The problem with that is that everyone needs water. The only way to avoid paying high Los Angeles water rates would be to move elsewhere, but the people who’d be hit hardest would be the ones who can’t afford to move across the country.
With rare earths the price the Chinese can extort is strictly a short term thing until the US can reopen our mines. We also have unexploited rare earth deposits in places like the Lemhi Pass that could mined. If electric cars take off, there may be an issue with Neodymium, but there are less efficient alternatives if the price goes too high.
Supply and demand isn’t magic. A demand, no matter how high it is, does not guarantee a supply will exist to meet that demand.
[QUOTE=Chronos]
The problem with that is that everyone needs water. The only way to avoid paying high Los Angeles water rates would be to move elsewhere, but the people who’d be hit hardest would be the ones who can’t afford to move across the country.
[/QUOTE]
Basically, the people who could move would in that case…and that would relieve the pressure on the resource. Either that, or California would have to find yet more money to pour into either extending their aqueduct and canal system further out or build those desalinization plants. It will be the cost of water that will drive whatever happens.
(BTW, I think with the rains California has gotten this winter there is less pressure right this minute on their system. I’m not sure if the chronic problem with Lake Mead and LV have similar been relieved, as I’m not sure how much rain or snow they have gotten this winter into the area that supplies the city)
-XT
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
Supply and demand isn’t magic. A demand, no matter how high it is, does not guarantee a supply will exist to meet that demand.
[/QUOTE]
Never said it was magic. If there is a demand for something and there is absolutely no supply for it, then that’s going to be a problem, no doubt. However, if chocolate is too cheap to be worth while to produce, then rising demand (and price) is going to change that equation, unless people want to do without it. If rising cost of helium and a rising demand for it happens, then the practice of not bothering to gather the stuff will probably change. If water becomes increasingly scarce then demand for it is going to open up new water supplies or new ways to get the resource…or those cities are simply going to die and people will move elsewhere. If people want tequila then a way will be found to produce it, and farmers won’t burn their crops and plant corn instead.
It’s not magic. And there are no guarantees. By the same token, however, if there is a demand for something, then people who want to make that crass money stuff will probably find a way to supply it, if possible.
-XT
And that’s just it. As with oil, it’s not a matter of absolute shortages, but of the prices that settle out.
Tequila and chocolate are basically supply/demand issues. Both will become more expensive but I doubt we’ll “run out” of them. Helium is worrisome but I don’t know what the actual depletion/known reserves ratio is. The problem with phosphorous is that we’re running out of cheap, high-concentration reserves (see peak production upthread); whether this is a crisis or if we’ll just have to be more resourceful about recycling will have to be seen. Medical isotopes is a no-brainer: a temporary shortage caused by a supplier shutting down. Water is a biggy; we know we’re depleting aquifers and once they’re gone the agriculture based on exploiting them probably won’t be cost-effective anymore. And of the renewable supply, there’s the potential for it to be ruined by contamination.
Does it make sense to do water desalination when we are letting 50 trillion gallons of water from the Mississippi flow into the Gulf of Mexico every year? It would probably cost 100 of billions of dollars to dam the Mississippi and build canals to areas that can use the water, but it doesn’t seem impossible.
There is also a lot of valuable crops that could be produced from algae using salt or brackish water instead of water pumped out of the aquifer. It isn’t that far from the Gulf of California to Arizona. Of course, it probably makes more sense to actually put the algae farms in the ocean and combine them with fish farms.
Exactly. Water isn’t worth much right now.
There are more than trace amounts of helium in the atmosphere IIRC. If you are producing liquid oxygen/nitrogen from the air (which are quite common and used in significant quantities) you are also “mining” CO2, argon, xenon, radon, krypton, neon, helium, and some other stuff from the atmosphere.
How much more expensive Helium derived from the atmosphere would be compared to other sources I don’t know. But, given that at least in low amounts it would be produced as a byproduct of other industrial processes indicates to me that at least some amounts could be produced for tolerable costs.
Or, in other words, it might be more costly, but I don’t think we would ever reach OMG! we can’t get any useable amounts at any price! levels. Unless of course we come up with some reason to use massive quantities of the stuff…
Holland is a major waster of phosphorus. We are the worlds second largest exporter of agriculural products and we’re a country the size of Massachusetts. We import so much raw bulk animal food and export so much cheap meat with our industrial farming, that our country is overrun with manure. Phosphorus is wasted here into the environment and a major polluter of ground water.
