There is much discussion of late (typically gullible) of a recent article claiming that a 1972 prediction of the collapse of civilization between 2040 and 2070 from “MIT” is “on track.” This is scam logic that needs to be called out—particularly as it discredits its own cause (which is now: environmentalism), exemplifying a typical “shoot own foot” behavior from environmental alarmists who rightly want society to adopt wiser policies (indeed we should), but think scaring people with lies is going to succeed at that (pro tip: that not only won’t succeed, it will also discredit your entire project and thus actually undermine your achievement of it). The whole exercise teaches good lessons in critical thinking.

General Context

I’ve discussed attempts at promoting “secular apocalypticism” before. In Did the Environment Kill Rome? I explained why attempts to credit the Dark Ages to “abuse of the environment” are simply bogus; Roman civilization did itself in with bad intellectual, political, and economic decisions (while China, which did all the same shit environmentally, never suffered a tick for it). Likewise, in Facebook comments years ago I explained why modern America is not even close to being analogous to the Roman Republic or Empire (there has been no “assassination of the Gracchi,” nor any Caesar or Augustus—Trump even recently tried that, and the system soundly crushed his dreams, demonstrating that our system is, for all its corruption, still a far sight healthier, even though that’s despite continued treasonous Republican attempts to sicken it, which we still must not allow or ignore).

In Are We Doomed? I pointed out why “existential risks” are very unlikely, and are not the same thing as downturns and bad outcomes, yet these all tend to be conflated. It’s actually extremely hard to kill off a civilization; and almost as hard even to just collapse it (which is not the same thing). Total Thermonuclear War couldn’t even do it. We literally don’t have enough bombs—and never will. Nukes just aren’t destructive enough to pull that off (just ask actual survivors of Hiroshima…that’s right: survivors of Hiroshima). This doesn’t mean something like that wouldn’t be really bad, even mightily suck, or even launch us into another Dark Ages. But we’d be back in form in just a few centuries, just like last time, which is hardly even a visible amount of time biologically, much less geologically (even less, cosmically). “Wiping us out” is not the same thing as “Fucking us up.”

Civilization has been around for over six thousand years, and will likely be around for millions of years more. In that time-frame, a setback of a few hundred years is nothing. It will suck for those who must endure it; but it’s not going to be “the end of humanity.” And even that lesser outcome is highly unlikely. A temporary collapse (especially from something like that) is far more likely than an actual extinction event, sure. But most bad outcomes are not “Hello, Dark Ages.” To put it bluntly, “our rent will go up” is not “civilization will collapse.” Bad things (world wars, civil wars, economic depressions, global warming, pollution, et al.) rarely collapse civilizations. History proves this out; even relatively recent history. Those societies that make such bad decisions and thus get saddled with all the “bad things” they cause typically chug along anyway, continuing economic, political, technological, and scientific advancement barely abated—especially when we look at a time scale of decades rather than mere years (and given that civilizations have lifespans in the thousands of years, we should be looking at units of time in the decades, not mere years). Look back over the last several hundred years; even just the last century. Reversals and downturns, even fascist backlashes, simply don’t last long. Historically, it’s been extremely rare for an actual “collapse” event to actually come about (and that usually takes a century or two of gradual decay—it doesn’t just happen overnight).

This does not mean we can just ignore shit. “Oh that won’t kill us, so we don’t need to do anything about it” is dumbass logic. But one needs to be honest about the scale of a threat and the need to address it. Because dishonesty will signal to everyone you want to rally into action that you are a liar, and thus nothing you say is to be heeded—not even the unexaggerated true shit you could have been arguing instead. The worst thing global warming activists could ever do, for example, is claim “the global sea level will rise twenty feet in our lifetimes.” It actually won’t likely even rise more than two feet in two lifetimes—which is actually still really bad and something to be concerned about, but it doesn’t “sound” scary enough, so environmentalists lie, leading people to dismiss all alarmism about sea level rise, and thus discrediting even the truth they could have told instead. Shoot, foot. Animal rights activists do the same thing when they falsely represent exceptionally corrupt practices of disastrously managed farms as what every company is doing, or lie about how much grain and water is “wasted” on raising beef. Which lies cause most of their target audience to disregard them entirely, in place of what could have happened: rallying people to genuinely defensible reforms of animal industry.

The bogus 1972 “MIT Study” I’ll be talking about today is another species of this dishonest bullshit, created and promoted by fools who think lying about a threat will get people motivated to fight it—when, predictably, exactly the opposite has happened.

