This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In the late 1960s, an Italian industrialist and a Scottish scientist started a club to address what they considered to be humankind's greatest problems.

Things like pollution, resource scarcity, and overpopulation.

And because this group met in Rome, Italy,

it came to be known as The Club of Rome.

Producer Katie Mingle.

Over the next couple of years, the Club of Rome

would grow to include politicians, scientists, economists,

and business leaders from around the world.

It was a pretty elite group.

I've always pictured a lot of leather, furniture, and cigar smoking.

I don't know how much cigar smoking there was.

I mean, it was certainly clubby.

That's Patrick McCray. He's a professor of history at the University of California,

Santa Barbara. I think there certainly was a tendency to imagine them as sort of this cigar smoking

cabal, you know, sort of pulling the strings behind the scenes, but I think there was a, you know,

genuine interest on their part to address these problems of the world.

The people who were a part of the Club of Rome basically wanted to figure out if and when

the world was going to hit maximum capacity and run out of resources and toward

this end they had a tool a relatively new tool at the time the computer and so

they plugged a bunch of data into their huge 1970s computers and then looked at the results and switched up the variables and ran the tests again.

No matter how they played with the variables, which were resource use, pollution,

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