Thanks to Paul for sending me this very noteworthy Australian 11-minute video from 1973 – it mentions the year 2020 several times. Ever seen members of the Club of Rome interviewed on TV….?
Transcript
00001 – 00:00:00/00:00:09 – [♪ PULSING 70s ELECTRONIC MUSIC ♪]
00002 – 00:00:09/00:00:13 – It’s not some science fantasy effect from 2001.
00003 – 00:00:13/00:00:18 – This electronic display emanating from Australia’s largest computer is a picture of the condition,
00004 – 00:00:18/00:00:21 – past, present and future, of planet Earth.
00005 – 00:00:21/00:00:25 – The program was originally devised by a scientist working from the Massachusetts
00006 – 00:00:25/00:00:28 – Institute of Technology, Jay Forrester.
00007 – 00:00:28/00:00:32 – It was developed under the auspices of the Club of Rome by an MIT research team to present
00008 – 00:00:32/00:00:36 – a complex model of the world and what we humans are doing to it.
00009 – 00:00:39/00:00:43 – The program, called World One, doesn’t pretend to be a precise forecast.
00010 – 00:00:43/00:00:48 – What it does, for the first time in man’s history on the planet, is to look at the world as
00011 – 00:00:48/00:00:52 – one system. It shows that Earth cannot sustain present population and
00012 – 00:00:52/00:00:55 – industrial growth for much more than a few decades.
00013 – 00:00:55/00:00:58 – It shows that simply cleaning up our car exhausts and making
00014 – 00:00:58/00:01:02 – some small effort to limit our families simply isn’t enough.
00015 – 00:01:03/00:01:08 – It’s like an electronic guided tour of our global behaviour since 1900
00016 – 00:01:08/00:01:09 – and where that behaviour will lead us.
00017 – 00:01:11/00:01:15 – Well this is the printed version of what we’ve just seen on the television screen.
00018 – 00:01:15/00:01:18 – And what looks, at first, to be just a maze of computer
00019 – 00:01:18/00:01:23 – characteristics is really a system of very simple graphs which project what’s
00020 – 00:01:23/00:01:27 – going to happen to the planet over the next 150 years if we don’t do something
00021 – 00:01:27/00:01:30 – drastic to stop it .
00022 – 00:01:32/00:01:40 – Down the left-hand side of the graph is the date 1900, 1940, 1980, 2020, right down to 2060.
00023 – 00:01:42/00:01:47 – Now each of these lines of letters represents a curve showing some aspect of the
00024 – 00:01:47/00:01:54 – condition of the planet. The further out this way they go, the greater that figure is.
00025 – 00:01:54/00:01:59 – The further this way the less. For example, P represents population so here it
00026 – 00:01:59/00:02:05 – is at 1900, and then it comes up to 1940, it starts to take off. Here we are at 1980,
00027 – 00:02:05/00:02:09 – up to the turn of the century, and then it starts to peter off.
00028 – 00:02:09/00:02:14 – Let’s now have a look at this next curve, the Q curve, which is the quality of life
00029 – 00:02:14/00:02:18 – and this is represented by, for example, the amount of space people have,
00030 – 00:02:18/00:02:23 – the amount of money they have to spend, the amount of food they have to eat.
00031 – 00:02:23/00:02:28 – Now it increases rapidly up to 1940, but from 1940 on the
00032 – 00:02:28/00:02:33 – quality of life diminishes and here we are, about the turn of the century, and we
00033 – 00:02:33/00:02:38 – come up to the year 2020 and it’s really come right back.
00034 – 00:02:38/00:02:42 – More people of course means that you start to chew up your
00035 – 00:02:42/00:02:46 – supply of natural resources, and this is this curve here, the N curve, that shows
00036 – 00:02:46/00:02:52 – that slowly but steadily the pool of natural wealth in the world;
00037 – 00:02:52/00:02:56 – natural resources, minerals, oil and so on, is slowly but steadily diminishing.
00038 – 00:02:56/00:03:01 – So this is the situation – as population increases, the quality of life decreases,
00039 – 00:03:01/00:03:04 – and the supply of natural resources decreases.