The Bogus So-Called “MIT Study”

Even what the study in question is commonly called is a lie. The very name of MIT evokes awe and respect, as if that university is somehow more authoritative on anything. So people call the 1972 “Limits to Growth” study the “MIT Study” even though institutionally MIT had nothing to do with it. The study’s authors happened to have jobs at MIT, and used some MIT computers. But no MIT Press published their work, no MIT department funded it, and MIT never endorsed it. It was not even a peer-reviewed scientific study. It is actually quite disingenuous to keep calling them “the MIT team” and their report “the MIT study.” The actual funders of the project were the Club of Rome, a society pushing the communist-environmentalist ideas of its eccentric millionaire founders (Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King), whose projects have been condemned by experts as dubious and amateurish. It is not surprising that the study got exactly the results its funders wanted. Which alone would not suffice to dismiss the study. But it is grounds for suspicion.

What exactly did this study argue? You can read it yourself (there is a free PDF of it here). It’s a convoluted mess, based on a lot of imprecise handwaving and complex computer modeling so sensitive to input assumptions as to be all but unfalsifiable. But the overall gist can be represented by this table (from page 124):

There is no actual date scale here, and the authors have defensively admitted the table produces no clockable predictions as to what year anything will happen. One might be misled into thinking that since the table begins at 1900 and ends at 2100, that the “middle” of the table represents the year 2000, but nope. This allows their claims to be safely unfalsifiable (at least until 2100, when I’m sure they’ll just move the goal posts and relabel that side of the table “2200”). Because we can never “check” any of it against reality—at least, any of it that matters. Because there is only one feature of this table that says anything remarkable: that at some point there will be a shocking “collapse” of the world population due to starvation—literal and figurative, as the table shows “food per capita” and “industrial output” suddenly collapsing some time before the world population does.

Take away this single feature of their table, and all it would show is that these things will steadily increase to some limit on a certain curve, with no collapse to be concerned about. This is important to note because the new 2020 “report” by Gaya Herrington, which claimed the study’s predictions were “on track” (thus inspiring all the latest chatter online, like the ridiculous Vox headline “MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule.”), only confirmed those boring and uninteresting growth curves—it does not actually “confirm” the predicted collapse, the only thing anyone would ever even bother citing the 1972 study for. So there is no sense in which the study’s predictions are “on track” that actually matters to fuck all. And this is to be expected, because Herrington’s study couldn’t verify the only remarkable claim that study made, because notably, observably, it’s been half a century now and nothing has collapsed. The only remarkable prediction the study makes has yet to find any empirical confirmation whatever. And really, it doesn’t even look plausible now (if it ever did; and by most accounts, it never did).

The entire outcome (the predicted “collapses” of “food per capita,” “industrial output,” and then, in result, “population”) is not actually tracked to year on this table, but is predicated on the S-curve overlaying the whole thing labeled “resources.” In other words, the report is just one giant “if, then” statement: if total global resources decline on that standard S-curve, then these collapses will occur at the designated point on that resource-decline S-curve. Ironically, almost all apologetics in defense of this report hinge on insisting this “if, then” statement is mathematically unassailable, which may well be true (I won’t bother challenging that; though some have). The problem is with the claim that global resources will actually decline that way. This is the difference between fiction and reality. To say “if available resources drop below a certain level, then civilization will collapse” is completely trivial, even asinine. Yes. Duh. If a stray star flew into the Earth, we’d be vaporized. If the moon suddenly turned into a billion lit rockets, we’d have a fantastical fireworks show. If an army of ancient psychopathic robots suddenly rose out of the Earth, we’d have problems. I can do this all day long. These are pointless assertions. Sure, they are all true. But their being true is trivial to the point of stupidity. What we want to know (what everyone is citing this study as declaring) is whether these things will actually happen. Is a stray star hurtling toward Earth? Will the moon suddenly turn into a billion lit rockets? Are ancient robots coming to get us? Will global resources drop to “that” level—whatever “level” that’s supposed to be?

And nothing—literally nothing—in that study evinces that it will. They produce no evidence entailing that outcome. It’s simply a presumption of the model. There is much winging about resource-decline indicators in the study, but none of it links their speculations, or even evidence regarding that, to the actual S-curve in the model producing the tabled results. This is the central key premise on which all their results hang. And it’s all bogus.

