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Are we running out of resources?

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Re: Are we running out of resources?

#41

Post by gwd »

standardUser wrote: post #32

"Should any particular resource begin to run short, our creativity will bring into being the knowledge of how to replace that resource from either some other source or by using some other means to accomplish what that resource did." The track record on this appears to be 100%. Are there any examples of a resource humanity has depleted and not effectively replaced or otherwise made irrelevant?

A good real-life parable is to read what happened on Easter Island [1]. In short, humans found a completely isolated island that could support a population of around 5000. Over a few centuries they damaged the environment (cut down all the trees, overfished the local waters, over-farmed the land, etc) to the point where it could only support a population of about 600; at which point their civilization descended into anarchy and cannibalism until "the market adjusted" the population to be equal to the available food.

Ten years before the collapse of Easter Island, someone could have made the same argument: When we cut down all the trees so we couldn't hunt dolphins any more, we replaced that with clams. When the clams were gone, we began hunting birds. When the soil became so poor that we couldn't grow one crop, we replaced it with another one. Our track record is 100%; there's no reason to believe we can't go on replacing one resource with another forever.

And then one day they couldn't.

Or listen to Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

"Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests,' as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief." [2]

So far we've been able to replace wood with coal, coal with oil, and so on; so far there hasn't been anything critical to civilization that we've run out of. But it would be foolish to ignore the possibility that something like that could happen.

[1] http://employees.oneonta.edu/allenth/Class-Readings-Password...

[2] As quoted in https://www.businessinsider.com/nassim-talebs-black-swan-tha...

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#42

Post by beaconstudios »

rob74 wrote: post #8

> Everyone should be living much more like the most wealthy people in the most wealthy nations are living now. It should be considered a moral abomination that billions of people are not living in multiple story homes with robotic assistants to control their lights, security, doors, air-conditioning and the temperature of their pools. As with the rest of the article, I'm really not sure if this is irony or hubris? If…

Not only that, but the conditions in the West are contingent on the work done in the rest of the world. There's a reason we're not all working in sweatshops making all the products we are constantly using, and it's because we have poor people in other countries doing it instead. For their living standards to rise, ours will have to lower (though the economy is not a zero sum game of course, and technology/automation can reduce the necessary labour).

I don't think it's malicious or anything - I just think that this perspective is a little ignorant of how the world really works.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#43

Post by fennecfoxen »

volatilecarbon wrote: post #28
verisimi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we should petition the governance structure to create a maximum threshold of 10 million dollars per person. Sure, billionares will lose much of their wealth, and will try to hide in off shore funds (even more so than they do at present) but we can legislate for this and de-anonymise the wealth. We would then collapse those off shore legal structures, allocate the wealth to individuals, and apply the 10m limit…

I'd much rather see public investment in projects that will make the world livable once energy and resources are no longer cheap. Rail transportation in particular. Every car a person is not required to own to live in America would save them ~$10,000 a year in costs today. When cars and gas are more expensive, they'll save even more. Those savings might even save them from losing their home or going hungry if things…

> Rail transportation in particular.

ahem bus rapid transit

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#44

Post by Someone »

standardUser wrote: post #32

"Should any particular resource begin to run short, our creativity will bring into being the knowledge of how to replace that resource from either some other source or by using some other means to accomplish what that resource did." The track record on this appears to be 100%. Are there any examples of a resource humanity has depleted and not effectively replaced or otherwise made irrelevant?

> a resource humanity has depleted and not effectively replaced or otherwise made irrelevant?

If we were to have depleted something we need without finding a replacement, humans would be extinct by now, or at least on a path towards it.

We’re alive and, on average, extremely safe (life expectancy is higher than ever, despite obesity, opioids, etc)

So, if we assume that we’re better of than ever in history, I don’t think there can be any way the answer to that could be “yes”.

Of course, one can claim that assumption doesn’t hold. for some, having all the modern stuff may not make up for not being able to see dodos, passenger pigeons or huge herds of bison.

