Matt Ridley says “no”:
I have lived among both tribes. I studied various forms of ecology in an academic setting for seven years and then worked at the Economist magazine for eight years. When I was an ecologist (in the academic sense of the word, not the political one, though I also had antinuclear stickers on my car), I very much espoused the carrying-capacity viewpoint—that there were limits to growth. I nowadays lean to the view that there are no limits because we can invent new ways of doing more with less.
This disagreement goes to the heart of many current political issues and explains much about why people disagree about environmental policy. In the climate debate, for example, pessimists see a limit to the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with extra carbon dioxide without rapid warming. So a continuing increase in emissions if economic growth continues will eventually accelerate warming to dangerous rates. But optimists see economic growth leading to technological change that would result in the use of lower-carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long before it does much harm.
I made a similar point about nine years ago:
The only hope for the planet is to get more of it to operate on the principles of the market, and individual choice. There are two competing approaches. The first is responding hysterically to problems that won’t occur for many decades (Kyoto being a prime example) which will reduce current wealth to the point that if and when those problems actually occur, we won’t have the financial wherewithal to be able to deal with them. The second is to use those resources wisely, per their most productive uses (i.e., responding to market pricing) to create the wealth necessary to create new resources.
There are many things wrong with our current approach to such things (e.g., the fishery problem), but the nostrums proposed by most “environmentalists” (who tend to be socialists and command economists in green clothing, even if many don’t recognize that) would make things worse, not better. Headlines like that in the Guardian article, implying that resources are a static quantity, of which we’ve already used two thirds, are just the kinds of misinformation that lead to flawed policy decisions, and reduction of wealth, and ultimately reductions of “resources.”
The problem is that the environmental movement has been hijacked by socialists and others completely ignorant of technology and economics.
The stock market has not been kind to “Peak Oil” plays. Nuclear (cough, Exelon, cough), not doing so good. Venezualan heavy oil — fuggetaboutit. Canadian heavy oil — so, so. CF industries, a fertilizer maker for whom natural gas is an important input. To the Moon!
The most accurate energy forecasts, as usual, are those in the EIA website. What they have claimed for a long time is that the usage of so called unconventional oil would increase as conventional oil reserves get depleted. So yes there is more oil but the thing is it is getting increasingly expensive to extract and refine. EROEI is going down. Which means we are all becoming poorer as a result.
Nuclear usage has been growing in places like China. In the US and Europe one would expect a lot of investment right about now even if it was just for replacing the legacy power plants. However instead they just extend the licensing on existing power plants making them increasingly more dangerous to operate as they get extended to twice their original planned lifetimes. They were supposed to operate for 20 years. Now they claim they want to operate them for 40 years.
IMO there have been some good news on the nuclear front. The Generation III designs are getting built even if it is in China and Finland. In the meantime France and the US are changing the separation process to more efficient gas centrifuges making uranium a whole lot cheaper.
Venezuela has too many political problems to fund heavy oil extraction right now. Perhaps if the regime changes it will happen.
s/EIA/IEA/
I mixed those up.
What a great point that matter is not created or destroyed, only transformed. You really can’t run out of anything but space. …and space is really big.
The Easter Islanders and the Anasazi clearly ran out of resources.
The American west is scattered with ghost town when the key resource dried up or played out.
The Easter Islanders and the Anasazi clearly ran out of resources.
Because they had no technology, you moron.
“Because they had no technology”
Spoken by a man who has never built a moai or sailed the
South Pacific. The Easter Islanders had the ability to sail
across the open ocean with no GOP, No Compass, no clocks
that’s a pretty nifty feat and one you can’t do.
They also built 877 moai.
What’s the biggest thing you ever built?
Nonsense. I navigate practically everywhere without GOP. I’ll bet Rand does too. I know you do.
As for moai, you got me there. I’ll admit I’ve never spent so much as a minute carving huge stone god faces out of volcanic rock. One of those socializing/bonding experiences my stubborn atheism has caused me to miss. Ah well.
The biggest thing I ever built was probably a launch shack on a friend’s parents’ property where we used to make and launch Estes rockets on weekends when I was in junior high. Had the help of a half-dozen or so fellow rocket geeks to do it, to be sure. Of course I’m guessing none of those moai were solo works either.