The Resource Bullshit

For example, the Limits to Growth study relies on the usual 1970s bullshit argument about “peak oil” (p. 58) claiming we will run out of oil in just 50 years (spoiler: we haven’t). In actual fact, We Will Never Run Out of Oil. All claims to the contrary are, quite simply, bullshit. As soon as an oil-based economy gets more expensive than, say, a hydrogen-based economy, we will simply shift to hydrogen. Exactly as happened before: wood became too expensive, until coal was cheaper, so we shifted to coal; coal became too expensive, until petroleum was cheaper, so we shifted to petroleum; now we are shifting toward natural gas; and soon solar, wind, and nuclear will take the baton. There is no evidence we couldn’t just, if we had to, switch everything to electric and supply entirely with nuclear power (and all arguments against that being viable are likewise bullshit—including this study’s own argument that we will “run out of uranium,” which is both false and moot: nuclear plant designs now run on the waste product of uranium plants and on other raw materials besides uranium). And I want to emphasize here that that’s all the case even without capitalizing the space industry; it will be far more the case when we inevitably do (a point I’ll elaborate on when I discuss agro-resources).

Worse, most of what they are talking about doesn’t even require shifting any industrial foundation (like switching from wood to fossil fuels, or from fossil fuels to nuclear, which we already know we can easily do when we need to). Their argument is in most cases even more ridiculous than that. To illustrate what I mean, let’s take their argument about “chromium” reserves. The same points follow for almost every other resource they talk about (while the rest fall to the same point just made about oil). Here is what they say about chromium (p. 61):

The world’s known reserves of chromium are about 775 million metric tons, of which about 1.85 million metric tons are mined annually at present. Thus, at the current rate of use, the known reserves would last about 420 years. [The] actual world consumption of chromium is increasing, however, at the rate of 2.6 percent annually. [So the] growth rate, if it continues, will deplete the resource stock, not in 420 years, as the linear assumption indicates, but in just 95 years. If we suppose that reserves yet undiscovered could increase present known reserves by a factor of five [then] this fivefold increase would extend the lifetime of the reserves only from 95 to 154 years. Even if it were possible from 1970 onward to recycle 100 percent of the chromium…so that none of the initial reserves were lost, the demand would exceed the supply in 235 years.

This is all trivially true. If demand just keeps increasing “forever,” eventually there won’t be enough. But there is absolutely no reason to believe demand will keep increasing “forever.” As I’ll point out shortly, Earth’s population is already expected to peak at 9 billion, and then drop (not rise), and entirely for reasons this study completely and utterly failed to predict—which is just one of many reasons we should chuck it in the bin. But that aside, we are already nearing 8 billion people—and chromium supply is fine (global reserves are at 570mt and the industry is actually worried about oversupply). Is it really that hard to imagine we can find 12% more chromium? That’s obviously already available with just a minute increase in chromium recycling. Much less mining.

And that is actually where all growth curves will end: once we reach a steady peak population, entailing a steady peak demand on all resources like chromium, we will then simply just operate on a recycling economy. The only reason we don’t already live like that is that it’s still cheaper to dig up and smelt more of it; eventually it will be cheaper to just smelt existing stuff we made with it back into chromium again. All the chromium we ever use, will just keep being reused. It doesn’t “vanish.” Chromium does not dissolve (unless you throw it into a star or something). We will never run out of chromium. There will always be plenty of it on Earth. And even if there weren’t, we’ll just ship it in from space.

Both facts hold for literally everything they use as an example. Either we will never run out of something (e.g. chromium, water, iron); or we will easily replace it with something we will never run out of (e.g. a nuclear-electric economy will eventually replace the fossil fuel economy). Even actually depletable resources—radioisotopes like uranium or selenium, which do indeed dissolve (into other elements)—are still in ample supply (we still today have hundreds of years left of uranium on Earth), and eventually will simply be resupplied from space. Radioisotopes used for specific purposes (e.g. medicine), if ever they run out even across the entire solar system and can’t be rebuilt with future atomic technology, we will just do without, or replace with some other tech (eventually we will have cures for cancer and scanners that can scry internal organs without using radioisotopes). And if we still need these as power sources thousands of years from now, and somehow we’ve gone through the entire solar system’s supply of nuclear fuels, we could simply switch to mass-scale space-based solar and run our civilization off “the” nuclear reactor in our system (up to and including even building a Dyson sphere if we must; and trillions of years after that when the sun burns out, we could just run on cosmic background radiation, by living in ultracooled simverses with slowed clocks).