Industrial farming has much to answer for. :mad:
They missed another one: Lithium
I was wondering about lithium. An astronomy professor told me once that all (or nearly all) of the lithium in existence was formed during the big bang. Pretty cool. Pretty much the ultimate non-renewable resource, though.
Well…pretty much everything was formed in the big bang or subsequent actions, so it’s not all that meaningful to point at lithium. All of the heavy elements were, IIRC, formed in the hearts of supernovas, so we won’t be getting any more in our neck of the woods any time soon…we gots what we gots and we aint gettin no mores. 
-XT
I’ve made a lottery metaphor before in arguments like this. Suppose a guy wins $20,000,000 in the lottery and he starts spending a million dollars a year. His family and friends tell him he shouldn’t spend so much - he’s young and he’ll spend all his money in twenty years and then he’ll be broke. He should spend less now and invest some of his money so he’ll have enough to last him the rest of his life.
The guy says, “No, I really enjoy my lifestyle and I don’t want to give it up. And it costs a million dollars a year so that’s what I’m going to spend.”
People ask him, “But what will you do when you run out of lottery money?”
He says, “I told you I won’t give up my lifestyle. It’s easy now because I have all that lottery money. But when that’s gone I’ll be motivated to figure out some other way to get the million dollars I want to spend each year.”
That may be what we’re doing. We have an economy that is based on some resources which are finite. But we just assume that when we run low on those finite resources some alternative will turn up because we’ll need it.
But the universe doesn’t owe us anything. It might instead be that when we run low of some finite resource, they’re won’t be some handy replacement. We’ll just live the good life while we’ve got it and then we’ll be broke.
Well, the thing is that if he’s got that $20 million and he invests it and only get’s a 10% return (my own investments are actually doing better than that and have been for the last year), he could have that million dollar a year lifestyle and still have the money last most or all of his lifetime.
Other than that it’s a good story, but I’m not sure how relevant it is to the discussion, to be honest. I’m not saying that to be snide or snarky or whatever…I really don’t see the relevance. I know that there is a theme on this board about knocking magical technology solutions (it usually comes up in the Peak Oil™ threads) where someone will bring some gloom and doom into the discussion and someone (like me) will say something along the lines of ‘well, market solutions and technology will most likely solve the problems, especially considering that most of the technology involved already exists and is simply not economical right now’.
In every one of the examples in the linked article, technology already exists to ‘fix’ the various ‘problem’…and, in fact, technology already exists to ‘fix’ the lithium ‘problem’ as well (we already know how to extract it from sea water, for instance, if nothing else). It won’t take any magic…and, market dynamic will come into play (distorted by the government, as with the water situation) as the real price of those items grows. We aren’t just going to raise our collective hands and starve to death, or die from thirst, or whatever…we’re kind of beyond that today. This isn’t to say that the problem might not be grave, and the solution expensive, because it might be…or we might have some other problem that isn’t related to any of these predictions (it might turn out to be on par with the dire predictions that we are rapidly running out of whale oil and the end is near!), and be something entirely different. But we’ve survived shortages before, and we’ll survive them in the future as well.
-XT
“Market solutions” are not a way out of peak oil. The market response–dramatically more expensive transportation for people and goods–is exactly what’s going to make it hurt so much.
I don’t know if there actually was a peak-whale-oil crisis but you’re making a false assumption even if there was: we survived a crisis, therefore, all crises are survivable. I’m sure you can see the logical fallacy there.
And keep in mind I’m not talking about the end of civilization or the extinction of the human race. I’m just saying we shouldn’t assume that progress only runs in one direction and the future will always be better than the past. That have been numerous historical examples of societies that have collapsed - sometimes things do get worse. To use my prior example, just because you’re rich now doesn’t mean you’ll be as rich or richer for the rest of your life. You can be rich today and middle-class or poor in ten years. Societies are the same - just because the 20th century was better than the 19th and the 19th century was better than the 18th doesn’t mean that the 22nd century will be better than the 21st and the 23rd will be better than the 22nd. Maybe we happen to be living at the apogee of prosperity.
But one thing I’m confident of - nothing ever got solved by complacency. It’s foolish of us to act like a solution is guaranteed so we don’t have to bother worrying about the problem.
I don’t think this is true. I read on another site that the US mines only contain usable quantities of some rare earths, not all of them. There’s essential rare earths that don’t really exist outside of China.