The Oil Drum

Yes, the idea of "The Limits of Growth" was very well known in the '70s and the notion that also oil and gas will deplete was accepted. M. King Hubbert predicted at that time that conventional oil would peak in 2000. He was pretty well at the target, conventional, light oil peaked around that year. Now we speak about non-conventional oil, extra heavy, tar sands etc. These have much lower EROEI than conventional oil. The lower margin EROEI (EROEI of additional production) explains some of the oil price hike (price tell also something about the energy inputs). And we add some "non-oil" (NGL) in the all liquids numbers and count this as oil. This is just forging the statistics.

In fact the predictions of the '70s have been quite realistic. The main error of the authors of "The Limits of Growth" was that they didn't understand the primary role of the energy resources, but treated all natural resources as  equally potential constraints of growth. With energy it is possible to substitute one raw material with others and boost food production - but you cannot substitute energy itself. Byt the way, the Club of Rome has developed its World Model all the time, but running it crashes the simulated world just as before... (http://www.clubofrome.org/)

Now, if "everybody knew", why nothing was done? A lot was actually done. There was quite ambitious alternatives reasearch - so we know already a lot. That is why there is not as much interest on that reasearch now as some could expect. There was wide discussion about alternative fuels, but the results were just the same as now: nothing much to gain there.

The Club of Rome and Limits of Growth approach was later discredited by claiming that the expected catastrophe didn't happen. Well, they gave us about 30 years of good time before we would see the impacts of the global resource depletion. So here we are.