Why most resources don't run out

http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/why-most-resources-don%27t-run-out.aspx

by troystribling • 12 years ago

48 65 12 years ago

beat4• 12 years ago

Interesting to dovetail that against the recent top article here that we are reaching the end of the antibiotics era. I hope we have a replacement for fossil fuel when the time comes, but I worry about too much "rational optimism". Tragedy of the Commons is a real thing, and Pangloss was sarcasm, not a role model.

jal2784• 12 years ago

There's a seemingly reasonable fallacy embedded in the argument that so far technology has been able to dig us out of the holes that it itself digs: That past performance is indicative of the future. Of course, the past often does predict the future -- yet, we can't bank on it, because there are sometimes qualitative shifts, and exceptions.

The problem with hoping that technology will solve climate change before it happens, is that we're gambling something we can't afford to lose. So, it may well be the case that we do solve the problem -- but what if we don't? There are limits to technology, after all.

To me, the danger in placing excessive faith in technology is that it can bypass our critical thinking. For example, right now our own technology (nuclear weapons, or biological weapons as that technology develops) is the greatest threat to humanity's existence. So while technology is a great thing, it may well be our species undoing rather than its savior -- at least until (if) we survive long enough to colonize other planets or enhance our own morality such that we can handle the responsibility our technology demands.

polemic• 12 years ago

Good analysis. I like to think that it's a bit like investing in a vehicle that may or may not be a ponzi scheme. It's worked so far, but that doesn't mean you bet the house on it.

mikeash8• 12 years ago

This is indeed a problem. If there is an event which causes the extinction of humanity, then by definition we will not find a parallel event in the past to use for prediction. Yet to conclude that humanity will never go extinct is ridiculous. It's only going to happen once.

There's also another problem from the opposite direction. Resources have run out plenty of times. Entire civilizations have collapsed because they could no longer sustain themselves, because they used up something important and couldn't find more or come up with a substitute.

Yes, peak oil now could end up being like peak stone in the stone age, where there's plenty of it and we move on to better things well before we run out.

But peak oil now could also be like peak forest on Easter Island, which resulted in the collapse of civilization there.

I don't see anything in this article beyond naked hope for why peak oil must follow the former path rather than the latter. Yes, the history of resource exhaustion is extremely optimistic if you ignore all the times when it led to disaster, but that doesn't tell me anything.

glenra4• 12 years ago

The Easter Island story told by Jared Diamond in Collapse is arguably a myth. Do you have any other examples?

An alternate view of Easter Island includes these sorts of points:

- Forests on Easter Island were largely killed by rats (an invasive species) and to (productively!) clear land for agriculture, not to make statues.

- Civilization there grew and persisted and thrived even well after the trees were gone due to human cleverness at finding and making new resources. (The Islanders ate fish and rats and eggs and chickens at that time)

- When their civilization eventually collapsed it was because they were pushed. It was due to war and diseases brought by outside invaders who sold a lot of the locals into slavery.

Mark Lynas sums up the situation here: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myth-of-easter-islands-...

Jared Diamond, sticking to his guns, responds to Mark: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myths-of-easter-island-...

Lipo and Hunt in turn respond to Jared's response filling in lots more detail: http://www.evobeach.com/2011/10/diamond-attempts-to-defend-m...

Leading quote: "Diamond would have readers believe that the majority of archeologists who have studied Easter Island support his thesis. It is simply not true. The new evidence that we and other serious scholars have provided over the past decade not only contradicts the old story that Diamond has so heavily invested in, but has led to a new consensus among the majority of scholars around our work."

UPDATE: Okay, now THIS is my favorite thing I found revisiting this old argument. Diamond thinks the statues were moved on logs but Lipo thinks they were "walked" into place upright...and here is a video showing how one does that - walks a multi-ton statue upright using only people and ropes:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/easter-island/walk...

jerf• 12 years ago

If there is a subtle fallacy embedded in the idea that innovation will always save us, there's a blatant fallacy in the idea that we're inevitably doomed because we're absolutely guaranteed to continue on our current course with no changes until we consume all the resources that we are consuming in the current static snapshot of the world. Looking back over the past couple of hundred years of us overcoming challenge after challenge, and drawing the conclusion that it is absolutely certain that can't happen more, is simply an absurd position to take on a rational basis.

