It intrigues me that growth is one of the goals of sustainable development (the 8Th), when we have a group of brilliant MTI scientists warning of its limits since the 1970s.
At a time when all we hear about is hyper growth, I hope the work of Jay Forester and Donella Meadows is revisited by new engineers. It's time to question the goal of the system.
[1] https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/21...
Most causes in the list are just idiotic, so it doesn't matter. There are a few that are more convincing than "sexuality" TBH.
Anyway, yes, the article and everything around it is just weak, malthusianism all over again. The first wtf for me was the "every civilization has fallen, why not ours". Exactly, why not? Don't they see any difference? And did all previous civilization fall for the same reasons?
Maybe they fell because "complexity"... come on.
I think the list is on alphabetic order.
Regardless of the reasons above the real problem is that we are putting all the eggs on one basket. When we listen to Elon Musk saying we need to be an interplanetary society we think "the guy is right", but we have difficulties on accepting that having a single global economy is dangerous.
Resilience is the new buzz word but anti-fragility is what we should strive for. Nassin Tabel give Switzerland as an example. Again you see the pattern, instead of one big and fragile system you have 26 cantons with some degree of independence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome#Critics
TLDR of the criticism is their reasoning is amateurish and do not reflect reality, reflect professional norms, etc.