Fifty years ago, an international team of researchers was commissioned by the Club of Rome to build a computer simulation of exponential economic and population growth on a finite planet.

In 1971, its findings were first released in Moscow and Rio de Janeiro, and later published in 1972 under the title The Limits To Growth. The report concluded society would start experiencing serious declines in resources and population soon after 2030.

One of the original seventeen researchers involved in The Limits To Growth study, Dennis Meadows, joins us for the podcast this week. Fifty years later, what does he foresee ahead?

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Modern society is addicted to and engineered for perpetual economic growth.

Now, a fourth-grader can tell you that nothing can grow forever, especially if you have finite resources. But that simple realization is eluding today's central planners, despite multiplying evidence that growth is becoming harder and harder to come by.

This week's podcast guest is Professor Tim Jackson, sustainability advisor for the UK government, professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey and Director of CUSP. Tim is also a full member of the Club of Rome.

He explains why the exponential growth rates of today's economies, and their associated rates of resource extraction/consumption, will not be able to continue for much longer — and why a pursuit of "prosperity" (defined much more broadly than simple consumerism) is a much healthier goal for humanity.

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Permanent impairment of capital is the cardinal sin of investing.

Well, today's markets present a clear and present danger of coming capital impairment for those who don't take prudent action in advance of a market downturn. Don't be guilty of inaction.

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Any sense of prosperity in today's economy is based on a falsehood, claims Steve St. Angelo, proprietor of the SRSrocco Report website.

Like we here at PeakProsperity.com, Steve is a student of energy. He shares our worldview that net energy per capita has been in steady decline, and a result, future growth will be limited. Also like us, he notes that the "growth" seen over the past several decades hasn't been due to surplus net energy (which makes being able to do more possible). Instead, it has been fueled by debt  — which essentially steals prosperity from the future and consumes it today.

Any third-grader with a crayon can quickly tell you that kind of scam can't last forever. And it can't. Once the can can't be kicked any further and the next economic and/or financial crisis is upon us, Steve sees today's over-inflated asset prices quickly dropping by a gut-wrenching 50-75%.

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It’s time to be blunt: Humans are headed towards disaster. 

Most of us already know this.  Some consciously, others unconsciously.

No matter if it's consciously or unconsciously, everybody who ‘knows’ that something is terribly wrong is correct.

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Many questions surround the elevated financial asset prices we are faced with today.

I'm talking not just about the sky-high prices of stocks and bonds, but also of the trillions of dollars’ worth of derivatives that are linked to them.  All are intricately linked together. For instance, stocks are elevated, in part, because bond yields are so low. 

These questions are important to consider because — if central banks have been too involved and gotten themselves mixed up in trying to ‘wag the dog’ by using elevated financial asset prices as a means to drive economic expansion — then the risk is a big implosion in financial asset prices if their efforts fail.

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James Howard Kunstler returns to the podcast this week, observing that despite the baton being handed to a new American president, the massive predicaments we face as a society remain the same. And it seems the incoming administration is just as in denial of them as the old.

Kunstler adds fresh critique to his now decades-old warning that we are sleepwalking our way deep into the Long Emergency. The longer we delude ourselves and waste our energies in pursuit of reviving the failed "endless growth" model, the farther our journey back to a sustainable way of living will be when our current system collapses.

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Historian and economist David Fleming undertook the writing of Lean Logic a grand vision that projected out the likely path of collapse for our currently unsustainable way of life, as well as the key success factors society will need to cultivate to come out the other side.

Following his death, his writing partner Shaun Chamberlin distilled the book's prime conclusions into the more accessible Surviving The Future: Culture, carnival, and capital in the aftermath of the market economy. Shaun, who has also been deeply involved with Rob Hopkins in the Transition Movement since its inception, stresses that localized communities that pursue developing as much independence from the central economy as possible will be the foundations for entering a sustainable, enjoyable future.

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