Exponential Growth is a magical thing. The doubling time of something growing at a constant rate is approximately 70 divided by that rate. For example, something growing at a 10% annual rate will roughly double in size every 7 years. I don't doubt the potential of human ideas, but unless the rate of growth in natural resource consumption goes to zero (or becomes negative), we will at best defer depletion. While the author points out some novel ideas, he doesn't show the math to prove these ideas will reverse the growth in consumption. Until that’s shown, we are at best just buying time.
This is a historically ignorant argument. It's unlikely we'll actually run short of any of these metals. The more likely scenario is that if and when we do start to exhaust the most easily mined sources prices will start to rise, spurring investment in new extraction technologies and exploitation of previously uneconomical sources. Increasing production and amortization of R&D costs will then lead to lower prices in the future. This has happened innumerable times with innumerable resources throughout history.
Which is, indeed, the conclusion of the linked article as well.
Unless we stop consuming a finite resource we will eventually run out, by definition. Your argument simply demonstrates how rising prices will lead to extracting 'harder to get' resources. When something is harder to get that means it's scarce, which is the opposite of abundant. In other words, it means we are running out.
"Unless we stop consuming a finite resource we will eventually run out, by definition."
Timescales matter here. If we're going to run out of a "finite" resource in 10 billion years vs. 1,000 years or 10 years it makes all the difference in the actions you take.
Also, when something is "harder to get" it may mean merely that we haven't developed the technology to extract it yet. Aluminum used to be more precious than Gold because it was "harder to get" than Gold, though it was not scarce. And today Aluminum metal is far from scarce and far from expensive.
It is estimated that about 10 million hectares a year is lost (the size of the state of Indiana), 30% of the arable land in
the last 40 years. 1mm of topsoil lost takes about 20 years to
replace. The United States is losing soil 10 times faster -- and China and India are losing soil 30 to 40 times faster -- than the natural replenishment rate.
Not to be rude but I don't think you are comprehending the scale of the problem. Where would the compost come from? A rough calculation (10 million ha, assume a thin 80 mm layer of topsoil is lost, 1 mm of soil over 1 ha is 13 tons) estimates that 10 billion tonnes of compost would be needed per year to replace the lost organic matter.
It's a feedback system since good land produces lots of organic matter. Once eroded away, it's extremely difficult to restore. I have a hard time figuring out how we could avoid serious troubles in this area in the not too distant future. Some years ago there was a big push in North American to improve farm practices (stop burning straw, reduction or elimination of tillage, etc). That helped a lot but developing countries have not or cannot adopt such practices.
I'm not sure we should turn this thread into a farming lesson but I'm happy to explain. ;-) Burning straw causes a lot of nutrients to end up in the atmosphere (see http://www.topcropmanager.com/index.php?option=com_content&#...). It really is horrible practice but old habits die hard. It also reduces soil organic matter and the surface "trash" (broken up straw and chaff), making the top soil much more likely to be eroded by wind and rain.
In the 1930's drought (the dirty thirties, the Dust Bowl) soil drifted in the wind like snow. North America had a worse drought in the late 1980's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Drought_of_1988) but erosion was not really a problem due to much improved farming practices. Crop yield during the late 1980's drought were also much higher than in the 1930's because the new farming practice was much better at preserving soil moisture. That said, it was still not a fun time to be a farmer.
Despite regular evidence to the contrary going back for generations, so many are ready to fall in to the trap that advancement and innovation is done. If materials, goods, and skill markets are reasonably free and fair, the price signals alone will drive others to innovate and develop alternatives in resource use, resource access/extraction, or resource reduction through the use of other materials or technologies. As long as the rewards for innovation remain, alternatives are likely to be found and developed.
You know, not every problem is solvable by creating another startup. :-)
In particular, it takes a bit more than the spirit of innovation to move the developed world from a depleting energy source to a more renewable energy source.
For example, it's not like oil is going to disappear overnight. When gas prices get up to 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 dollars a gallon... at some point, people are definitely going to start buying electric cars. Same goes for trucks, ships, everything else that uses oil. But innovation to make alternatives available isn't going to happen until market forces make it profitable.
For pretty much any location in the world outside of perhaps France an "electric" car is, in most cases, a coal powered car. There is far too much coal in the ground for it to run out in the near future, market rates alone aren't going to get rid of coal power plants.
> There is far too much coal in the ground for it to run out in the near future
And "640K should be enough for anyone," right? The idea that something will never 'run out' is usually predicated on the assumption that consumption levels will remain the same (or at least only increase linearly rather than exponentially).
Peak [insert metal here] isn't directly comparable to peak oil/coal/combustible for the obvious reason that when the former is used up and discarded, it can be reclaimed, while the latter is gone forever. Obviously you can still hit limitations, such as when demand is greater than the entire supply on earth, but that at least puts the problem further out, buying more time for innovation and reducing demand for less valuable things that also require those resources.
