We have no issue with finite resources. We have plenty of energy and raw materials for everything we want for a long time.
The challenge is working out how to access those resources in ways that don’t harm our lives. That is a technically possible challenge, but the problem is that it is much more efficient in the short term to harvest resources in a destructive manner. Without some sort of collective action, the destructive manner simply outcompetes the sustainable methods.
Agreed about the fact that collective action will be the solution.
But about resources it is true that we can harvest them in a less destructive manner, will that be enough? Or do we also need to harvest less of them?
The gap we need to bridge is to harvest in such a less destructive manner that 1) they can regenerate themselves at the same rate as we harvest them, making our civilisation actually sustainable 2) they don't harm us directly indeed.
Can we bridge that gap by harvesting in a less destructive manner?
1) How is the phosphorus - vital for our current food system - that we harvest in mines concentrated for us during billions of years going to regenerate? Same for oil, gas, rare metals, all the silicon and metal that we disperse in our devices etc etc going to regenerate themselves? Should we bet on our ability to figure that out in the next 30-50 years?
2) so far the rate at which we harm ourselves due to the amount of garbage we throw at nature (i.e. everything we make, build and reject) has only increased with progress. Should we bet we are going to reverse that just with technology in the next 30-50 years?
If we lose the bet, the consequences are never seen in history.... I'd rather bet on more reliable methods to survive...
Which resource is really limited? Raw materials are rarely destroyed, only converted to other things... if you have enough energy, you can reuse them... so energy is the limiting factor, and there is PLENTY of energy to harvest.
1) Energy is the limiting factor IF we decide to do different things than we have done so far. So far what we have done with energy is mainly deplete and destroy things. In other words: we are very clumsy in the way we control matter, we cause tremendous side effects with our actions that are going to end up swallowing us back into the abyss if we don't change.
2) Energy being the limiting factor is in itself a huge problem, given the amount of energy your problem requires: the amount of energy required to get the original quality raw materials back from an iPhone is orders of magnitude bigger than the one that was needed to extract them from nature in the first place. It seems irrational to bet on this as a means for getting to a sustainable model in the short term (30-50 years).
The challenge is working out how to access those resources in ways that don’t harm our lives. That is a technically possible challenge, but the problem is that it is much more efficient in the short term to harvest resources in a destructive manner. Without some sort of collective action, the destructive manner simply outcompetes the sustainable methods.