Even a resolute “no” answer doesn’t say much, though. Past performance is no guarantee for future results.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#45

Post by beaconstudios »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #17
rob74 wrote: post #8

> Everyone should be living much more like the most wealthy people in the most wealthy nations are living now. It should be considered a moral abomination that billions of people are not living in multiple story homes with robotic assistants to control their lights, security, doors, air-conditioning and the temperature of their pools. As with the rest of the article, I'm really not sure if this is irony or hubris? If…

The multistory rather than merely spacious homes and 'pool' with the implication of a private pool, which are both very space inefficient make this seem foolish to me, but I see no issue with billions of people living in cities with easy access to pools, parks, schooling, jobs, and comfortable safe, warm/cool housing and living standards that are science fiction to their immediate ancestors.

This is one of the reasons we need to be expanding the space for collective resources - it's not likely we can sustain a world where everyone on earth lives in a single family detached home in the suburbs with a car, private heated pool, private air conditioning etc that the author advocates for. However, if we're a little more clever with how we allocate and share our resources, we can scale up standards of living in a sustainable way - urban transit and a fleet of automated electric taxis, community pools, zero energy building techniques and mixed developments, and so on. This just requires that we head back in the direction of sharing things (social democracy) and away from economic individualism (neoliberalism).

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#46

Post by ytjohn »

ge96 wrote: post #18
0des wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's with the weird username?

Pretty cool don't know the term about the numbers and name eg. i18n

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words. Software Engineers are prone to this. @lunasorcery has a talk on this subject.

https://twitter.com/lunasorcery/status/1278984875190689798

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#47

Post by TuringTest »

verisimi wrote: post #12

I don't think we are running out of resources. I think we are infinitely resourceful and capable of re-imagining and re-engineering our environment - in a good way! But the problem we face is vested interests and the institutions they have captured. In the name of protecting us and the environment, the governance structure creates artificial rules on behalf of their stakeholders (corporations) that stops innovation a…

> I think we are infinitely resourceful and capable of re-imagining and re-engineering our environment - in a good way!

> But the problem we face is vested interests and the institutions they have captured.

The second sentence contradicts the first one.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#48

Post by pfdietz »

volatilecarbon wrote: post #13

There were a lot of words here to simply fall back on the argument that innovation will solve every problem and do so before there is significant suffering. I agree that life will always go on, but this idea that consumption and quality of life can do nothing but rise when it is so dependent on the limited cheap energy and resources that we only learned to exploit a century ago is insanity to me. Our ever increasing…

What he is pointing out is the long history of doomsaying being wrong, because it implicitly depends on the assumption that technology has reached its peak and cannot further improve.

To get a real doomsaying argument, you have to base it not on details of current technology, but on hard physical limits that no technological improvement can evade. And it's really tough to do that. The population limit for Earth based on pure thermodynamics is somewhere around 1 trillion people.

> Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked.

This appears to be wrong. Population growth is inexorably declining, and with renewables charging hard energy prices are going to be declining, not increasing.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#50

Post by lm28469 »

standardUser wrote: post #32

"Should any particular resource begin to run short, our creativity will bring into being the knowledge of how to replace that resource from either some other source or by using some other means to accomplish what that resource did." The track record on this appears to be 100%. Are there any examples of a resource humanity has depleted and not effectively replaced or otherwise made irrelevant?

> The track record on this appears to be 100%.

Keep in mind that until about 200 years ago we didn't consume anything even close to the scale of what we're doing now.

So far we basically replaced everything with petrol derived products (whale oil, coal, natural fibers, fertiliser, insecticide, &c.) and good luck replacing that, virtually anything you have in direct line of sight contains petroleum products. The fact that we did it in the past at some lower scaler doesn't really tell us anything about the future.

I always found the "fuck it we'll figure it out later (when I'm dead)" argument to be extremely questionable. Burning your bed to stay warm once your sofa is done burning doesn't really sound like a smart plan, but it seems to be the one we're adopting

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