Over the last 150 years we have developed a set of rules regarding economy, politics, industry, environment and food production, and for 150 years they worked. Austria was a relativley poor monarchy and became a rich democracy. And all around the World, people have gotten better off. But now we have come to a time when the old rules don't work any more. Nobody wants there to be climate change, but there is. Nobody wants there to be a bigger and bigger gap between the rich and the poor, but there is and nobody wants there to be hunger or destruction of forests on our planet, but there is. These results come not because some evil person or group desires them, but be­cause the rules which we have developed over 150 years don't work any more. Unfortunately, we are trying to solve problems with the same rules that caused the problems in the first place. If you do something and it causes problems, doing it harder, or faster, generally won't solve those problems.

30 years ago when we wrote our first book I didn't have any supporting evidence of the problems revealed in our computer model projections of possible futures out to the year 2100. I had to show my model and talk about the theoretical assumption and hope that people would believe what we were fore­casting. Now I don't need to do that any more. If you read the papers you see evidence of these problems on almost every page. Our first book was published in English in 1972. The second edition was published in 1992 and the third English edition in 2004, it is now also available in German language. Our conclusions haven't changed in 34 years but the world has changed. In 1972 global population and use of materials were still under longterm limits of the planet. Then the goal we promoted was to slow down, to try to reduce the growth of industry and population before they exceeded the limits. Global society and economy did not slow down. Now they are past the limits, above longterm possibilities.

If you try in Austria to use growth to solve some of your problems, you are making assumptions that are not realistic, because growth rates everywhere will be negative within the next 3-5 decades. Now, humanity’s goal must be to get back down below the limits. Global use of energy and materials will come down, the question is, whether they will decline through policies which we initiate or decline because of forces from the global environment which push them down. In the first case we can have a relatively, peaceful, civilized society and a planet which can support our species for many centuries. If we continue to ignore these problems, however, then the planet will slow things down through conflict and enormous damage to the fertility of the soils and so forth. The decision between the alternatives will not depend on technology. We have enough technology today on this planet to solve our problems. The reasons we don't solve the problems are because of cultural and psychological factors. That's where the main change has to start.

In 1972 we presented a global computer model about these issues. Actually a computer model can't prove to you that there are physical limits on a physical planet. If you don't believe it, if you think technology will change in a way to solve any problems, then you don't have to worry about the limits. If you have those ideas, my computer model isn't going to change your mind. But for those who do think that there are limits, our model has some important contributions. We show why growth in population and industry are exponential. If you look at the data you see these characteristic patterns of exponential growth. We showed the underlying cause and effects and we showed that those mechanisms deal with limits typically by overshooting collapse not by asymptotic growth, not by a nice orderly levelling out.

When we first said in 1972 that global population and materials use faced nearby limits, most people were either amazed or very critical. They thought that the authors of our report were totally lunatic. I remember people taking me to the ocean and saying: “Look at this big ocean, could you imagine that human beings could ever have some impact on this ocean? That's crazy! Or look at the atmosphere, or look at the forest. They are far to vast to suffer any consequence from human action.” Now, 30 years later, we see in many ways that human activities are indeed big enough to damage the ocean. The scale of human activities alters the physical characteristics of the planet. World population and the industry have continued to grow exponentially. Interestingly enough, the projections that we made for 2000 in 1972 turned out to be quite accurate. It doesn't prove that our model is true, but it shows that it is least describing some of the processes that work in real life. Now the global limit has been overshot. Fig. 1 shows population growth from 3.6 Billion in 1972 to over 6 billion today. Industrial production looks similar. It's been very interesting to see the evolution of the critics. First they said there are no limits. Then after some time we began to see this limits. So they said, well there are limits, but they are very far away. Don't worry about it. And then soon it became clear that the limits were not so far away.

Fig. 1 World Population

Fig. 2 Industrial Production

So, they said, maybe the limits are close, but technology and the market will take care of these things. And when it became clear that technology and the market would not solve the problems, they said, “We just need more growth. If we had more growth we would be able to solve these problems with technology and the market”. Later they will say: “It is to late, we can't do anything.” Growth will not help us to solve the problems:

• When we have growth, benefits are kept by the people who generate the growth: politicians and corporate leaders. They hold it for their own use, for investment and so forth.
• It turns out that growth raises the costs faster than it raises the resources. If you try to solve your problems by growth it is like chasing gold at the end of a rainbow.
• Growth is going to bring us soon to a period where the major government agencies and other decision leaders are confronted with muliple problems.

