, J. Randers, and W. B. Behrens, The Limits to Growth Report to the Club of Rome s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, Potomac Associates, Universe Books New York, USA (1972). 

Furthermore, the report of Club of Rome (1972) indicated environmental damages due to the use of fossil energies. In this context, the climate change caused by industrial CO2 emissions takes on alarming proportions. 

Friedrichs, Gunter, and Adam Schaff. Microelectronics and Society For Better or for Worse, a Report to the Club of Rome. New York Pergamon Press, 1982. 

Product-related life cycle assessment with an emphasis on energy, resources and waste started around 1970. It was the time of The Limits to Growth, a report to the club of Rome and the first oil crisis soon afterwards showed, if not the shortage of oil, but at least the vulnerability of the global economic system. Twenty years later, life cycle assessment (LCA) was developed by the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) and later was standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO 14040-43). LCA can be considered the first internationally standardized environmental assessment method. ... 

The most pressing of the problems arising from our exploitative approach to the natural environment is undoubtedly the shortage of food in parts of the world dependent on large-scale importation of food supplies, but we also face a bewildering variety of problems arising from various kinds of environmental pollution and the prospect of exhaustion of non-renewable mineral and fossil fuel resources. The seriousness of the overall situation was underlined by the publication in The Ecologist of A Blueprint for Survival in 1972 [1] and by the formation of the Club of Rome. 

Von Weizsacker, E. U., Lovins, A. B., Hunter Lovins, L. Factor Four Doubling Wealth - Halving Resource Use. A New Report to the Club of Rome. St Leonards (NSW), Australia, 1997. 

Meadows, D. H., Club of Rome. (1972). The limits to growth A report for the club of Rome s project on the predicament of mankind. New York, NY Universe Books. 

Clowes, M. 2004. The ediacaran biota. www.Dalaeos.com Club of Rome. 2004. Organization, www.clubofrome.org C02j. 2004. Carbon Markets. www.co2e.com... 

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