Just over 50 years ago, in 1972, I was an undergraduate physics student at the University of Western Australia, Science Union president and the WA National Science Faculty Association (NSFA) student representative. I travelled from Western Australia to South Australia to attend, at Flinders University, the meeting of the NSFA conference under the Club of Rome.
At that meeting, we workshopped the limits to global resources, human population and the environment. The meeting was opened by and overseen by South Australian Governor and physicist Professor Sir Mark Oliphant AC, KBE.
What exactly is the Club of Rome? The Club of Rome describes itself as “a group of world citizens, sharing a common concern for the future of humanity.” It consists of current and former Heads of State, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe.[1] Aurelio Peccei was the founder and first president of the Club of Rome.[2]
In 1968 the Club of Rome was founded and determined the limits to global human population growth and published their first report “The Limits to Growth” in 1972. The environmental best-seller examined five variables in the original model: world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion. The results of the study was that civilization as we know it would collapse shortly after the year 2000 unless the population was seriously reduced.[3] (But that never happened.)
According to the Worldometer[4] the global population in 2023 is 8.045 billion but in 1972 when I attended that NSFA/Club of Rome meeting at Flinders University it was 3.845 billion. Thus in 51 years, the population has increased by 109%, that is it is now 2.09 times larger than in 1972.
How naïve was I? I did not see the big picture that those academics, including Oliphant, were attempting to engineer. I would never have thought that the intentions of the report we developed from our brainstorming sessions at Flinders University were nefarious. At the time I thought it was only about preparedness and planning to implement reasonable taxes to limit the destruction of the planet’s natural resources and limit overpopulation but not methods of de-population.
Club of Rome member Dennis Meadows was one of the 4 co-authors of that 1972 ‘The Limits to Growth’ report. The report “laid that foundation under modern environmental thinking”,[5] so says the environmental group which calls themselves “We Love Earth” on Facebook and YouTube.
In 2017, speaking at a Club of Rome Dutch Association sponsored event, Dennis Meadows, said that he hopes the “necessary” depopulation of the planet Earth, down to one billion—an 87.6% reduction from today’s population—can “occur in a civil way”.[6]
“The planet can support something like a billion people, maybe two billion, depending on how much liberty and how much material consumption you want to have. If you want more liberty and more consumption, you must have fewer people. And conversely, you can have more people. I mean, we could even have eight or nine billion, probably if we have a very strong dictatorship.” (emphasis added)
In the notes to the video of Matthews’ talk, the following is written.
“When it comes to hope, Meadows – knowing collapse of the current global system is certain – hopes for a peaceful, slow collapse, more like a degrowth transition. To get there still requires revolutions, very many revolutions, on all thinkable levels – from the personal to the way we organise politics and the way we reward corporate CEOs. We need everything.” (emphases added)
Let’s be clear ‘degrowth’ is another way of saying ‘depopulation’. That explains all the ESG nonsense and corporate-government partnering to force a fascist agenda on the masses. The revolutions they describe are those we are seeing now implemented. Western governments among other things are pushing censorship, misinformation control laws, and authoritarian controls limiting food production, especially red meat, and much more. Of course, it’s all for our own good, to limit the alleged destructive effects of manmade climate change.
Meadows said at the beginning of his talk:[7]
“The important thing to realise: we don’t consider climate change to be a problem – it’s a symptom. When you have physical growth in a finite planet, pressures are going to mount to stop the growth. And climate change is one of those pressures. So it is a symptom of our efforts to keep promoting physical growth in a finite planet.”
In 1972 nobody was using the expression ‘climate change’. Back then the bigger concerns were ‘global cooling’ and a coming ice age. A 1974 Time magazine article, headlined “Another Ice Age?“,[8] painted a bleak picture of global cooling:
“When meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe, they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.” (emphases added)
A 1975 Newsweek article, titled “The Cooling World,”[9] suggested that cooling “may portend a drastic decline in food production.”
“Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend… But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”
Interestingly in regards to this 1975 Newsweek piece, the author “[s]cience journalist Peter Gwynne recently retracted his article, which has become a talking point for how science can get facts wrong.” Now it is all about ‘global boiling’ so you can’t have ‘global cooling’! But isn’t his retraction an admission that science gets it wrong, then why couldn’t it be wrong now?
However, in 1971 a paper in the prestigious journal of Science cautiously predicted an ice age.[10] Large increases in aerosols were predicted to reduce the warming effect of carbon dioxide emissions and hence, the paper reported that,
“…such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.”(emphasis added)
Aerosols were the bigger concern which were supposed to have a reversing effect cancelling the warming effect of carbon dioxide on increasing global temperature. Aerosols were also alleged to have a destructive effect on the ozone layer opening the southern Antarctic hole and allowing dangerous solar ionising particles into our atmosphere.
It only takes a generation to forget and the same old tricks are hauled out again. This time they use the more flexible ‘climate change’ ideology which can be fitted to any story. Quite obviously the agenda is not really about global temperatures and whether the planet is heating or cooling but it is about decarbonising the planet by reducing the global population to about 10% of its current level.
Meadows said in 2017 that ‘climate change’ is a symptom. He means the human population is the disease causing the change in climate. Have they have lost their minds? All you hear now is ‘climate change’ causes everything. Babies are dying with heart problems. Why? Climate change, of course! Droughts, flood, hurricanes all caused by climate change. But don’t get distracted!
The environmental movement is really about controlling the human population, to depopulate, read ‘decarbonise’, the Earth with Malthusian methods. They call for revolutions and to organise politics to produce a strong dictatorship especially if the planet has more than 1 billion people. The message is ‘accept the deprivation of your liberties and you can live’. Or like WEF founder Klaus Schwab wrote: ‘you will own nothing and you will be happy’. But really that should read ‘and you will be starving’. The climate change narrative is a flexible but false rationale. Reject their propaganda!
[1] 16 August 2008, ‘Club of Rome The First Global Revolution’ at https://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/club-of-rome-the-first-global-revolution/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20050417064734/http:/www.fondamental.com/en/eclub2.htm
[3] Shawn Paul Melville, 30 October 2021, ‘The Club of Rome & The CIA Depopulation Program at Fauci’s Fort Detrick’ at https://www.civilianintelligencenetwork.ca/2021/10/30/the-club-of-rome-the-cia-depopulation-program-at-faucis-fort-detrick/
[4] ‘World Population by Year’ at https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/
[5] 4 September 2017, ‘Dennis Meadows Interview p4/4 (A ‘peaceful collapse’ & many revolutions…)’ at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbo6uvJBtZg
[6] Ibid.
[7] 1 September 2017, ‘Dennis Meadows Interview p1/4 (Limits to Growth, Climate Change..’ at https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=578951268946684
[8] https://nationalcenter.org/Time-Ice-Age-06-24-1974-Sm.jpg
[9] Peter Gwynne, Newsweek, 28 April 1975, https://www.scribd.com/doc/225798861/Newsweek-s-Global-Cooling-Article-From-April-28-1975
[10] S.I. Rasool, S.H. Schneider, ‘Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate’, 9 July 1971, Science, Vol 173, no. 3992, pp.138-141
