The world is fast running out of resources. Oil, fish, agricultural products, various metals, fresh water, etc.
Soooo, do you think technology will allow us to switch to alternatives or extract more from the earth, or will the lifestyle we have grown accustomed to disappear?
Will cornucopian economics take over, and as metals become more and more expensive better ways to extract and recycle them, or use alternatives instead, will pop up? Or will that be too late? With oil, the price of gasoline is going to spike after peak oil, but it will take roughly 2 decades with a crash program to actually transition to alternate fuels, that is my understanding. And that is with a serious crash program, not the programs we have now.
I realize these resources won’t totally disappear, but they may become more and more unaffordable which means human suffering and poverty will increase.
So what are the predictions for life in 2030? Will we have found better ways to extract, recycle and find alternatives for our disappearing resources, or will global poverty and material insecurity increase? When food prices doubled and tripled, it resulted in foot riots all over the world. So even if we have alternatives for food (hydroponics, biotechnology, investing heavily in undeveloped farmland), it may take years for those investments to actually start producing results.
This sounds like a topic about overpopulation to me, and my experience with that around here is that people are going to insist that there is absolutely nothing to worry about, and when you try to continue to have an intellectually inquisitive discussion, they’re going to get angry. I don’t know why it’s such a touchy issue here (it’s got to somehow relate to a political platform that I’m unaware of, is my best guess), but it is.
In my limited understanding of the specific issues you brought up, overfishing (combined with pollution and destruction of habitat) seems to be the most pressing. Once the balance is finally pushed over the precipice, I’m afraid that can F us all a lot quicker than most people realize. People seem to be becoming more aware of it, but the question remains whether it’s too late.
In the early 80’s a book entitled “The Fate of the Earth” by Jonathan Schell (I hope I remembered all these details correctly) came out. It made a pretty convincing argument that we would start running out of natural resources, and the shortage of various resources would force us to use others less efficiently, such that we would systematically deplete more and more kinds of resources more and more rapidly. It would be a sort of chain reaction, accelerating rapidly once these things started interacting. This was going to happen soon, in a few years. I remember thinking it was clear this would happen by around 1990. Of course, it never did. At the moment, the case for impending natural resources disaster in several years seems weaker than it did 25 years ago.
I think depleting resources is an important problem, and unethical considering we deplete them for future generation and, conceivably, for other species that might depend on them in some way. But I don’t think we will run out in such a punctuated way.
I think instead that we may have lifestyle changes, and think we are slowly starting to change our use of petroleum, for example. But we can shift priorities and pay 10X or maybe even 100X for fuel and still mostly live the same way. At 100X for fuel, we allocate a bigger fraction of the budget to hybrid autos and maybe we carpool, but we don’t walk 8 miles to work each day.
Somebody close to me works exclusively for the government in strategic planning as a civilian contractor. They cannot tell me anything about their job (as it requires a top secret clearance), but we have had general conversations about national threats. One of the interesesting things to me is where their priorities are: while energy is a concern, it is a minor one. The really big issues facing the united states in the next 20-50 years are food and water. The really big issues facing the world in the next 20-50 years is food and water.
I would be happy to write more about this (its an interesting topic), but I am leaving and will be offline for the next 4 days…
water is definitely a huge concern, especially in northern china. America is underpopulated and has more natural resources when compared to China so if the resources do crunch in the near future, China will be a good coal mine canary. sustainability and the engineering thereof is a big business in china right now as they look to modernize while not destroying their environment (there are steps being taken in some urban areas, but overall pollution is at a disturbingly high level).
i think the real issue is how are people NOT in wealthy countries going to get their resources and modernize? South America and Africa specifically. I have no doubts that the wealthy here in america, europe, and east asia will be able to cope but to end “poverty” and raise the standards of living in places not meant to sustain highly populated modern societies - are they/how are they going to modernize?
obviously technology will help. it’s helped since the 18th century when malthus was predicting imminent doom and gloom.
Apart maybe from fish, your statement simply isn’t true. The world is not running out of resources. There’s still the same amount of fresh water - and there are huge amounts of that available. There’s plenty of oil and other hydrocarbons out there. Metal can be recycled and iron is very common anyway. As for fish, there are other sources of protein.
Now, there may be insufficient economically available resources for humanity’s growing requirements - too expensive to extract or transport, for instance - but that’s a very different issue.
We don’t “run out” of metal. Iron, gold, silver, titanium, aluminum, and all other metals are elements. They aren’t destroyed or “used up”, just combined with other elements. And as a general rule those combinations can be uncombined. When they say “run out” it’s not like the world will suddenly be out of metal. It means we are using iron to create buildings and ships and whatnot faster than we can mine it out of the ground. And generally those shortages increase their prices making it more cost effective to mine deeper for previously unreachable supplies.
Similar idea with water. The planet isn’t going to run out of water. 3/4 of the world is covered by it. And when you “use” water, it just gets recycled back into the system. Most water, however, is undrinkable as is. So what will happen is that it is going to cost more money and energy to desalinate and pipe water over long distances. The problem is more of an economic and a political one.
Fish, agriculture, timber and other renewable resources are another matter. But they are also the resorces that are most under our control. Technological improvements and good resource management are the key here.
Oil is a unique problem because as far as we know, the supply of oil is finite and using oil does irreversibly change it. And synthetic versions can’t be made cheaply on the scales we use it.