00040 – 00:03:04/00:03:10 – But have a look at this curve here. This is called the Z curve and it represents pollution.
00041 – 00:03:10/00:03:17 – Now predictably enough as the population increases up to 1980, pollution increases.
00042 – 00:03:17/00:03:22 – There’s more rubbish. But from 1980to the year 2020 pollution really takes off.
00043 – 00:03:22/00:03:25 – This is assuming of course that we don’t do anything about it.
00044 – 00:03:25/00:03:30 – So the year 2020, the condition of the planet starts to become highly critical
00045 – 00:03:30/00:03:34 – and if we don’t do anything about it this is what’s going to happen.
00046 – 00:03:34/00:03:39 – The quality of life is going to go right back to practically zero.
00047 – 00:03:39/00:03:46 – Pollution is going to become so serious, right out here, that it will start to kill people,
00048 – 00:03:46/00:03:53 – So the population will diminish, right back here, less than it was in the year 1900.
00049 – 00:03:53/00:03:59 – And at this stage, round about the year 2040, 2050, civilised life as we
00050 – 00:03:59/00:04:02 – know on this planet will cease to exist.
00051 – 00:04:03/00:04:08 – Well hopefully of course it won’t be allowed to happen, but it’s taken this kind of shock treatment
00052 – 00:04:08/00:04:11 – to nudge governments into doing something and slowly we are. We’re starting to clean up
00053 – 00:04:11/00:04:15 – our atmosphere, we’re starting to recycle our rubbish, we’re doing something
00054 – 00:04:15/00:04:21 – positive about population control, but so far our efforts have really been just a drop in the ocean.
00055 – 00:04:21/00:04:26 – The Club of Rome comprises some 70 men of widely varying backgrounds,
00056 – 00:04:26/00:04:31 – but their common concern is that the world problems cannot be solved by individual nations.
00057 – 00:04:31/00:04:34 – I spoke with Professor Hugo Thiemann, director of the Battelle Institute in Geneva,
00058 – 00:04:34/00:04:40 – Dr Aurelio Peccei, founder of the club, and Dr Alexander King, director of the World Bank
00059 – 00:04:40/00:04:42 – and the United Nations’ OECD.
00060 – 00:04:42/00:04:45 – Dr. King, now you’re describing the world as a closed system where all these
00061 – 00:04:45/00:04:51 – things are interrelated and yet the government, the control of the system, is by individual nation-states.
00062 – 00:04:51/00:04:54 – Now how do you convince them to cooperate?
00063 – 00:04:54/00:04:59 – The sovereignty of these nations is no longer as absolute as it was.
00064 – 00:04:59/00:05:06 – There’s a gradual diminishing, whittling away of sovereignty, little bit by little bit,
00065 – 00:05:06/00:05:10 – especially, of course, the smaller countries where it’s more obvious,
00066 – 00:05:10/00:05:15 – but the bigger countries have to do a good deal of this by agreeing to international
00067 – 00:05:15/00:05:25 – arrangements for the Law of the Seas, or for the limits of fishing or for control of the wavelengths and radio
00068 – 00:05:25/00:05:32 – and a hundred and one other things, but especially in a technological field I think.
00069 – 00:05:32/00:05:36 – This is going to be increasingly so with the developments next year.
00070 – 00:05:36/00:05:41 – I was at an important meeting in Washington a couple of weeks ago and Peterson,
00071 – 00:05:41/00:05:48 – the former Secretary of Commerce, was saying the same thing from an economic point of view –
00072 – 00:05:48/00:05:52 – that the general world economic situation, the interdependence of countries,
00073 – 00:05:52/00:05:57 – on their food and fuels and so on, is leading to an interdependence
00074 – 00:05:57/00:06:01 – which has seeds of draining away of sovereignty within it.
00075 – 00:06:01/00:06:08 – So I don’t think one can envisage an idealistic of jumping to a world federalism or anything of that sort
00076 – 00:06:08/00:06:16 – but the building up probably in the next decade in a number of particularly sensitive fields,
00077 – 00:06:16/00:06:24 – like energy, raw materials, the use of the oceans, space and so on, of a number of what
00078 – 00:06:24/00:06:31 – people are tending to call regimes, which will not be ordinary United Nations-type of organisations
00079 – 00:06:31/00:06:37 – but semi-management organisations. There’ll be a great deal of consent in them.