So these “MIT Study” claims about a collapsing population caused by vanishing resources is 100% bullshit. None of those resources is going anywhere. There will always be enough to do what we need with it. And we will always have ways to get more. The only thing that will change is how expensive it is; but none of that variance will be significant enough to cause a collapse of anything. It will just have minor effects on our monthly bills and what “stuff” there is to buy. “Dang, a toolbox costs twice as much now” is simply not “Oh shit, civilization is collapsing!”

That’s all straightforward. But someone might note they really mean to be talking about the supposed problem of unending “economic” as opposed to “population” growth, such that even our inevitable stable population will still “burn through everything” chasing a continual economic “crack high.” That’s bullshit too. But I’ll get to that last. First let’s get through the rest of their bullshit.

Their Pollution Bullshit

All their model results, such as shown on the table I provided above, also show pollution peaking before population collapse as well, but they provide no scientifically coherent definition of “pollution,” nor any actual metric by which they are measuring it, or its effect (their model just counts “quantity” in the abstract, e.g. “ten times more” means, well, ten times more by whatever metric you imagine to be relevant). But carbon dioxide producing global warming is not the same thing as lead causing fatal or debilitating disease or even crime, which is not the same thing as a giant vortex of plastic in the ocean, and so on. Nor do any of these things just “go up” (world lead pollution, for example, has experienced substantial decline, and this is a trend for any pollutant we choose to combat). Nor do they have any negative relationship to population growth. Never in history has “pollution” moved any significant population’s growth rate below zero. For example, after the 14th century, lead pollution increased a million times, and still the world population exploded unabated—it did not “collapse” as this study’s model presumes. None of these things can be measured with the same metric, either as to “quantity” or “effect,” much less the consistently implausible metrics they assume in their model. So a line labeled “pollution” on this table and its calculated “effect” on population is total bullshit.

I could drop mic on this point here, and set aside this study’s total unscientific nonsense about “pollution” and instead look just at the role of food, industrial production, and population (as I will next). But their claim is that (p. 127): “the primary force,” sic, “that stops growth is a sudden increase in the level of pollution.” There is zero empirical or historical basis for any such assertion. They declare this will happen because at some point pollution will get so bad as to cause “an overloading of the natural absorptive capacity of the environment,” but nowhere in their study do they run any actual numbers predicting this ever happening with anything whatever. For example, they never show that lead pollution will keep rising until the whole Earth is so lead poisoned that billions of people start dropping dead. Explicably. Because, uhem, lead pollution didn’t keep rising like that. There is no evidence any pollutant is going to increase that far, or even could.

Even where they make an accurate prediction—right now, for example, the effect of CO2 pollution on global temperature looks to be expected to keep rising problematically—nowhere do they show this will go “so far” as to kill everyone, or even force population growth into the negative. To the contrary, historically Earth has thrived with life at CO2 levels far higher than humanity will ever produce (during the Cambrian Explosion it was ten times higher than even today; human industry won’t produce even half that). This doesn’t mean global warming won’t suck and create enormous problems making everyone’s life worse (so We Do Need to Do Something about Global Warming); but it also won’t have by itself any predictable effect on population growth. Ditto any other kind of pollution. The Limits to Growth study’s claim to the contrary is simply made-up bullshit, never demonstrated by any evidence or argument anywhere.

Their Food Production Bullshit

But let’s pretend that bullshit about pollution isn’t in the study. Let’s just look at food and industry growth and their effect on population. The study says (ibid.) their model predicts “the death rate rises abruptly from pollution and from lack of food” and “at the same time resources are severely depleted.” So, does that claim hold up? Not really. Yes, trivially, “if” food production declines, “then” that’s what will happen. But what reason do we have to expect food production to decline like that? There is no valid reason given anywhere in the study. It’s worth noting that the actual evidence indicates the reverse is going to happen: rather than a sudden collapse in our ability to feed people causing a decline in population, all evidence indicates population is going to level off and decline on its own. In other words, population reduction will occur before we hit any reduction curve in production. This flatly contradicts the “catastrophe” scenario the study is trying to sell us on.

And this is predicted by three things: an already-observed global decline in population growth rate (not caused by “starvation” but simply human choice); the already negative growth rate of many first world populations (not caused by “starvation” but simply human choice); and the matching observation that as third world populations advance toward first world conditions (and as the remaining first world nations approach the others in development), their population (as well as economic) growth rates also correspondingly decline. Which means the best way to stop population growth is to…end global poverty. But more to the present point, this also means we do not have to forever continue “increasing” food production. We only need to be able, really, to feed nine billion people (the peak we will hit, and then decline from, before 2100). We already feed eight. That’s a small increase in required productivity.

