Limits to Growth vs Paul Ehrlich

Whenever I bring up Limits To Growth, the groundbreaking study based on Systems Dynamics modeling, critics respond about Paul Ehrlich, who made many predictions in his book Population Bomb and in many interviews which were incredibly wrong.  Noah Smith (an economist who I basically despise btw) has a good synopsis:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-paul-ehrlich-got-everything-wrong

But Paul Ehrlich was not an author of Limits to Growth, and he was not ever a member of the Club of Rome which commissioned it.  

The Club of Rome is still around today making annual report books.  They still say we need to transition to a sustainable society or it will be forced on us at some point in the future, still likely around 2050 (but the exact date is less important than the principle) with Buisness as Usual, with drastic consequences like a large die off of humans, not just demographic shifts.  A sustainable society will not have a growing population and resource use, because the earth is finite.  Our current society can't work like that, resource use growth is forced at every level, especially through the demand for higher profits.  All that seems incontrovertible to me, and it seems we are indeed continuing down the easy road to a catastrophic collapse of several kinds all at once.

Paul Ehrlich's predictions were based on what looks little better than extrapolating current trends.  He predicted catastrophes based on limited resources in the 1970's and 1980's.  These catastrophes never happened, largely because technological changes which at least kicked the can down the road if not solving them completely.

Meanwhile, Limits to Growth made arguments (they denied they were predictions) based on a Systems Dynamics Computer Model of the world called World3.  World3 was run with different scenarios, the Standard scenario represented Business as Usual and showed Growth (of population and material production) peaking in the Middle of the 21st Century.   The authors repeatedly reiterated in interviews that they did not predict catastrophes in the 20th Century, but somehow the confusion with Ehrlich persists.  Another scenario based on wider ecological consciousness, conservation, and reduced materialism showed peaking in the early 22nd Century (but a steeper decline thereafter).

There were several official updates to Limits to Growth, in 1992, 2004, and 2015.  In every update, the authors concluded our actual trajectory still seems closest to the original Standard scenario, which did not even include Global Warming, Endless Wars, and unforced declining Fertility.

Paul Ehrlich was a co-founder of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), which has always advocated for free birth control and abortion on demand, in the US and elsewhere.  I think there are no good arguments against these things, but I know some who make them.  Anyway, ZPG has rebranded itself as Population Connection.  And they are not to be confused with another organization, Negative Population Growth, which has several ideas including severely restricting immigration to USA because immigrants have more children than non-immigrants.  I oppose ideas like that in principle, I believe in as open borders as possible both for economic and fairness reasons.  So awhile after discovering that POV I stopped supporting NPG, but I have been a long time supporter of Population Connection.