The problem with the peak hydrocarbon argument is that there is more than enough of some variety of hydrocarbons in the ground to satisfy a world population 10 billion people all consuming hydrocarbons at 1st world levels for hundreds of years. The peak hydrocarbon argument relies on a chain of hypothesis, none of which have been backed up by evidence. Firstly, there must be no discoveries of new reserves. Secondly, there must be no advances in technologies in extraction or refinement. Thirdly, there must be no advances in technologies to convert different hydrocarbon sources into others (e.g. manufacturing gasoline from coal), worse than that there must be no adoption of known hydrocarbon conversion technologies (coal gasification is a decades old technology).
Anyone who's looked at the numbers for reserves of coal, tar sands, methane clathrates, etc. is unlikely to take peak hydrocarbon arguments seriously, there's just too much of the stuff. Ultimately the peak oil argument comes back to a visceral hatred of petroleum and a wish to see a world without it, but wishes aren't reality.
Ultimately the peak oil argument comes back to a visceral hatred of petroleum and a wish to see a world without it, but wishes aren't reality.
I don't think this is true, and your argument ignores how expensive many of the technologies you cite are, like coal gassification, which has been available for decades but isn't used because of the cost. The question isn't only about reserves, but about how expensive those reserves are to access (and what kinds of environmental damage access will cause).
And oil prices have, in real terms, gone steadily upwards through a boom and bust cycle: prices rise stratospherically, then crash, then find a new trading point higher than the previous trading point. For more on that, see Christopher Steiner's $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline will Change Our Lives for the Better: http://jseliger.com/2009/08/21/20-per-gallon . Note that I don't believe the provocative claim in the title, but he provides a lot of useful historical data.
And this argument mostly ignores the environmental cost of oil, both in terms of extraction and in terms of consumption. And in terms of the massive wealthy transfers from the West to charming places like Saudi Arabia that do a great job of churning out people who become terrorists and ideologies that are repressive. If the price of oil goes up—and it almost certainly will—the latter dynamic will only get stronger.
People who cite peak oil aren't doing it because they have "a visceral hated of petroleum," especially if visceral refers to inward feelings rather than the intellect: they have rational concerns about the world in which we live. Those concerns might be misguided, but they might not be, and time will, as usual, be the judge.
Let's talk about peakers' "mistakes":
> Firstly, there must be no discoveries of new reserves.
Wrong, all it takes is that the demand grows above the discoveries rate. If I remember correctly, demand to discoveries ratio was about 4:1 in the last decade. (and demand is to go even higher as emergent countries create middle classes that aspire to follow the American dream)
> Secondly, there must be no advances in technologies in extraction or refinement.
That is irrelevant. Efficiencies can only buy you more time. Every grade school kid knows fossil fuels are non renewable resources. We could debate whether the Peak Oil is one year, or one decade or one century away, but this is something that will eventually happen.
> Thirdly, there must be no advances in technologies to convert different hydrocarbon sources into others.
This is frankly foolish! It takes energy to transform materials from one "format" to another, and it takes serious energy to do that at an industrial scale. Specially, if you want to take low concentrated energy sources and make then highly concentrated, you will waste most of it away! (while screwing the environment on unprecedented scales) There is a good reason the Nazis tried an all-in and attacked Russia. They could not afford to keep converting coal into synthetic oil for much longer!
> Anyone who's looked at the numbers for reserves of coal, tar sands...
One thing that has to be said about this, is that the good stuff is already gone. Clearly, there is plenty of cheap, dirty, low yield fossil fuels around. But the sweet crude, the one that yielded 100:1 returns on energy invested, was burned during the economic expansion of the 20th century.
This is not to say that we are doomed, and that we are back to the dark ages (when I see the stupidity around in Facebook, I sometimes think we are indeed, but it clearly has nothing to do with peak oil). The catch is that we need to recognize that our whole civilization is built over a non renewable resource, and we have to use whatever we have left of it in an strategic way (which I think may last for the 21st century, give or take). It would be nice to make the jump now that we have still some capacity for retooling, than later on when we have less so.
Seems that a number of these alternatives are unfeasible (given current tech) since net energy figures are negative ie it takes more than 1 barrel of oil to produce a single barrel. Of course we're banking on technology solving these issues which it has done 'til now.
There's only one planet Earth, finite in size - and therefore a finite amount of natural resources exist within it. Once we've split all the uranium and washed all the phosphorus into the ocean, that's it - you can't think up more Zinc, Rubidium or Lithium - once it's gone, it's gone.