” I navigate practically everywhere without GOP.”
damn you auto-correct
You know it just occurs to me that if you had asked what was the biggest useful thing I ever built, that my junior high launch shack would beat all 877 of the Easter Islanders’ moai.
So, once again, you have nothing except an anonymous attack on me?
Moron.
Pointing out the skill and knowledge to travel 1600 miles over the ocean in open canoes is a statement of admiration towards a stone age people.
Observing that someone lacks the skills, knowledge and courage of these
tribesmen is not an attack, it’s a comparison.
Do you have the skills, knowledge and courage to sail 1600 miles over the ocean in an open canoe?
The Easter Islanders and the Anasazi clearly ran out of resources.
Yup. Sure did. Guess it’s a good thing we’re not a static neolithic society with insufficient ability to innovate. Oh, wait! That’s exactly what all those Deep Ecology tree-hugger lefties want us to be!
The American west is scattered with ghost town when the key resource dried up or played out.
I love the smell of creative destruction in the morning!
Technically, the resources powering said towns in their pre-ghost incarnations, didn’t usually “dry up” or “play out” so much as just become economically unsuitable to pursue once concentrations fell below a certain market-determined threshold. A lot of those ghost towns have had periodic revivals as the improving technology of resource extraction has rendered deposits successively profitable again, then unprofiable, then profitable, etc. There are numerous gold mines that have been revived and shut-in a dozen or more times since the original 19th-Century strikes.
Easter Island? Not so much.
The Anasazi? They didn’t have big enough trade networks (you know, they were “locavores” and all that). Read The Rational Optimist. It’s all about trade.
The Anasazi were clearly done in by global cooling.
The Ancestral Puebleans (not Anasazi, that’s a Navaho name) moved because of a protracted drought. Fortunately, we have better technology than ancient peoples and can create new materials, at least as long as the environmental whack jobs don’t get their way. They’re beyond NIMBY, they’re Don’t Build Anything, Anywhere (DBAA).
“The Easter Islanders and the Anasazi clearly ran out of resources.”
Laying aside Rand’s correct point about lack of technology, your comment is fairly worthless also because one can always pick an arbitrarily small chunk of resources. But to point to that small chunk and then extrapolate to the US or North America, or the Hemisphere is…
well…….
…a kind of 4th grade notion
It’s just a matter of size of the island and the size of the population.
Technology helps, but, you have to invest and grow the tech, faster then you grow demand
There are a few resources that are getting harder to find that have limited substitution products. First, Helium. The reserves are small, stock is pretty small. For scientific use, there aren’t many substitutes. Second, copper. A back-of-the-envelope analysis I saw indicated that even if we could afford it, you couldn’t convert the world’s auto fleet over to plug ins or hybrids due to lack of copper for the motors, especially if you factor in demand from China’s emerging middle class. (lithium for batteries is also a problem, but it’s more abundant.)
Fortunately, there are a couple of solutions. First, copper can be “mined” from wiring and other uses where there are substitutes – it is one of the most recycled metals. Second, as price goes up, a lot of reserves become feasible to use. Third, it’s available in asteroids.
As for Helium, long-term we can extract it from some of the outer planets, but that’s very long term. In the short run, I’d suggest a tax on it for non-health and science uses to encourage more capture of it from natural gas wells.
You could write an interesting solar fiction story about a race using dwindling helium reserves on earth to open up new supplies from the gas giants.
“You could write an interesting solar fiction story about a race using dwindling helium reserves on earth to open up new supplies from the gas giants.”
Or hydrogen. I mulled over a piece on how a hydrogen economy might evolve if one can skim off hydrogen from the gas giants.
Do you have some reason why you don’t want to have anything to do with the frozen H2O which is so abundant in those parts, and so much easier to get to?
“Do you have some reason why you don’t want to have anything to do with the frozen H2O which is so abundant in those parts, and so much easier to get to?”
Yes. In the story I was mulling over, the economy stretches across the Solar System and beyond.
p.s. I never said, by the way, that I would “never have anything to do” with Terran H20, in the story.
