There’s no question about it: modern civilization is depleting the world’s resources. At the current rate, we will run out of gas, petroleum, and uranium in five decades. We’re cutting down the rain forest much, much faster than it can regrow. Desertification is ridding the world of topsoil. No matter how much we try to conserve, we will eventually simply run out of resources.
What happens then?
Read Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel for one possible answer.
What happens when the sun runs out of fuel? 
Entropy happens. (Hmmmm…that could make a fun bumper sticker.)
We’ll find some elbow room…
Up on the moon!
Elbow room, elbow room. Gotto gotto get some elbow room. It’s the moon or bust. In God we trust. It’s a new land up there!
Schoolhouse Rock has answered all the important questions of our time.
After Asimov, you might get a giggle or two out of this fiction (presented as fact) by (an environmental think tank) The Club of Rome, who in their 1972 book “The Limits to Growth” predicted the world would run out of: [ol][li]Petroleum by 1992, []Copper by 1993, []Lead by 1993, []Gold by 1981, []Mercury by 1985, []Tin by 1987, []Zinc by 1990 and Natural gas by 1993![/ol].[/li]What a gas!
You may also get a kick out of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb.
BTW: Thank you Miss Hart, My 8th Grade Social Studies Teacher for presenting that pablum as fact and scaring the crap out of your whole 1980 class.
The question is “When do we do when we run out of resources?” When it happens is another question, JohnBckWLD. Technology is changing so quickly it’s hard to make a reliable estimate. The Club of Rome made a bunch of poor suppositions, but that says nothing about the whether it’s reasonable to speculate what happens when resources give out.
Eventually, the original, conventional, economic places to get some materials will run out. We’d be ignorant to imagine otherwise. Then what happens:
The world may not be “out” of oil, but the shortage, and the unequal distribution is good enough to bankrupt economies. Having a dribble of material we need may not be “running” out, but if something’s too expensive to use, it might just as well be gone.
One of the deceptive factors (up to this point) has been the price stability of resources over the last 40 years. (Here I’m drawing from Mineral Resources, Economics and the Environment, which includes recycling in its calculations.) Virtually all commodities have stayed constant, given inflation. A few, such as oil, gold, copper, and natural gas have gone up quite a lot.
But in the same book is a table showing how long known mineral reserves will last. (That “known” is very difficult to interpret, due to the huge amounts spent on exploration, in the case of the oil companies, billions, count them, billions.) This table shows 10 mineral reserves giving out in the next 15 years (including gold, lead, silver, and diamond). Within 25 years after that, oil, copper, graphite, tin and cadmium run out. 25 years after that, it’s nickel, natural gas, tungsten and cobalt. There is, you may be glad to hear, more than 100 year’s supply of iron, coal, bauxite and soda ash.
How much are reserves? The answer to that question would be worth millions. There’s just no way to know, for certain. How close to being “used up” does a resource have to be before millions die? If oil is any example, not very close.
The long term solution (meaning, in this case, in our lifetimes) is to stop using material that can’t be recycled.
What happens is eventually you will graduate school, enter the real world, and stop buying into the doom and gloom of the greenie weenies… 
Long before we run out of any particular resource, the economy will shift to accomodate lower price materials.
If the price of oil increased to $500 per barrel over the next twenty years due to diminishing stocks, you can bet we’d all be driving electric cars because they’d be a lot cheaper than gas based vehicles (and the electricity would come from hydro or nuclear power).
Environmental doomsayers always seem to ignore the economic implications of their predictions, acting as if we’ll squeeze the last drop of something out of the ground and then go to war for nothing better to do. For any resource, there are alternatives, and increasing prices due to scarcity will fuel a search for those alternatives. Our society may change greatly in character, but I’ve seen nothing to indicate that resource scarcity will be the trigger for armegeddon.
Do you have cites for each individual resource named? 
You might get a better debate by addressing each resource you state. Besides, it’s possible each resource may have a different “importance” factor, be it on a local and/or global scale, than the wide brush you used.