I'm sure we could do vastly more recycling, use alternatives for some things, improve efficiency, develop magical new technologies, etc, etc... but almost no-one I've spoken to about this appreciates just how terrifyingly rapidly we're approaching these limits. If we run out of available mine-able Zinc & Copper in 30 years - which is quite possible - what then? Do we have enough time to switch to coping strategies? Will that be a smooth ride? It seems to me that the front of the train has already hit the buffers, but we've still got our foot on the gas pedal, back here in the cab.
Most of the useful mineral resources on Earth are only available in vanishingly tiny quantities elsewhere in the solar system. We currently do almost no recycling of anything, compared to our consumption. The human population is huge, growing in number, affluence and resource usage per capita. We're on course to run out of the minerals required to run our economy & infrastructure within most of our lifetimes.
We are sitting on a huge ball of matter. And with enough energy--which we can get from the sun for another 5 billion years or so--we can recycle almost anything.
Of course coping may not be easy in the first place.
It's not really the long term future that I find alarming, it's the near-term transitions. It seems like globally we're finally bumping up against a load of fixed environmental, resource and population buffers almost all at once. Bumpy road ahead, possibly.
The problem is obtaining enough energy per cubic metre-second, so to speak--over the next 5 billion years, the sun will provide the earth with enough power to do just about anything we'd like to do today. But the reason we don't recycle rare earth metals is because it takes a lot of concentrated energy that we'd rather use for other things.
This problem will only become worse as concentrated energy sources are used up, and we move on to more diffuse sources with lower EROEIs, but expect to have the same surplusses we had in the 1990s.
According to "Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air" Thorium will last a while. A few hundred years should be possible. That should be plenty of time to develop nuclear fusion.
Hmmm. Fusion. Even if sustainable ignition is made to work, and a perfectly functioning fusion reactor can be built - it's still completely unknown if it can be used as a useful power station:
Anyone interested in fusion power really ought to read that article. The main thrust of the article is: a) even if you build the reactor, how do you capture the energy - which is mostly emitted in the form of neutrons - and b) where are you going to get the tritium from. Currently the answer to both questions is 'don't know'.
“Is it realistic to predict that knowledge accumulation is so powerful as to outweigh the physical limits of physical capital services and the limited substitution possibilities for natural resources?”
Yes, unless we figure out the knowledge required to synthesize these elements, recapture them, or develop substitutes.
Knowledge has a habit of disrupting what otherwise looks like a zero-sum game.
It seems natural that humans have always reproduced until they ran into some limiting factor. No matter how much we conserve, we will just have more babies. There is an out though. Research suggests that educated woman have less babies. http://www.eubios.info/EJ124/ej124i.htm . Just imagine a life where no one had to worry about limited resources because there are a lot less people on earth. _That_ would be a utopia.
The point of the article is that limited resources are countered by human innovation.
And human innovation is driven by population. In a small town, there may not be enough people interested in computers to even form a club; in a big city, you can find enough interested, talented people to form a business many times over. The explosion in wealth generated by large populations is not something to be discarded lightly.
That rule, to reproduce until you reach a limiting factor (food, money, whatever) applied until the introduction of birth control. Today, we see that in places with good access to birth control people end up being quite conservative about reproducing, trending to replacement rates or lower.
Actually, that change took place well before the introduction of reliable birth control. See "A Farewell To Alms" for an account of the transition from resource-limited birth rates to the modern world: http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princet...
First is lost to space second is actually destroyed. Most other elements can be recycled.
Arguably genetic/linguistic diversity might also count. Because the rate of creation of new species and languages is slower than the rate of their destruction.
And finally total useful energy supply of the universe.
Plutonium is not a natural resource, it's manufactured in nuclear reactors.
Also, as it turns out operation of nuclear reactors generates Helium (an alpha particle is a Helium nucleus). Realistically we're not running out of Helium, there are lots of sources for it.
Uranium 235 / 238 supply's are finite so Plutonium is finite. I used it as an example because of it's decay rate forcing the issue also, using depleted uranium in ammunition is "sustainable" even if there are limits on it's use as a fuel. More specifically Plutonium-238 has a half-life of 88 years and emits alpha particles. It is a heat source in radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which are used to power some spacecraft.
Anyway, Man made production of Helium is no where near our current usage levels. Granted, if the world total energy supply was generated by fusion the numbers would be closer.
Energy density by mass (MJ/kg) Deuterium-tritium fusion = 337,000,000 MJ /kg, total worldwide energy consumption was 474 exajoules (474×10^18 J) = 1,406,528.19 kilograms / extraction efficiency.
I had hoped for something more forceful. Helium and plutonium are quite obscure and we can do without.
You are probably right about genetic and linguistic diversity. Though we can also do with less, if necessary.
I am not sure about the useful energy supply of the universe. I suspect its true, but we probably do not know whether the universe at large behave like a thermodynamically closed system.
I guess at some point mining our solar system will become technologically and economically feasible. Maybe waiting for and 'roping in' a passing Asteroid would also work - aren't those things chock full of useful elements?
