Computer predicts catastrophe: How The Club of Rome shocked Dutch politics and media by modelling the limits to economic growth

‘Disaster threatens world’, read an ominous headline on the frontpage of the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad on Tuesday August 31st, 1971. “If life remains business as usual for everyone, an absolute catastrophe will hit us within mere decennia. It is only a question whether the catastrophe will be caused by hunger, exhaustion of essential resources, or pollution of the earth. Radical measures will be necessary – immediately! – if calamity is to be avoided”, NRC’s science journalist Arie de Kool started one of the opening stories of his paper. De Kool had not personally discovered a major disaster that was about to hit planet earth and its inhabitants, he was quoting directly from a leaked early version of a report compiled by a few experts working at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. Although warnings like this one are common these days, when De Kool first showed his editor his scoop on The Club of Rome and the foreseen dangers of economic...Show more‘Disaster threatens world’, read an ominous headline on the frontpage of the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad on Tuesday August 31st, 1971. “If life remains business as usual for everyone, an absolute catastrophe will hit us within mere decennia. It is only a question whether the catastrophe will be caused by hunger, exhaustion of essential resources, or pollution of the earth. Radical measures will be necessary – immediately! – if calamity is to be avoided”, NRC’s science journalist Arie de Kool started one of the opening stories of his paper. De Kool had not personally discovered a major disaster that was about to hit planet earth and its inhabitants, he was quoting directly from a leaked early version of a report compiled by a few experts working at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. Although warnings like this one are common these days, when De Kool first showed his editor his scoop on The Club of Rome and the foreseen dangers of economic growth to the future of mankind in 1971, this was not the case. Back then, computer models were relatively new and although many of the warnings by The Club of Rome had been uttered by politicians and activists for decades already, attempts to create a holistic model for a combination of interconnected risks had not found a very receptive ear in most countries. De Kool, whose career could use a major scoop by 1971 as this thesis shows, found a massive audience with his story on The Club of Rome and its distressing model. Not just the general public, but also politicians from left to right across the many waning political pillars of Dutch society in the 1970s read the Club’s Limits to Growth-report. This thesis - which provides an answer to the question why the report made such a splash in the Netherlands in particular - is grounded on research of the most important Dutch contemporary sources, that is, on a close reading of the most important and widest circulating articles, reports and op-eds concerning the ideas and suggestions of the Limits to Growth-report as it came out in the early 1970s. To this body of sources, in order to explore the political relevance of such an emerging environmentalism, this thesis adds an overview of parliamentary debates and governmental deliberations, which are crucial to further embedding the Club of Rome’s reports into the Dutch evolving socio-political landscape. Finally, a large body of secondary literature helps this thesis to problematize and operationalize the most important terms of the discussion, from environmentalism to modelling, while contextualizing them historically and geographically.Show less

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Computer predicts catastrophe: How The Club of Rome shocked Dutch politics and media by modelling the limits to economic growth