b'When Greta Thunberg chastised members of the U.N. General Assembly for accepting fairy tales of eternal economic growth, she was also calling for a new economic narrative.But those arent fairy tales she was calling out. Theyre myths. Perhaps the greatest myth of the 21st century is that globalization and climate change can be managed without addressing the question of limits to growth.Back in the 18th century, Thomas Malthus, predicting imminent food shortages due to population growth, didnt get his numbers right. Neither did IBM CEO Thomas Watson get his numbers right when predicting, in the early 1940s, There is a world market for about five computers. The power of exponential growth and accelerating technological innovation was bigger than both of them. When the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth in 1973, it put a new cast on such matters. Despite being criticized as Chicken Little with a computer, The Limits to Growth succeeded in framing the modern environmental discussion. The book came out just as human population was doubling at its fastest pace in historyfrom 1950 to 1987, world population grew from 2.5 billion to 5 billion, on its way to the fastest additional billion in history, from 5 billion to 6 billion during the period 1987 to 1999. This acceleration of population growth in the 52'