If you do not wish to completely flip to the "everything's going to be peachy keen!" side, hey, fine. I'm not even sure anyone's really advocating that. But trying to salvage the panicky pure-ecologist view is in my mind frankly irrational. The one guarantee in life is change, and projecting out the present conditions into the indefinite future as a static precondition is always wrong. Mind you, it may be wrong because the nuclear exchange of 2021 wipes out 98% of humanity and not because the Happy Fun Solar Company solved all world energy problems in 2025, but still, change is inevitable. And what's going forth into the future is not mindless automata who passively experience challenges and fall over dead at a feather's push... what's going forward into the future are several billion human beings, which for all their faults, are still the cleverest things in the Universe we know about.

By the way, trying to mitigate the fact we've overcome challenges by pointing out that there are still challenges in the world is just another way to try to dodge dealing with the fact that we have overcome challenges. I absolutely, positively guarantee you that if we survive another 20 years, that there will be even more challenges. I forsee no day coming where the human race can just sit back and declare total victory over challenges.

mikeash8• 12 years ago

Who is saying that we're inevitably doomed because we're guaranteed to continue on our current course?

The doomsayers are almost universally saying, we need to change course to avoid catastrophe. That's the complete opposite of being guaranteed to stay on course.

genofon• 12 years ago

Looking back over the past couple of hundred years of us overcoming challenge after challenge, and drawing the conclusion that it is absolutely certain that can't happen more, is simply an absurd position to take on a rational basis.

Looking a bit further there were society completely destroyed by themself (for example Easter Island http://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/News-Events/Latest-News/News-...)

It's good to have both forces, a conservative and a progressive, to maintain equilibrium, it's never a good idea to put all the eggs in one basket

Edit: update link about Easter Island

orthecreedence4• 12 years ago

there's a blatant fallacy in the idea that we're inevitably doomed because we're absolutely guaranteed to continue on our current course with no changes until we consume all the resources that we are consuming in the current static snapshot of the world

Perhaps, but it's already getting to the point of "too little, too late" as far as convincing people climate change exists, not to mention our current infrastructure is heavily invested in ignoring climate change. So continuing on our current course is bad, yes, but deviating at this point will only delay the inevitable. There are a number of cascading changes set in motion already.

And while I don't think humanity will be extincted by climate change, we'll certainly get our "hair mussed." As in, large amounts of drought/flood displacing millions of people into already crowded areas that don't have the infrastructure to support the influx...meaning plagues, food/water shortages, etc.

And to say, "technology will find a way to fix it!" is the bigger fallacy. We should be ready for a nice big shitstorm 50-100 years from now that no amount of scientists or computers can fix. After all, as much as we like to think of ourselves as little gods, we're really just apes with shiny toys. We've made it this far, but when you think about it, we've been through one ice age, a handful of plagues, and zero mass-extinctions. Not a big list. We're a blip on the geological radar, and we can disappear as fast as we came. We need to remember this.

jal2784• 12 years ago

I agree that humanity has a strong track record of overcoming challenges, and of course, that's a great thing! And I'm not saying that climate change will be something we'll be unable to overcome. However, it's unwise to bet the planet on an uncertainty: Let's just be a little cautious when we are talking about something with potentially devastating consequences.

I agree that predicting based on a static extension of the present may be limiting -- but prediction in general is a pretty tough game, and we should not put too much faith in any extrapolations into the distant future; meaning that there is much uncertainty in the future, and we should acknowledge that we can't know what will happen; and thus we should try to minimize risk if possible when dealing with singular resources (like our planet as a whole).

My main point is that technological optimism should not be an excuse for failing to ask inconvenient questions (that may demand opposing the current inertia of technology-driven capitalism): Are we negatively impacting the environment in a way that may undermine our grandchildren's quality of life? What happens as technology automates away a large percentage of cognitive jobs and displaces those workers? Is the current trend of increasingly powerful technology and relative moral stagnation likely to lead to our species' extinction?

mempko• 12 years ago

It also ignores massive collapses of civilizations throughout history because of ecological collapse. In the past they were localized, but we are becoming more connected with each other.

waps• 12 years ago

The problem with this argument is that it is both an argument for and against climate change, and so both for and against taking action on climate change.

Humans have a history of (locally) causing massive pollution and other various disasters, like removing topsoil and destroying agriculture. Mining. Extermination of non-tiny animals in a large area. The list goes on. Every time this turned out not to be a problem. Will it now ? If so it will be the first time.

But of course, climate change is not based on physical evidence, nor first principles. It is based on statistical trend analysis. Climate change only has basic explanations of mechanisms of change in the athmosphere, they cannot physically model a warming planet from first principles, only by extrapolating past observations into the future can predictions be made.