We are currently a bit behind on meeting that goal, but not for any unsolvable reason: the curves currently fall short primarily because of under-investment. “In the U.S. Midwest, wheat yields per acre have been rising at a decent 2 percent per year,” but, for example, “in parts of India or Eastern Europe, they’ve basically flat-lined,” not because they can’t grow more, but because they aren’t investing in doing so—because they don’t need to yet. This means we will easily meet the rising demand when we have to. We will simply invest in under-developed regions (e.g. we’ll get India and Russia up to par with the American Midwest). In other words, as hundreds of millions more people need food, industry will step up production to sell it to them. There is no evidence to the contrary.

And this is before we even consider exploiting space. I’ve hinted at this a couple times now. But it bears elaboration. Even if we just stay here on Earth, there is no looming agro-disaster (even global warming won’t produce one; all it will do is relocate bread baskets northward, not eliminate them, e.g. Saskatchewan’s production will eventually replace California’s—which will suck for California, but rock for Saskatchewan). But we aren’t even constrained to that option. There is a virtually unlimited resource opportunity to grow food in outer space, not only on other planets, but in space stations built for the purpose. Once you are off planet, the enormous cost of reaching escape velocity no longer hinders production (whereas dropping food onto Earth costs a relatively trivial amount of energy), and the quantity of basic resources in space (water, carbon, nitrogen) is vastly greater than on Earth.

Currently, imagining space industry entails imagining enormous increases in cost, due to the high expense of even reaching much less leaving orbit; but once we get past that initial capital investment—once we have entire self-sustaining colonies beyond Earth—“space industry” will no longer be as substantially burdened with that cost. It might still be more expensive than terrestrial agriculture (due to all that flying around the solar system collecting and moving around billions of tons of raw materials, plus the running “infrastructure” costs that we have to make up for that we get for free on Earth), but it won’t be prohibitively expensive. Because it is self-feeding: you will always end up with more resources, raw and processed, than you spent to get it. So this falls under the “my grocery bill might go up a bit” scale of “problems,” a far cry from “civilization will collapse.”

Their Industrial Production Bullshit

This all pretty much does in their whole “industrial production” collapse prediction as well, as that was entirely based on the combined bullshittery of diminishing materials and diminishing energy supply, which we have seen are bullshit squared. There will be no such disastrous decline in resource or energy availability. We will always have enough stuff to continuously feed and supply the nine billion people we expect there to be, and there will always be enough accessible energy sources for it all as well. The only things that will change are cost and distribution, and thus whether we will have a good world where everyone enjoys a decent living and environment (think, Star Trek), or a shitty one with massive income disparities, resource-hoarding, and misery-inducing heat, drought, war, and pollution (think, Blade Runner). And that’s no joke. Our decisions as a society will determine which it is, and we should care about that, indeed above almost all else when it comes to public policy. But let’s not sell people on that truth with a package of lies. Please. No more bullshit chicken-little scare tactics. Just tell the damned truth. Tell it like it is. And get people on board with taking action on that.

There are two aspects left to discuss relating to this: the first is whether we need perpetual economic growth (see a recent article on this debate in The New Yorker for example), a then-popular position this study was meant to argue against (the Limits to Growth study wants to convince people to stabilize “economic growth” to zero); the second is whether the only way to have “perpetual economic growth” is by “making more stuff” (and thus, tautologically, by “using more resources”), which is assumed by this study to be the case. I think it has been well demonstrated we could run a civilization fine on zero net economic growth if we wanted to; but it has not been demonstrated that we have to. The Limits to Growth study is thus simply wrong in its every core assumption. And one of the most overlooked ways it is wrong is in that assumption it has that the only way to have “perpetual economic growth” is by “making more stuff.” This is well known to be completely and entirely false.

One of the most obvious and important ways we realize economic growth is through enhancing labor productivity through innovation. For example, one of the reasons often noted for why the American construction industry has stagnated in its efficiency while every other industry has realized enormous gains in productivity is that it has under-utilized automation. They aren’t even using computers effectively, much less robotics and prefabrication. This is a failure of choice that is correctable. The effect of automating the construction industry more than we have would be a major gain in economic productivity without any net increase in “stuff” being made or “resources” consumed.

