The proposals to curb industry and energy consumption to avert global warming echo the ‘limits to growth’ alarms of the 1970s. Back then, groups like the Club of Rome proposed Draconian curbs on industrialization and urbanization because the world was supposedly about to run out of petroleum and other natural resources. These arguments resonated with the oil crises of the decade (even though these crises were, in fact, created by strategic, political, and economic factors, not true scarcity). Eventually deregulation and a saner foreign policy exposed these arguments for the shams that they were.