Of course the truth is that both facts are chaotic. In other words, every event in human history is a first, and every change in the athmosphere is a first. For either domain, any particular event is without precedent, and will never happen the same way again. This does not exclude, of course, that one observes patterns. Temperature has been rising, and there are many historically analogous periods, but none that are quite the same. So will the same thing happen ?

Unfortunately we know the mathematical theory underpinning this. The answer is sure to disappoint all involved : we don't know, and we don't know the chances either. And no algorithm can ever be used to arrive at a correct answer (note the problem is NOT that we don't know, it's that we can't ever know [1]). It is impossible. It is extremely obvious in human history. When we move past oil (and we will, in the next decade or two), there will be a key ingredient that wasn't there before that completely determines the outcome. It will be a first, that's for sure. Either we find a new energy source that economically blows oil out of the water, or it will be the first long-term sustained drop in global economic activity due to running out of energy. It may also be something different entirely (e.g. WWIII). Maybe thorium reactors start taking the world by storm. Nobody can tell you, with any amount of certainty, what this grand event will be, but it is a surety that it will come.

What isn't entirely obvious is that the same is true for climate. Whatever happens, it will be a first, and there will be some event, some factor, that completely determines the outcome, but we can't see it just yet. Firstly, there is of course the potential for large external factors that are obviously so large as to be much more powerful than anything happening on the earth surface itself. Think volcanic activity or a comet, but likely there are 100 such events that could happen we don't even know about. Both events can both raise and drop the temperature by ridiculous amounts, far outstripping what we could ever do with co2. Other things could happen. Suddenly the sea floor starts leaking methane on a large scale, like what happens in any earthquake, but it is sustained. There's certainly enough methane down there to make human solar forcing look like a cow fart. Maybe we're wrong about cloud cover (still a possibility) and the situation simply self-corrects past a certain threshold, something that no statistical model of the past would ever have been able to uncover. Maybe we do get a single world government and actually stand a chance of fixing the situation. Maybe Saudi Arabia and Iran start doing what they've been threatening eachother with for 100 years now and Iran nukes the oil fields there. Maybe it doesn't correct at all, solar forcing happens, and animal life becomes very difficult for a few centuries/millenia.

But what is an absolute certainty, as you say, is that the situation will not continue as it's been progressing so far. That is pretty much the only impossibility.

Note that the obvious defense of climate theory here, that it results from deterministic actions, and so is not random/chaotic at all, is both correct and completely beside the point. Random systems are not chaotic nor vice versa. Deterministic systems that exhibit 3 properties are chaotic. None of them involves randomness. Neither chaotic nor random systems are predictable [1].

As to whether chaos theory really applies to climate theory the following can be said to summarize things : for 150+ years, the study of chaos theory and the study of climate were one and the same field of study. This has changed, but not for good reasons. There is a longstanding argument that long-term effect dampen the medium term unpredictability, but there is no proof for this, in fact there is plenty of contradicting evidence.

And the last defence of climate theory is that climate theory only studies averages. They admit that short-term change might be chaotic, but long-term averages aren't. They certainly don't look it, after all. This flies in the face of the central insight of statistics : the central limit theorem (it basically states that any variable you study must be convergent, that statistics doesn't work on divergent series. And it doesn't, that can be easily tested). This argument is incompatible with statistics on a theoretical level. Therefore it does not matter if this argument is true or not. If this argument is true, then there is no correct way to calculate even an average. If it is false, then you simply can't correctly average certain variables (including a lot of climate variables). The "false" seems to me the sane option, but it doesn't even matter which you pick.

Lots of scientific fields of study have these "existential" problems. That doesn't mean they have no value, just that they are fundamentally limited in a few ways.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

facepalm4• 12 years ago

- Catastrophes happened in the past that killed lots of people. Technology did not always save our ass

- Read "Collapse"

- What about resources like housing? It sounds to me as if housing in SF has run out? Build lots of skyscrapers everywhere? Then what about sunlight in your apartment?

Kerrick• 12 years ago

What about resources like housing? It sounds to me as if housing in SF has run out? Build lots of skyscrapers everywhere? Then what about sunlight in your apartment?