Only a narrow minded, Terran-centered, provincial clod would think that the Earth is the be-all and end-all of a future economy and civilization. Once the backwards Neanderthal lout freed it’s mind from Earth LEO, it might think that the best place to get Hydrogen, for civilizations at some extremes of the Solar System, might not be Earth.
But Terrans could certainly extract hydrogen from water on Earth if they so choose.
I was referring to the ice in orbit around each gas giant – on the moons, including the very small moons, and even in the rings. The ice on the outermost moons is so significantly easier to get to than the atmospheres of the giants themselves, and ice is so abundant elsewhere in the outer solar system (and even the not-so-outer solar system) that an operation to mine hydrogen from the gas giants themselves requires an explanation if you want to create a plausible scenario.
Maybe instead of throwing around names like clod, dolt, and lout , you would be better off learning about the solar system you live in.
Excellent point. Enceladus, in fact, spits megatons of water into space at greater than its own escape velocity where it freezes and becomes mass in Saturn’s F-ring. Just getting out that far and scooping up some of that F-ring ice should make one the low-cost producer for the entire Solar System.
You just suggested a tax. I’m surprised you aren’t being called evil.
There are ample helium supplies extractable from natural gas. For awhile it hasn’t be very economical to extract this resource. A huge strategic helium reserve dating back to when airship were in more common use is being sold off, suppressing the price of helium.
The requirements are increasing but for a lot of these cases there are substitutes. Copper can be replaced by aluminium in most cases be those heat radiators or electric cables at minimal performance loss. Some people are working on carbon nanotube cables with even better conductivity than copper.
The history of mankind has seen a lot of materials emerge over time. From rock, wood, and bone. Then we had metals from gold, copper, bronze, iron, steel, aluminium, then the plastics, titanium, etc.
In a lot of these cases we replaced more expensive and rare materials for cheaper materials which initially quite often had worse quality but eventually as technology improved became as good or better than the old materials. e.g. early iron had worse quality than bronze weapons which remained in use by those who could afford them but the good availability of the ore made it commonplace and eventually the manufacturing processes turned it into a superior material to work with.
Sure, I mentioned substitution. However, right now copper for electric motors is one of the areas where the substitutes are not very good. As for room temperature superconductors, it’s anyone’s guess as to when they become practical. Helium is pretty much irreplaceable for science and health uses, which is why I would support a tax for other uses. It’s the most economically efficient way to channel use outside of fiat.
Running out of a resource is only a problem if there is no economically viable substitute, as the Easter islanders had no substitute for the trees they used for boat building, they had an insurmountable problem.
So far we haven’t come across that problem, and a free market is the best mechanism for finding ways around the problem of diminishing supply.
The Easter Islanders also lacked the foresight to preserve tree cutting to a sustainable rate.
Pretty much all of these problems (likely even the helium problem, although I haven’t thought about it) disappear when confronted with cheap, boundless energy. IMHO the best option for cheap boundless energy is the molten salt reactor family, including the well-studied (and already prototyped) liquid fluorine thorium reactor (LFTR). The physics is proven, all that is needed is the nuts-and-bolts engineering to develop the Oak Ridge research reactor work into practical power stations. The LFTR approach is far and away the most practical approach I’ve heard of that could truly provide cheap, boundless energy in the next 30-50 years. It’s raining soup out there; we just need to build our buckets.
Of course, if you’re looking for Helium, you still want to be mining Uranium, so you may as well keep those existing reactors running for a few more years. But yes, LFTR makes a lot of sense. Kirk Sorensen presented a compelling case for it in a TEDx talk.
When you have a liquid flourine leak, the fire will be truly spectacular.
A “liquid fluorine leak”?? Bwahahahaha!!
I really, really hope that was a typo. I had no idea anyone was planning on running a nuclear reactor at temperatures below ~85 K.
You beat me to it. Pournelle points out that all resource issues can be resolved with energy. Although usually you don’t need transmutation.
The ecologists’ mistake is a matter of confusing using something with using it up. From the standpoint of physics, resources consist of atoms and energy. The atoms aren’t used up at all and the energy we’re using is far less than that in the sunlight hitting the Earth.
You’re neglecting information theory / entropy. To use an example from Cosmos, a species (or a full ecosystem) is like the library at Alexandria. Destroy it, and it is hard to get it back. It would be convenient if DNA constituted the full record of a species, must less an ecosystem, but it doesn’t.
