5.4) Limits To Growth: Criticism
Despite its complexity, the World 3 model has some fairly clear drawbacks:
- Geographical areas are not considered in World 3
- Rich and poor are not represented separately
- Only two aggregate pollutants are considered
- Violence, military, corruption, natural disasters and diseases are omitted
As a result of this, and for less well founded reasons, the Limits to Growth report was heavily criticized. For example:
“Lumping together (to cite just a few scores of possible examples) highly substitutable but relatively limited resources of liquid oil with unsubstitutable but immense deposits of sedimentary phosphate rocks, or short-lived atmospheric gases with long-lived radioactive wastes, struck me as extraordinarily meaningless.”
Vaclav Smil, 2005