I think in a tradeoff of "There's literally no more room for anybody to live," and "I have to go outside to get sunlight," I'd choose the latter.

facepalm4• 12 years ago

Sure, but I don't think it really qualifies as "see, science solves every problem". And what if there are houses everywhere? There will be time slots for rooftops. After a certain size of the houses, there will not be enough rooftops for everyone to get sunshine.

manicdee2• 12 years ago

I'll take option 3: encourage smaller families and lower fertility rates.

thunderbong• 12 years ago

Finally. Someone who makes sane and balanced points rather than take a binary position.

mikeash8• 12 years ago

This is about as unbalanced and binary as you can possibly get. That alone doesn't make it wrong, but this article is so far from the middle ground that you'd need a telescope to see it.

damon_c• 12 years ago

"this article is so far from the middle ground that you'd need a telescope to see it."

This assumes one is standing on the middle ground. ;)

beat4• 12 years ago

Ugh, I hate the "balanced" argument for "middle ground".

If one person says 2 + 2 = 4 and another says 2 + 2 = 6, the truth is NOT that 2 + 2 = 5.

Abraln• 12 years ago

At least he included multiple positive stories of government interference. If the free market says something nessesary is not worth it, tip the scales to MAKE it worth it. Tax hikes on polluters and non renewables and tax cuts for going free would go a LONG way. Too bad it won't ever happen.

manicdee2• 12 years ago

"If we run out of phosphorous reserves, we can just dredge the rivers of the world to get it back!"

Yup, that sounds sane to me.

"If we run out of easily accessible gas and oil reserves, we can just destroy the arable farmland of the world to find more!"

Yup, perfectly sane.

"If we run out of fresh water, we can just recycle sewage and run solar-powered desalination plants."

Says the economist who has never looked into the power required to desalinate sea water at the scale required to support a city.

Next he'll be saying, "oh, we can just power the desalination plants and hydroponic sheds with nuclear power" (which just means we'll run out of fissile material faster).

No mention of 'sustainable production' in his screed at all.

There is absolutely nothing sane about that essay. You can't live on money. You need food and water, and for the sake of food security you can't rely on power supplies other than the Sun to grow that food and bring you that water. A nation dependent on its power grid for food and water is ripe for terrorism, industrial sabotage or corporate oligarchy.

mkempe3• 12 years ago

Two fundamental arguments of the thesis that we will not "run out" of natural resources for productive purpose have been made eloquently in:

- The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon [1] --the human mind has limitless potential to select and pursue the use of materials; and

- Capitalism by George Reisman [2] -- the phenomenon of price responds to actual supply and demand, and prompts profit-seekers to develop and switch production accordingly.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691003815

[2] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0084RU67S, see Part One, Chapter 3

coldtea3• 12 years ago

The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon [1] --the human mind has limitless potential to select and pursue the use of materials

Only if those materials exist in the actual world first. So not that limitless after all. (And that's if we indeed accept that the mind's potential is "limitless", which is non-scientific mumbo jumbo).

Capitalism by George Reisman [2] -- the phenomenon of price responds to actual supply and demand, and prompts profit-seekers to develop and switch production accordingly.

Says nothing about resources "not running out" -- just about distribution and demand of them, when they are available. A tribe of capitalists in a desert without water would still die of first.

mkempe3• 12 years ago

Have you read either or both of these books? you seem to be arguing with straw men.

facepalm4• 12 years ago

So how come cancer isn't eliminated yet? Many people still die.

mkempe3• 12 years ago

Non sequitur?

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

Just because things have worked out in the past doesn't mean they always will. Despair might actually be the correct response: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-th...

ebbv• 12 years ago

This view is so childish it is only taken seriously by those who already agree with it.

Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered

But not before many types of whale were nearly wiped out, and may yet go extinct.

or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along,

What? Fertilizers have been known for centuries. Modern fertilizers are hardly a panacea. They come with costs of their own.

or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls.

This has nothing to do with any of the other arguments, and demand for copper is still high enough that people are stripping it out of vacant buildings via breaking and entering. Risking injury, jail time and even death.

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.

It's pretty obvious if you look objectively at the data that "much harm" has already been done.

This blog post is the epitome of biased garbage.

restless• 12 years ago

"Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered

But not before many types of whale were nearly wiped out, and may yet go extinct.

or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along"

The old correlation!=cause problem...

batmansbelt• 12 years ago

Not to mention that modern fertilizer is petro-chemical and it is very much limited by the finiteness of those resources.

lasermike0262• 12 years ago

Must man destroy everything?

lavamantis2• 12 years ago

yes. http://www.npr.org/2014/02/12/275885377/in-the-worlds-sixth-...

lasermike0262• 12 years ago

No. Our species must make the small evolutionary step to change general behavior or die. I am willing to make every ethical change to make that possible and I think I would like to live in that world.

vsbuffalo• 12 years ago

But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed. They will run out one day, but only in the sense that you will run out of Atlantic Ocean one day if you take a rowboat west out of a harbor in Ireland.

