In an interview on Global Warming

Your first two choices are all part of what influenced you to do your campaigning work. But your next book, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, is directly to do with your work.

Well this book was originally written in the 1970s by a group of people at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is when I was first involved in family planning campaigning in the early 70s. Books like this predicted that there would be famines in the future due to the rising population. They also drew attention to the beginnings of atmospheric global warming. This particular book takes another look at what was said 30 years ago, so you can see how things actually did turn out.

In terms of famine the timing was wrong because food technology postponed chronic shortages. But for the last few years we have actually seen an increase in the number of people starving. It’s now over a billion people going hungry in the world today. So these predictions may well still prove to be right, although 20 years later than they originally thought.

And what kind of things did they get right?

They got right the projections about carbon emissions and the fundamental point that there are limits to growth. And this has been proven through the economic and population growth that has taken place since then which is now pushing us to the very limits of sustainability.

You first read this book when it came out in the 1970s. How did you feel about it when you were reading it then?

When I read the original version there was a lot that chimed with my own personal feeling about what was happening with nature, and there were things that alarmed me.

Such as?

Such as the predictions of severe food shortages, and of course this didn’t actually happen. But the rest of it was pretty well right.

The whole issue of population control is seen by some as controversial. What kind of comments were made about the book when it first came out?

In an interview on Saving the World

Tell me about Limits to Growth.

This is a report produced in 1972, but it’s still as current now as it was then and is still available today. It was commissioned by the Club of Rome and produced by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What they did was simply to look at projections for world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion and draw up models of what would happen to the earth in those areas. At the heart of it was the message that we need to make wiser use of the earth’s finite resources. That is true now and it was true 30 years ago. We have to get into a different mindset about the earth’s resources. It’s not saying that everything is going to run out tomorrow, but if we get smart there is no reason why the earth shouldn’t be able to sustain us way into the future.

When is it all going to run out?

Tricky question! But if we take, for example, the aluminium can – we are all familiar with that – if it was in a closed loop cycle, if nearly every can were recycled, then, clearly the amount of aluminium that would need to be mined would be very small. It’s easy to see how the economy can keep churning with renewable resources in that way, but with oil and gas, these are strictly finite. There are a lot of hydrocarbons in the world and, though not everybody agrees with me, I think there will always be a lot simply because we will stop using them for environmental reasons long before it runs out.

So, this is a report without laughs in it?

You want laughs?

Well, I suppose I mean – is it readable?

Yes, it’s written for the layperson so it’s very readable. I wouldn’t choose anything unreadable unless you think Moby-Dick is unreadable.

In an interview on Clean Energy

Let’s start with books that make clear the severity of this crisis. The Limits to Growth, first published in 1972, projected the consequences of continued population growth in a world of finite resources. What is its core argument?

In the book, three scientists from MIT looked at five variables: World population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion. They put population and consumption on the existing path of exponential growth, and showed that we’re going to start running out of resources and it's going to start impacting civilisation. They projected pollution, food shortages and so on.

The book was written 30 years ago. I read it in the 1980s and it made a big impact on me. The predictions were pretty accurate. They foresaw the strains of growth, and the wear on our planet is certainly starting to show. So it's a good book, an easy read and it gives you some idea of what we're up against. We must clean up our environment and find cleaner sources of energy.

Some critics argued that the authors loaded their case by projecting exponential population and pollution growth but sporadic technology growth. Isn’t clean energy technology keeping pace?

Any model of society or human behavior is not going to be entirely accurate but nonetheless there is explosive growth, and if we don't find the technology to replace oil we're going to be in trouble. We have the know-how to produce the technology that can keep pace. Solar, wind – these technologies can supply a large fraction of the requirements of our civilisation, as long as we don't keep growing exponentially. So we need to find new clean energy sources and become very, very efficient.