The point is I doubt there will ever be a resource “crunch”. But what happens is that technological innovations that provide more energy and resources allows a greater population to be supported. Which uses more resources and so on. The population always just seems to be just a bit more than what can currently be provided.
For all practical purposes we have an unlimited supply of energy. There are huge oil reserves in the United States alone that are available (but politically held hostage). BP just anounced a huge oil strike in the Gulf of Mexico and I see no reason why additional oil fields will not be found. It’s more a political problem then anything else. Beyond that, we are well on the way to an unlimited source of biodiesel fuel using algae. It’s currently in the $8-$10 range and coming down in production cost. We’ve already tested it as an aviation fuel so it’s being taken seriously. The technology involved substantially reduces the amount of CO2 so it can’t be held hostage like oil. We’re already seeing the beginings of a wave of diesel cars coming into the US so the major car companies are reacting to anticipated future trends.
Resources that are recycleable will continue to be recycled and water will dictate population locations like it always has.
None of this really changes the plight of poor countries because we continue to feed them as if food was real problem. We are making the situation worse by doing this.
I know we don’t technically run out, we just see prices spiral out of control. I said in my original post
“I realize these resources won’t totally disappear, but they may become more and more unaffordable which means human suffering and poverty will increase.”
When I say “run out” I mean supply will not keep up with demand, and as a result costs will spiral and we may not be able to provide everyone with what they want. We won’t run out of fresh water because we can desalinate, but costs will go up because like you said we have to purify and transport the water.
So there will still be a resource crunch in the sense that affordable resources that can keep up with demand may not exist much longer. As I said, food prices have gone up dramatically lately, which means supply might not keep up with demand.
“The price of rice has more than tripled since early 2006, while prices for wheat, corn and soybeans have more than doubled, triggering food riots and threatening to plunge more than 100 million people into deeper hunger and poverty.”
As far as extracting metals that have already been used, I do not know if we have the technology yet to affordably extract all the elements that go into a laptop or TV, then reuse them.
Are there recent developments in this field? The last I heard of it, a couple years ago-- I believe it was on NOVA-- was that in order to grow enough algae to be practical, they’d have to use the entire Colorado river, which would obviously dry up the western United States. Bye bye, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Diego, etc.
So that is 64 million gallons per square mile. We use about 180 billion gallons a year of gasoline and diesel, so about 3,000 square miles of algae farms.
One potential bottleneck is phosphate. Phosphorus is an element (can’t make it out of anything else) that is an indispensable nutrient for crops. Right now the world’s reserves of economically recoverable phosphate are at around 50 years supply. Unless some technological breakthrough makes it feasible to concentrate phosphate from sources of very low concentration.
Algae can be grown in fresh or salt water. If need be we would pump it out of the ocean or grow it on the surface in floating bags. That’s not a technical problem. The technical problem is extracting the oil. That is where all the costs are. The beauty of aglae is that you can feed it C02 off of a coal fired electrical plant so it’s a win/win production and it would use the same distribution nodes and automotive technology today. Virtually nothing changes but we advance into a much lower level of emissions and we become energy independent. All the money flowing into unfriendly nations stays home and is pumped into the economy.
We are. It’s been quietly worked on for decades. Universities work on it, private companies are working on it and governement agencies such as the FAA have already tested it. Until the production price comes down it will be in the development state.
There’s a marketing problem in the US regarding diesels and I thought that image would be smashed with the introduction of the 62 mpg Honda Accord diesel. Alas, they cancelled it.
‘Fish technology’ draws renewable energy from slow water currents | University of Michigan News This is being built in the Detroit River. I believe there are more than one going in. Who would have thought of it a couple years ago. The point is not that this will save us, but that we do not know what the technologies of the future are going to be. How big, how important, who knows.
The current problem: as the graph shows, technology was up to the challenge to meet world wide food demands, until we reach the year 2000 or 2001.
The yields have gone flat while demand continues to rise. The point is that there was little evidence to worry before regarding food, but that has recently changed. The article though points that there is hope that we can make the leaps needed but many changes are needed, not sure if all of them be implemented.
The demand for resources is almost infinite. If energy were free I’d heat the air outside in February so I could have a picnic. There is a demand curve, not a point, and we are now, and always will be, in a situation where “we may not be able to provide everyone with what they want”.
Of all your worries, the only one that concerns me is the fish stock. We have seen that it is possible to virtually wipeout commercial species. Bison used to be so thick on the ground that they were killed just for their pelt. Salmon runs used to be so large that you could back a wagon up to the river and use a pitchfork to toss them in. Without regulation the salmon would be all gone. The Georges Bank has a fraction of the fish it used to hold. Living things do have a “tipping point” where they can disappear. Oil and water do not; they just get more expensive to extract.
Not to be too technical, but isn’t that process called “growing stuff”. You take minerals in low concentration in soils and concentrate them inside plants. If we composte the waste, we get it back.
There is a difference between heating your backyard to have a picnic and living in a world where rice costs $3 a pound and gasoline is $8 a gallon.
My point is, are we reaching a point where human suffering will dramatically increase, innovation will stifle and our standard of living will start going down? So far I have not seen any replies that would make me think that no we will not.
Hopefully as prices go up then methods of extracting, recycling or bypassing limiting natural resources will spring up. However those could take years or decades to go from research projects to mass production.