Limitations on resources have, in past, proven to be fairly meaningless, and there’s no particular reason to believe this will change going forward.
As far as I can tell, this argument seems to be the same as “technology has improved before, letting us overcome resource limitations, and there’s no particular reason to believe that the new innovations will stop coming”.
But that sounds much more suspect. There have been cultures that collapsed due to resource limitations before, and the current trend of very fast growth in our ability to extract more resources or replace them with more easily extractable ones has only been going on for some hundreds of years. “We will always be able to come up with the kinds of innovations that will save us” is a very strong claim, implying that observed cases of diminishing returns in various extraction techniques (e.g. taking advantage of tar sands requires a much larger energy investment and is much less efficient than traditional sources of oil, AFAIK) don’t matter since we’ll always be able to switch something completely different. There don’t seem to be any strong theoretical arguments in support of that, as far as I can tell—only the observation that we’ve happened to manage it of late.
It’s a somewhat weaker claim. Society isn’t really dependant on any single resource—oil is the closest we come, and even oil is only really essential in aviation and certain chemical processes(and it can be synthesized for that). My claim is closer to “No essential combination of resources will run out before replacement technology is available”. Still strong, admittedly, but weaker.
That said, I will freely agree that we’re going to take a financial hit as certain supplies run low. Oil will likely never again be as cheap as it was 20 years ago, because the extraction of our reserve oil supplies is so much more complex and expensive. It won’t be pleasant. But our society has a technological mindset, huge diversification, and a larger base of wealth than all of humanity before living memory combined. I think we’ll do better than Easter Island did.
And yes, there’s no theoretical reason it has to be true. But the accumulated evidence that it generally is is pretty strong. How many of the catastrophes predicted in recent centuries have actually come to pass, if society has had 5+ years to prepare? Peak oil, the population bomb, nuclear war, Y2K, expansionist Germans(twice!), the collapse of the Internet, and on and on. All of those were perfectly real concerns, and had the potential to be devastating if left unchecked. But we saw them coming, took steps to deal with it, and beat back all of them, many so thoroughly that nobody even noticed that they’d been and gone.
As far as I can tell, this argument seems to be the same as “technology has improved before, letting us overcome resource limitations, and there’s no particular reason to believe that the new innovations will stop coming”.
But that sounds much more suspect. There have been cultures that collapsed due to resource limitations before, and the current trend of very fast growth in our ability to extract more resources or replace them with more easily extractable ones has only been going on for some hundreds of years. “We will always be able to come up with the kinds of innovations that will save us” is a very strong claim, implying that observed cases of diminishing returns in various extraction techniques (e.g. taking advantage of tar sands requires a much larger energy investment and is much less efficient than traditional sources of oil, AFAIK) don’t matter since we’ll always be able to switch something completely different. There don’t seem to be any strong theoretical arguments in support of that, as far as I can tell—only the observation that we’ve happened to manage it of late.
It’s a somewhat weaker claim. Society isn’t really dependant on any single resource—oil is the closest we come, and even oil is only really essential in aviation and certain chemical processes(and it can be synthesized for that). My claim is closer to “No essential combination of resources will run out before replacement technology is available”. Still strong, admittedly, but weaker.
That said, I will freely agree that we’re going to take a financial hit as certain supplies run low. Oil will likely never again be as cheap as it was 20 years ago, because the extraction of our reserve oil supplies is so much more complex and expensive. It won’t be pleasant. But our society has a technological mindset, huge diversification, and a larger base of wealth than all of humanity before living memory combined. I think we’ll do better than Easter Island did.
And yes, there’s no theoretical reason it has to be true. But the accumulated evidence that it generally is is pretty strong. How many of the catastrophes predicted in recent centuries have actually come to pass, if society has had 5+ years to prepare? Peak oil, the population bomb, nuclear war, Y2K, expansionist Germans(twice!), the collapse of the Internet, and on and on. All of those were perfectly real concerns, and had the potential to be devastating if left unchecked. But we saw them coming, took steps to deal with it, and beat back all of them, many so thoroughly that nobody even noticed that they’d been and gone.