It is very interesting to consider the situation caused by the Louisiana hurricane, Katrina. People said, if the power plant floods, we know how to pump it out, and how we can start the plant again. And if the pump breaks down, then we have a second pump, that's not a problem. But what happened was: the power plant got flooded, it didn't produce electricity, so they couldn't run the pumps to pump out the power plant. They couldn’t bring in materials to repair the levees, because the roads were inundated. In the face of many simul­taneous problems, each soluable in theory, the system just became para­lyzed. That will happen in other systems, not from hurricanes, but when you have to deal with climate change, oil depletion, rising food prices and immigration, suddenly the systems will get overwhelmed.

This question of overshoot is a very difficult one. Technically, the system is complex and the notion of carrying capacity is very ambiguous. The best effort to think about overshoot empirically is done so far by a group under the direction of Mathis Wackernagel. He has created an index called the ecological footprint. Wackernagel’s calculations show the footprint of people in terms of the amount of resources they use. Recently the WWF released their annual report showing the footprint of every country on the planet. Austria is No. 18, so there are 17 countries in the world, where each person uses more resources and in most countries in the world each person on average uses less. The world as a whole is about 25 % above long term possibilities. When we wrote our first book, we were in 1972 about 15 % below (Fig. 3), now about 25 % above. Wackernagel dosen't show the path by which we will get back down below the long-term limit.

Fig. 3 Ecological Footprint (according to M. Wackernagel)

He is doing an empirical, static calculation each year. Note also that he shows the carrying capacity doesn't change when you go above it. But in fact, when we exceed the carrying capacity of the planet, we begin to damage the fertility of essential systems, the carrying capacity actually goes down.

That's more or less what happened in our model. Our computer projections in 1972 suggested that the growth of population, food, industry and so forth could continue up until 2000. Even the pollution is not very much of a problem by 2000 in our scenarios. In 1972 we projected that the big problems would emerge in the period 2015 to 2040. Big pressures are mounting to stop growth and to turn it around. This reality is reflected already in the current news. We have been informed recently that if current trends of overfishing and pollution continue there will be no more seafood by 2048. By the middle of this century 7 billion people in sixty countries may be faced with water scarcity. We know from empirical data that the ozone hole in the stratosphere is bigger in 2006 than ever before in human history. Now we don't have to run some computer model to see whether or not these trends are real, this is no longer a matter of scientific dispute. There are minor issues that scientists still have to work out, but they don't argue about the big picture any more. The argument comes between scientists and the people who need to do something about it.

In the 30-year update of Limits to Growth, we give indicators of overshoot. Europe, North-America, South-America (except Antarctica), every single continent has every single category of natural resource deteriorating, there is not one continent which has one resource which is getting more productive and better. Now, in Vienna the air pollution is down, in some rivers the water pollution is down. Perfect! But on a continental basis, we are drastically in overshoot. At a national level overshoot has many consequences which you are already seeing here in Austria. It depletes energy and resources. So the efforts to secure the requirements for economic growth require much more capital. Your oil is getting more expensive, because it takes much more of capital to produce it. In the old days (1920/1930) you could produce one barrel of oil per year with capital that cost you maybe a few hundred dollars. Now it requires thousands of dollars of capital to produce one barrel of oil per day. Thus less capital is available for personal consumption, for civic services, and for agriculture. You start to see this in living standard, I don't know the data of Austria, but I do know that the real standard of living for the majority of Americans has not improved in 20 years. Globally I do not think the economy is producing real additions to wealth any more. GNP is still going up, but that's because a lot of the costs are externalized and not included in the calculations.

The diagram in Fig.4 is the heart of our global model. It looks complicated, but the idea is quite simple. On the left, there is all industrial capital, everything that produces capital: steel mills, tool factories, etc. The amount of industrial capital determines how much industrial output can be produced each year – the output that can be used in different ways. Most of it goes to the consumption sector: It becomes houses, cars, light bulbs, refrigerators. This capital increases the material standard of living. Some of the output goes into the resource sector. It becomes oil wells, pipelines, pumps - all the capital needed to secure energy and resources. Some of it goes into the food sector to give you food and fibres, tractors, fertilizer factories, food processing companies and so forth.