Then again, you failed to mention fisheries, pollution and global warming, as additional examples. My comment is not to deflate your post but merely illustrate the depletion of resources is not as simple as you imply. All the resources you mentioned will not be exhausted at the same rate, nor at the same time.
You also must take into the political aspects as well. No, I’m not talking Bush v Congress v environmentalists in the USA and similar politcos overseas. What I am talking about are the unforeseen political calamities which may change the entire picture - i.e., a Middle East war which cuts off all/most of the oil to the West, a regional nuclear exchange wiping out a few million and stopping resource depletion there (and creating other resource issues as well), a natural disaster abruptly slowing resource depletion od one kind or another (say a massive earthquate in southern California and all those SUVs no longer in gridlock twice a day wasting precious gasoline), yadda, yadda.
In short, the issue is a bit more complex.
JohnBckWLD wrote:
That’s nothin’. My 10th grade English teacher managed to convince our class that Uri Geller was for real. Whereupon I rushed out and picked up a copy of David St. Clair’s Lessons in Instant ESP and wasted God-knows-how-many man-months of my life trying to “learn” the power of telekinesis.
(2 grades later, my Government teacher managed to sneak an anti-abortion film [“Assignment: Life” was its title] into the regular class curriculum. At least that I was able to resist. But I was still trying to acquire telekinetic powers at the time!)
Ah, another intelligent bunch of posts.
Every time an eco-movement is wrong, detractors say:
See, we told you their prediction was going to be wrong.
Every time an eco-movement is correct, detractors say:
Alternative resources, it may have escaped your notice are MORE EXPENSIVE. When oil reaches $500 a barrel, you won’t be driving ANYTHING, you’ll be sitting at home, hoping the sun will come up soon so you can get warm.
So you kids got scared by your high school teachers? Not enough to do anything about it, obviously. Time travel ahead about 50 years, and you’ll be claiming that “no one told you about it.”
Denial is a wonderful thing.
I’m sure you’ll agree with that!
partly_warmer wrote:
… which is what happens about 9 times out of 10.
and they also say:
Eco-alarmists aren’t poo-pooed just because of short-sightedness or evil corporate land-rapists. They’re also poo-pooed because they cry “wolf!” so damn much.
I got those numbers from a French movie clip found here, actually.
Right. I may have come off a bit simplistic, and the resource question is more complex than I could have ever fit into one post. My point wasn’t meant to be complex. The idea is that sometime in the future, unless some miracle or mass epiphany happens, our destruction of the environment will come back at us.
What will be the first to really become a problem I don’t know, nor can I fully predict the political consequences of it. But politics is becoming increasingly dependent on resources. World War II had a lot to do with oil, and the German’s not having possession of it. The Gulf War was a war over oil. And I think Afghanistan’s strategic position in attaining Central Asia’s oil supplies was a part (but not the whole) of the reason Bush decided to intervene.
But I didn’t want to make this post a debate over international politics; there are plenty of other threads for that. It was intended to be a speculation of the general consequences of the depletion of resources. This is a large, complex problem that needs to be addressed.
They’re more expensive BECAUSE they are alternatives, and not mainstream. If they become the industry standards, prices will drop. When demand increases, supply increases, which means lower per unit prices.
Prices of nearly all commodities have actually dropped, not increased, totally out of line with the doom and gloomers predictions.
The near infantile predictions fail to take into account the free market in a nutshell, plus technological advances. I need to find a source for this – apparently, back in the 19th century, predictions were made for New York which showed the entire city would be blanketed with a 5 foot layer of horse shit by 1950 if then current trends continued. Nobody foresaw the invention of the automobile, which near overnight supplanted horses as a means of transportation.
The point is, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Oil is very important to the world’s economy and our way of life and will continue to do so for a long time – even if alternative modes of powered transportation are found, simply because so many products are derived from it.
Of course, that’s true.
The question is whether the improvements outweigh giving up the material you wanted to use in the first place. In many situations (note that this only has to be true in a few to cause havoc) the cheaper/better material has already been selected. True, any material that’s been in use a long time has been subject to the advantages. But you can’t imagine that a completely competitive alternative to many materials does exist: there are plenty of companies with deep pockets that would love to take away someone else’s business.