As an economist, how can the author not see that the hidden environmental costs are growing? As markets demand natural gas within a cost range while resources are limited, the solution becomes to pass this cost off on the environment. The environment doesn't have a powerful advocacy and can't fight back.

I am disappointed that economists buy these models so readily without doing real accounting as to all costs. I think this is a problem in modern economics — we can easily measure monetary costs through accounting and prices, but other costs are hard to measure so the model treats them as residuals. Then, they run predictions with their models that completely ignore environmental costs. Don't argue markets don't have a cost on the environment when you've failed to include environmental costs in your models.

beat4• 12 years ago

The author's view is terribly shortsighted. "I'm going to run out of money next month" versus "I'm going to run out of money next year". Same outcome.

His fallacy, and it's a common one, is thinking that because the problem may be postponed past his own lifetime, that it doesn't matter. What about a hundred years from now? A thousand? Ten thousand?

I for one don't relish leaving my descendants a future in which environmental equilibrium is reached by starving or shooting a few billion surplus people.

znull• 12 years ago

You want to settle a dispute between economists and ecologists? Ask a physicist: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/about-this-blog/

beat4• 12 years ago

Or ask a cartoon physicist on xkcd.

http://xkcd.com/793/

danford• 12 years ago

So in short: The free market will save us.

marknutter• 12 years ago

It always has.

orthecreedence4• 12 years ago

The world climate is collapsing (hypothetical scenario).

The proponents of free market say:

"The market will adapt to fix the problems causing climate change!"

What really happens:

"I've built a mask that lets you breath the Earth's new poisonous atmosphere!"

"Well my mask lets you breath twice as much air per minute!!"

"My mask does all this !but! shows an interactive map of the next sulfuric acid rain storm so you can find your way to our nearest BioShelter2000. Buy now, and you get a month BioShelter pass, letting you stay for free up to 4 hours per day, including use of the bathroom!"

mikeash8• 12 years ago

Not really. Catastrophes have happened before and they will happen again.

sharemywin2• 12 years ago

I think if you combine vertical farms with nuclear fusion the skies the limit.

sharemywin2• 12 years ago

I think if you combine vertical farms with nuclear fusion the skies the limit. As long as we can get fusion to work. otherwise we better hope solar and battery prices drop enough to leave coal in the dust.

whythehellnot• 12 years ago

Our environment can't handle the damage by the time we get fusion to be useful for us or solar/battery become efficient/cost effective. We need to be thinking for today, as in right friggen now. Everyone I have ever seen or heard talk about this issue is always proposing the solution won't be too far away because of X.

NO IDIOT. We have the technology to stop all this right bloody now! One of which is so overlooked it's offensive. Latest Gen Nuclear fission should be replacing coal plants en-mass. The fact that it's not is so disheartening that I just want every coal lobbyist to choke on his own toxic waste...

coldtea3• 12 years ago

"Rational opimist"? Sounds rather dellusional to me, one of those guys that made a religion out of science and/or technology.

"But here's a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again."

Yeah, just like Bertrand Russel's inductivist (and rational optimist) turkey:

The turkey found that, on his first morning at the turkey farm, he was fed at 9 a.m. Being a good inductivist turkey he did not jump to conclusions. He waited until he collected a large number of observations that he was fed at 9 a.m. and made these observations under a wide range of circumstances, on Wednesdays, on Thursdays, on cold days, on warm days. Each day he added another observation statement to his list. Finally he was satisfied that he had collected a number of observation statements to inductively infer that “I am always fed at 9 a.m.”.

However on the morning of Christmas eve he was not fed but instead had his throat cut.

hxrts• 12 years ago

Time lag is a critical issue that needs to be accounted for. If we assume that innovation will mediate the worst effects of global warming then we neglect the possibility that forcing conditions created today may have consequences that manifest themselves over the next 20 or 50 years. Global warming is not like any problem that humanity has ever had to confront and it's dangerous to wave away the scale and complexity of the problem as something innovation will eventually rectify.

orthecreedence4• 12 years ago

Yes, but the free market will invent time machines and we can go back 50 years and warn ourselves. The free market will save us.

Why most resources don't run out

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