The Club of Rome is a small international association of scientists, former officials and business people that commissioned a famous computer study in 1972. The study said that if growth in population, industry and pollution continued on its 1970 course, the world economy would run into its limits in the 21st century. Fifty years later a strand of the internet reads that as a plan to kill most of humanity.
What happened
The club was founded in April 1968 at a meeting at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome called by Aurelio Peccei, an Italian industrialist who had been a senior executive at Fiat and Olivetti, and Alexander King, the Scottish chemist who ran scientific affairs at the OECD. They described it as an “invisible college” of about a hundred members and were concerned with what they called the problematique, the knot of interlinked global problems that no national government addressed. It had no treaty, no powers and for years no office; it is now a registered association with its headquarters in Winterthur, Switzerland.
Its first commission went to a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led by Dennis Meadows, with Donella Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William Behrens, using the World3 system-dynamics model that grew out of Jay Forrester’s work and was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. The Limits to Growth, launched at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in March 1972, ran a dozen scenarios to the year 2100. In the “standard run,” with no change in policy, resources ran down, pollution rose and both industrial output and population fell sharply in the middle of the 21st century. Scenarios with new technology delayed the decline; only scenarios that stabilized population and capital avoided it. The book sold about thirty million copies in more than thirty languages.
The investigation
The model was attacked at once. Economists including Robert Solow called it simplistic; a Sussex University team showed in Models of Doom (1973) that the outputs were sensitive to a few pessimistic assumptions. The authors answered that they were running scenarios, not forecasts, and the club’s later reports, starting with Mankind at the Turning Point in 1974, were more optimistic in tone. Whether the standard run was tracking reality was taken up in 2008 and again in 2014 by Graham Turner of the University of Melbourne, who compared the model’s curves with three to four decades of observed data and found the business-as-usual scenario the closest fit, a conclusion that remains contested.
The explanations
The depopulation charge draws on three things. The first is the model itself, which treats population as a variable that must stop growing; critics read a projected fall in population as a desired one, though the book proposes family planning and economic change, not deaths. The second is a passage in The First Global Revolution, a 1991 book by King and Bertrand Schneider, which observes that people unite against a common enemy and that pollution, warming, water shortage and famine “would fit the bill”; it goes on that these are caused by human behavior and that “the real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” Quoted without the surrounding paragraphs, the sentence has circulated for thirty years as a confession that the environment was invented as a pretext for control. The third is guilt by association: the club’s early members included bankers and former ministers, and from the 1970s it was linked, without evidence, to an assortment of unrelated plots. The Italian chemist Ugo Bardi, a member, traced in 2018 how a further legend, that the club had secretly disavowed its own report, grew from a misreading by the economist Julian Simon.
None of the club’s reports proposes reducing the number of living people. The population scenarios in The Limits to Growth are about birth rates, and the “enemy” passage argues for solving environmental problems, not for exploiting them. No plan, budget or mechanism for a cull has ever been produced, because none exists in the record.
Where it stands
The Club of Rome still exists, publishes reports and has about a hundred full members. Its 1972 model remains a live scientific argument about whether exponential growth on a finite planet can last, and it may yet be judged right or wrong on the data. The depopulation agenda is not an argument about the data; it is a quotation with its context removed.