Prices have NOT dropped, as my source makes clear.
Also, here’s a quote from the “Canadian National Resources” site: “By October 1993, the inflation-adjusted prices of nickel, copper, zinc and leadwere at all-time lows, but they have recovered quite strongly since then.”
Besides my point is that price is not related to how many decades of known reserves there are, but just the current market. Price says NOTHING about how soon things will run out.
No one can “take them in account,” sometimes there are great opportunities, and sometimes there aren’t. Your complaisancy is based on NOTHING, EVER getting used up. Do you pray to figurines of J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie?
A “free market”? How much economics do you know, anyhow? There’s nothing “free market” about materials a government decides are important to its national interest. And there are plenty of dictators who care nothing about free market economics, in the first place. Do they just conveniently drop out of your perfect world?
Ok, so let me get this straight. You don’t believe statistics, you don’t believe the authority of any expert who doesn’t agree with you, you’re obviously not a geologist or chemist, so you don’t have any personal experience…
Look, there are a few things going on here, as you know.
The idea that we can “predict the future” of resource use out 20 years is new for mankind, and no one’s very good at it, yet. Of course the studies that say “everything’s ok” aren’t going to generate very much interest, but the media, etc. latch on to the ones that predict problems.
Ecology is extremely complicated, and many people on both sides of the fence couldn’t pass the first day of a statistics class to save their lives (maybe that’s an unfortunately apt description). So yes, there are plenty of ignorant people, who have mostly their “gut” reaction to go on. Sometimes “gut” gets me, too. Like driving past miles of clear cut forest completely devastated in Oregon.
Not everybody who’s an ecologist is an alarmist. It’s not a club where everybody’s credentials are checked at the door. Quite a few just put their money into zoos with preservation programs, donate time to nature preserves and national parks, etc.
The problem with not being alarmist is that people with vested interests, just as one example, those with RVs, jet skis, snowmobiles, low-mileage luxury cars, and so on, don’t want to hear ANY BLOODY THING AT ALL negative about their love. (It’s perfect! They bought the best model, at the best price, what else is there to life?) They’ll continue to drive until their air is so unhealthy the government warns people not to go out and exercise! And the next day those suckers are back in their vehicles, again. No argument short of death seems to affect them. I’d be perfectly happy to let evolution take its course, but they’re taking me with them.
For an interesting treatment on the environmental movement read Hard Green by Peter Huber. I can’t say that I agree with a lot of what he says but he does raise some good issues and exposes some obvious fallacies of the standard environmentalist crowd.
As I see it, the biggest problem with the environmentalist movement (and I feel they do have an important role to play) is the over dependence on “prophecy of doom” tactics to get their point across. tracer has it right, their record is abysmal. The shear law of averages dictates that some predictions will come true. In the meantime you have already lost credibility.
On preview, I see that partly_warmer has already addressed a lot of my issues. In the whole we are a very wasteful society, we should do all we can to conserve and be more enviro friendly. It’s just that crying wolf any chance you get ultimately dilutes the message and makes the whole movement suffer.
Threadkiller wrote:
Here’s a favorable review of that book on USA Today’s website:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/columnists/freeman/ncjf57.htm
I see some obvious problems with Huber’s approach, if the above USA Today review is to be taken as an accurate treatment of Hard Green. In the review, the author says:
Huber’s solution? Since it can’t fulfill all the energy needs of New York City without using extra land, we should forget about solar power entirely and use fossil and/or nuclear fuels to supply all the power needs of New York City instead.
It doesn’t seem to occur to him that you could provide for some of the power needs of New York City by putting solar panels on the rooves of its buildings (rooves which currently do nothing), and thus burn less fossil/nuclear fuel to provide for the rest of the City’s power needs. It also doesn’t occur to him that New York City, and Manhattan in particular, is not representative of the rest of the country, as it has very tall buildings with comparatively little rooftop area and thus consumes far more kiloWatts per acre than an area of urban sprawl would.