Also, you’re wrong about atoms not getting used up, but that’s less important, unless you are near a whole lot of atoms getting used up at once.
If it’s important to preserve biodiversity… The overwhelming share of biodiversity on this planet is found among bacteria. So why are we worried about spotted owls and snail darters?
We have trouble trying to get rid of Staphylococcus bacteria deliberately because bacteria can evolve faster than anything we can currently throw at them. I doubt if we can do anything worse by accident.
Much of environmentalism is simply eukaryote chauvinism, the idea that the Ecology depends on passenger pigeons instead of on invulnerable bacteria.
As for the second point… Okay. Change it to “the nucleons aren’t used up.”
I wasn’t trying to defend ecologists – I just wanted to make a point about entropy.
The following is fairly half-hearted since I have a soft spot for factories churning out useful products, but I’ll give it a go, from a utilitarian perspective: We are macroscopic lifeforms — studying other macroscopic life designs may teach us useful tricks. The trick that space enthusiasts often think of first is hibernation. Also consider that drug company are scouring the rain forests for useful pharmaceutical compounds. If bacteria alone sufficed, the drug companies wouldn’t bother sending people into the jungle.
Back to entropy: As you say, bacteria evolve quickly but ecosystems become stable and beautiful over long time periods. If we destroy them, other ecosystems will take their place but they’ll very likely be less complex, less stable, and less beautiful. I won’t go on about beauty, but consider complexity and stability: I live in the midwest where the soil is rich and useful crops cover a lot of the landscape. I’m proud of the human race in general and Americans in particular for increasing the productivity of the land: it is pretty well known that in 1900, corn was produced at roughly 25 bushels per acre, now it is 165 bushels per acre. Awesome! But how much of that is subject to a single disease wiping it out? We need to maintain biodiversity as a hedge against disease, at least until we know a lot more biology. Also, it does suck that the monarch butterfly is going extinct around here – my daughter really likes them. Apparently the herbicides which contribute to our awesome farm productivity is also denying the Monarch butterflies the milkweed they need. I’ll get my daughter a microscopic so she can get enthused about microorganisms, but I imagine she’ll still want to see Monarch butterflies too.
however, the relative extractable potential gets ugly.
You need a lot of energy, and some pretty slick technology to drill dirt and make it into
raw elements.
However, a decent sized junkyard makes one heck of a mine, and even small efforts to turn
junk into resources tends to be pretty profitable.
The enviros like to take credit for inventing recycling, but there have been ragpickers and scrap metal dealers around for centuries. Most ancient cultures had pretty well-developed recycling industries dealing in the cut stonework of older cultures – or just of the previous ruler’s self-glorifying monuments. Everything that it made economic sense to recycle was being recycled long before the first Earth Day.
The signal contribution of the environmentalist Left was to mandate recycling of commodites of such low value as not to be worth the energy or labor costs of doing so, rather than sensibly parking such things in landfills. Thus, curbside trash removal, which was still a government service when I was young, has now become a corrupt lefty scheme to enrich politically-connected recycling firms and coerce enormous amounts of industrial stoop labor from the general population for the benefit of said corrupt cronies of Democratic pols everywhere.
As far as ores, minerals, and elements are concerned, there are no actual resource shortages, just imbalances in supply and demand. The business goes to the lowest-cost producers, and demand doesn’t skyrocket overnight, so most of the resources just sit there, waiting.
If we dig about a few meters down, every human on Earth gets:
4 Russian Alpha class attack submarines
1 Nimitz class aircraft carrier, with attached air wing
100+ Boeing 747’s
A gigantic pile of nickel, copper, silver, thorium, uranium, cobalt, tungsten, and barium.
A small pile of gold and platinum.
If you don’t already have a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, a bunch of attack submarines, and a hundred jumbo jets, then no, we’re not running out of resources.
Google “elemental abundances” and do a bit of math on the Earth’s continental area. At present, I think we’ve used the top millimeter of soil.
“I nowadays lean to the view that there are no limits because we can invent new ways of doing more with less.”
Tom Murphy argues the laws of thermodynamics puts a ceiling on how much we can do with less.