Fig. 4 Flows of Physical Capital

Some output goes into services, and some of it is reinvested. Industrial growth and GDP growth result when you invest enough output to offset the depreciation. As long as the output gives you more invest­ment and more capital, you can have exponential growth. Economists have come to expect that somehow this an automatic process. But it isn't. This is a positive loop. It can go up, or it can go down. You could find a situation where less capital gives less output and less output gives less investment. And less investment gives you even less capital in the future. It will take you long time to recognize this when it starts to happen, because the delays around this loop can be 20 years or more.

As soon as depletion starts to take a lot of capital you can find there is not enough capital to sustain growth in industry and then it starts to go down. There is some evidence from the World Bank data that this may already be happening in at least 50 countries around the world. When we see collapse in our model, it's not because you run out of something, it's because depletion raises the capital requirements in these sectors so much that you can't sustain industrial growth any more. When industrial growth starts going down instead of up, then it becomes a reinforcing process. This system is one that we have to deal with. What we want to do is figure out how to slow growth in a way which solves our basic problems and does not lead to overshoot. When we do that, we will encounter two different kinds of problems. I call them easy problems and difficult problems (Fig. 5). My diagrams are very generic. They could illustrate trying to lose weight, to reduce emissions, to reduce debt, or any other goal of a person, community, or nation.

Fig. 5 Easy Problems and Difficult Problems

Most politicians and most economists, most markets deal very well with easy problems, because the appropriate action to take for the long term also looks good in the short term – at the point of next evaluation. Unfortunately, there are other kinds of problems: difficult problems. In difficult problems, the action which makes things look better in short term is very bad in the long term - and conversely. Now what do we do? What does the politician do if there is soon to be another election? What does a market do if the discount rate means that long-term costs, doesn't count. What does a citizen do if he thinks that he will move next year and won't be around for all of these problems? If I want to improve my energy situation I have to make the energy situation look worse in short term in one way or another. For example, I might levy taxes, establish quotas, impose legal standards on automobile efficiency. In one way or another it is necessary to raise the costs of energy in the short term in order to make energy costs less in the long term. Most of the problems we confront now, such as climate change, are difficult problems in this sense.

How can we convert different problems into easy problems? How can we get our society to deal with difficult issue in an automatic and constructive way. First you have to increase the time horizon. You need to push out the planning period far enough that people begin to see the difference between the policy that looks good now and the one that actually solves the problem. Long range planning does that. ORF probably does it by scheduling discussions about longer term problems. And the second thing is to give the people a sophisticated understanding about the behaviour of complex systems. Many people can not imagine that an action which produces immediate benefits, can somehow in the future be a disaster. Their understanding of behaviour leads them to believe that everything which goes up in the short terms will continue going up in a long term.

First we have to get them to look further out and second, we have to give them some understanding that a complex system can behave in a different way. And when you do that, you can see a different behaviour. Instead of seeing overshoot and collapse, the system goes through a period of adjustment, and finally comes into some sort of equilibrium (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6 Transition Towards Equilibrium

The world portrayed in Figure 6 is not a utopia. There is still a lot of pollution; food isn't all that great; resources are still declining. It is not a problem free world, but it is a world in which things are happening slowly enough to deal with them.

How could we achieve such a world? We have started to work with people on how to increase their time horizon. There are concrete, practical constructive things to do. This is not a totally theoretical possibility. And for each of these, I can tell you concrete examples around the World where we see this happening. You can create government councils that last longer than the next election and have access to the media and to the people. So they can't be filtered out by short term political interests. You could change your election law so that the rich have less influence over voting.

Start to find incentives for the media and for the church, which are two important providers of education in the society, to focus on longer term issues. Look at the money system. The financial system we have is not given to us by the laws of nature. It was a invention which emerged over the last thousand years, it serves some purposes very well. However, it's a total disaster in another areas, and we need to rethink it. For one thing it has become incredibly unstable: The amount of money which moves back and forth across the national boundaries now for speculation is many times greater than the amount of money that moves back and forth across the national boundaries for trade. And because speculative money can shift locations almost overnight, it is a very unstable system. We need to develop new measures of wealth, instead of just using GNP per capita for example. It's interesting in English we use the term „produce oil“. When we pump it out of the ground. But we are not producing oil, we are pumping it out of the ground. The planet produces the oil, and we are just using it. Most of the actions that we call development are not actually development, they are construction. We need to rethink our vocabulary. And we have to start much more thinking about history and the behaviour of complex systems. We don't have utopia ahead, but we can manage to make a transition which is still basically civil and peaceful.