For example, consider a person who is still handling company invoices by hand vs. a person who relies on an efficiently-designed computerized invoice system fully integrated with suppliers and clients: the latter person can do the work of ten. Their productivity has thus increased tenfold. That’s even before we count up all the additionally resulting efficiency gains from fewer lost or mishandled transactions and the like, and reductions in waste (a lot less making of paper, shipping of paper, storing of paper, disposing of paper). Which all results in a net gain in economic growth. Which results not only from the computer used for this, but the writing of the software doing it. New ideas can always increase productivity to some degree; whether fundamentally (the hand-invoicer finally buying a computer) or incrementally (building a faster computer or writing a more efficient program or even just streamlining activities procedurally).

Since technology and innovation can perpetually increase labor productivity, “economic growth” can always be realized without any S-curve resource-drain imagined by the Limits to Growth study. More importantly, even if we somehow did reach a hard limit on this (some point where there just “aren’t” any more innovations that can increase labor productivity or industrial efficiency), that would have to be a world where, basically, AI is running everything and we are just all sitting on a virtual beach earning twenty percent. There would be no more economic growth. But neither would there be any need for it. Poverty would no longer exist. In the meantime, we’ll just stop or reduce doing things that become too expensive, which will be long before our depletion of resources would cause any “societal collapse” (e.g. we will never “over-use” chromium to the point of collapsing civilization; supply-demand effects on its cost will simply slow or reduce what all we do with it, and we’ll just glide on the topped-out level of its use).

Conclusion

What’s the point? Why assiduously argue for such prodigious bullshit for decades and decades? Even Herrington’s 2020 apologetic tripe claims that the predicted global collapse is now just ten years away! Based on…all that same bullshit. There is no way that’s all going to happen in “just ten years.” This is nonsense on stilts. One way to answer the question then is to go to the end of the study and ask what the actual “sell” is: what policy decisions are they using this bullshit to advocate? Some of what you find there is obvious stuff we should be promoting anyway, like improved pollution controls, environmental restoration investment, reduced income disparity. Others are less well-considered.

For example, they argue we could have a more efficient economy if we retooled manufacturing to focus on durability rather than disposability (e.g. make stuff that lasts longer, rather than stuff we have to keep throwing away and rebuilding), which may be true in some respects, but also false in others. A claim like this requires empirical testing, not presumption. And the answer is likely to be complex, and not reducible to their imagined universal rule. Recycling smartphones, for example, looks to be more efficient now than making “smart phones that last forever.” Conversely, near-eternal LED lights are far more efficient to manufacture and employ than rapidly-burned-through incandescent bulbs. There just isn’t going to be any “single simple rule” as to whether or how much we’d benefit from a durability-directed industry. It’s a neat idea, poorly thought out.

And chief among those poorly thought-out hypotheticals is something that smells of outright ideological claptrap: a desire to regulate economic investment to curb economic growth and control where consumers and investors spend their money, and forced rationing (e.g. pp. 163-64). Which is closer to some kind of command economy, where governments tell people what they can and can’t invest in or spend money on and how much, using some sort of magic crystal ball to discern what those limits should be, and some massively expensive socio-political apparatus for policing all this—that somehow, despite its vast (and thus attractive) power, won’t become disastrously corrupted and dysfunctional (think, every Marxist nation in world history). Sounds like a lot of really bad ideas, conjured from the armchair, based on no empirical evidence that it would even be viable, much less desirable. I’m not against government regulation of things. But it has to be soundly evidence-based and well-informed, not speculative pie-in-the-sky dreamery. For example, I am now convinced first world nations should now move to a Universal Basic Income (something this study never contemplates), not because it sounds like it would be cool, but because evidence now extensively backs it as a smart play even for the rich.

Overall, however, I think this study is now getting cited positively not for its crypto-Stalinism but for its supposed ability to bolster environmental policies, especially carbon policies. That was not its original intent I think; the study seems more interested in promoting a general command economy, with only an interest in environmentalism to the extent that it furthers that end. But now it’s a bludgeon for government regulation of greenhousing, which typically means the oil and meat industries as the usual targets (and the latter not even all that justifiably). But because this study is all built on bullshit, trying to sell people on those goals with this study is only going to doom your own cause. Because once people figure out you are arguing for your goals with bullshit (and they will figure that out right quick), they will no longer trust you even on the value of those goals. So please stop doing that. There are honest and productive ways to promote needed change on greenhousing. Please use those instead.