00080 – 00:06:37/00:06:43 – Dr Peccei views the European common market as an elementary example of the kind of regional cooperative
00081 – 00:06:43/00:06:47 – which is going to be necessary? What responsibilities does he see for Australia?
00082 – 00:06:47/00:06:51 – You are in a splendid position. [REPORTER] What should we do?
00083 – 00:06:51/00:07:01 – You have food, energy, space. You are distant from other centres,
00084 – 00:07:01/00:07:11 – so you can, for a longer time, feel rather more independent than interdependent.
00085 – 00:07:11/00:07:18 – but things of the world are going so fast that I I think that the enlightened leadership
00086 – 00:07:18/00:07:28 – in Australia should see down the road that Australia will have to lose some of its own self decisions
00087 – 00:07:28/00:07:39 – in order to acquire something else which may be purely political in a very wide sense, or maybe also security.
00088 – 00:07:39/00:07:45 – The Club of Rome is reluctant to point the finger at any one nation, yet clearly nations like the United States
00089 – 00:07:45/00:07:49 – which consumes approximately 60% of the world’s resources, will, in the club’s view,
00090 – 00:07:49/00:07:55 – have to accept a severe cutback in its voracious appetite. But the club’s utterances
00091 – 00:07:55/00:08:00 – are cloaked in a velvet democracy in the hope that their facts will gently persuade.
00092 – 00:08:00/00:08:05 – We will ask “who is making the decision?” and whether the decision makers of today
00093 – 00:08:05/00:08:13 – whether they perceive the problems, what kind of problems, and the interactions of the problems.
00094 – 00:08:13/00:08:15 – That’s a very pragmatic approach.
00095 – 00:08:15/00:08:20 – [REPORTER] Has the time come, Dr. King, when we’re going to have to say we can no longer entrust
00096 – 00:08:20/00:08:25 – our resources and the exploitation of those resources to private enterprise?
00097 – 00:08:25/00:08:28 – Is the time come when governments will simply have to take more control?
00098 – 00:08:28/00:08:32 – Simple nationalisation and things like that wouldn’t help at all
00099 – 00:08:32/00:08:36 – because we’ve got to keep an incentive approach and many of the good aspects
00100 – 00:08:36/00:08:43 – of private enterprise are very necessary here, but not in the old exploitative way
00101 – 00:08:43/00:08:46 – where the market forces dominated the whole situation.
00102 – 00:08:46/00:08:51 – [REPORTER] Dr Peccei, can you tell me what my lifestyle will be in 100 years’ time?
00103 – 00:08:51/00:08:55 – What sort of car I’ll drive, what sort of house I’ll live in, what sort of food I’ll be eating.
00104 – 00:08:55/00:09:04 – Probably you will have a smaller car, you will use more common transport means,
00105 – 00:09:04/00:09:19 – you will work far less hours, you will have a wider cultural possibility than today,
00106 – 00:09:19/00:09:24 – you will not be so much pestered by immediate needs
00107 – 00:09:24/00:09:30 – because through technology, organisation of the markets, the basic needs will be taken care of
00108 – 00:09:30/00:09:36 – and I think that you will love nature and continue then what I think
00109 – 00:09:36/00:09:44 – you are doing now to protect our environment, to avoid this man-made world
00110 – 00:09:44/00:09:51 – where the creatures of nature, the animals, the plants,
00111 – 00:09:51/00:09:56 – the green spaces, the wilderness, is bound to disappear.
00112 – 00:09:58/00:10:03 – To the Club of Rome the status symbols of the year 2000 will be the inverse of today’s.
00113 – 00:10:03/00:10:08 – Prestige will stem from low consumption. That personal consumption will have to
00114 – 00:10:08/00:10:12 – be less is plain enough, but for that privation to be seen as prestigious
00115 – 00:10:12/00:10:17 – would seem to indicate some radical rethinking, at least for the fat cats of the planet.
00116 – 00:10:17/00:10:27 – [♪ PULSING 70s ELECTRONIC MUSIC FINISHES ♪]
