(Introduction)
Mineral supply
Mineral demand
The challenge to “Cornucopianism”
“Cornucopianism” saved
Pollution
Extensive land-use change
Increased energy consumption
Instability in human settlements
International distribution of income
『Conclusions
World population and world income can grow at any likely rate
for the next 50 to 75 years, probably for longer, and mineral
supplies will continue to keep pace with demand. Not, however,
without environmental costs, without affecting Third World development,
and, perhaps most important, without ignoring critical questions
of power. In what might be termed the revisionist form of the
limits to growth thesis, Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King, cofounders
of the Club of Rome, seem to be saying that the forecasts of doom
themselves are unimportant but they symbolize critical problems
of the nature and uses of power in the modern world:
... the Club of Rome is questioning the quality of growth and
its distribution around the world... We know that the present
structure of the world is obsolete. ... Both private and state
capitalism are stale... we have to develop something else.
Surely, continually increasing rates of mineral production are
symptoms of this obsolete power structure, a results of the fact
that, ultimately, population growth and monetary income growth
lead to demands for natural resources that necessitate their being
found and produced regardless of the implications. since such
higher rates of production are geologically and economically sustainable,
we should choose among alternative paths of growth, and hence
among alternative rates of mineral resource development, according
to what we like or dislike about these implications. The key information
will not be found in tables comparing reserves and consumption
but in preferences and ethics.』
References and Notes