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Are we running out of resources?

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Re: Are we running out of resources?

#61

Post by kkfx »

Few notes:

- today "needed resources" might be different, at least partially, than tomorrow ones, as they are partially different than yesterday, but such differences are very hard to estimate since we know the past, but we can't really know the future, planning cover development with already or almost already known things, future scientific discovering are not predictable;

- resource estimate is done and sold as a "tangible number" however I'm not sure how approximate it can be. So saying on earth we can source X gazillion tons of a certain mineral for me is "probably near truth but until extracted we can't really know" and that's similar for agriculture production vs climate change;

- another issue is the meaning of "renewable" and "circular", wood is renewable at a certain rate of usage, recyclable one ore two time for different usage in a more or less significant percentage, Al is formally 100% renewable ad infinitum, glass the same, but the scale and the cost of such supply chains are not immediately measurable on scale etc.

Long story short my own personal opinion is: for actual technology, actual number of people, actual human development, we probably have significant resource issues witch does not means "we run out" in the broad sense, but we still are in a very bad situation. Planning moves to evolve is mandatory, but must be done at both scientific and social level, certainly not at economical level as is done today.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#62

Post by jotm »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #6
namecheapTA wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never just run out of something one day. Demand goes up, supply goes down, and as you realize that, prices go up. As prices go up, alternatives are used and adjustments are made. As an example, I've heard people say that if Russia shut off the gas supply, Europe would freeze to death. Maybe that's true at first glance, but it ignores that gas is used because it is the best option. But it's not like freezing to de…

Tell that to the inhabitants of Easter Island.

I mean, yeah, it perfectly describes humanity - we'll die on this planet while knowing there are unlimited resources outside of it.

But it was a small island and they couldn't even read/write.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#63

Post by jotm »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #35
jacknews wrote: post #24

I don't think we should strive to remake the galaxy for human comfort and desires, but instead strive to remake ourselves, to be better suited to the environments we inhabit.

I disagree. I think we should definitely try to remake not just our galaxy but the universe for our comfort and desires

Maybe start with a country lol

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#64

Post by southerntofu »

pfdietz wrote: post #55
wiz21c wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is not "if" but "when". Sure renewables are becoming bigger every day but will we have enough of them before getting into climate catastrophe ? That's the question...

We're almost surely going to have substantial warming. But it's a stretch to go from that to doom. We may end up seeing albedo modification as a stopgap.

Beyond the warming, the consequences of climate change are very real. Hurricanes that used to be the feat of a decade are now an over-yearly occurrence.

Beyond climate change, the consequences of pollution are very real. Many water sources can't be drunk anymore, and the agro industry is killing bees/insects (necessary for vegetal life) on a wide scale and depleting the soil of its water/nutrients turning it slowly into a desert.

Extinction is far off, but "doom" is a very likely outcome at this point given that no government is doing anything, besides advocating for "green growth" which is the opposite of what ecologists have been preaching for decades (green degrowth).

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#65

Post by jotm »

jacknews wrote: post #40
wly_cdgr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I think we should definitely try to remake not just our galaxy but the universe for our comfort and desires

If we have the power to transform the universe, we have the power to transform ourselves. Why would we make the universe ape our biologically-inspired needs and desires, when we could transcend them and become so much more?

Why not? It's a huge place.

Why don't you transcend and stop using electricity? Needs and desires.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#66

Post by pfdietz »

IHLayman wrote: post #58
pfdietz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> 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. I don’t agree with all of the article’s premises but this is not wrong. Population is still increasing, even if pop…

Population is continuing to grow, but that's because of demographic momentum as population age structure relaxes toward equilibrium (with fewer young people and more older people, particularly older people past their reproductive years.)

The long term problem will be population decline as the total fertility rate drops well below replacement.

Energy use is going up, because lesser developed countries are heading toward first world rates of energy use. But that plateaus or even starts to decline (due to efficiency) also.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#67

Post by simonh »

verisimi wrote: post #33
simonh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the wealth of billionaires is not cash, it’s locked up in their ownership of the companies they control. Elon Musk for example has 99% of his wealth in shares in Tesla, SpaceX etc. The only way to take that off him is to take those companies away and give control of them to someone else. It’s the same for Warren Buffett, the vast majority of his wealth is in ownership and control via BH. He sells some of that…

> Most of the wealth of billionaires is not cash, it’s locked up in their ownership of the companies they control. Elon Musk for example has 99% of his wealth in shares in Tesla, SpaceX etc. Yes. But its possible to allocate a value to these assets. The point I'm making is that it if we are trying to find a solution to these problems, the easiest one would be to take the billions in wealth - more wealth that can be s…

>Yes. But its possible to allocate a value to these assets.

And do what with it? A value is just a number. What would you do with the assets and the value?

I'm not being facetious, I'm really curious how you imagine this working and right now I honestly don't have any idea. Who would control these companies now that they're not owned by their founders and current owners? How would ownership and control work? Who would run the economy and how? I'm imagining millions (a $10m company isn't actually all that big) of founders, investors and CEOs retiring to the country with $10m retirement funds. Viva la Revolution! Who takes over?

What are the world's poor going to do with a handful of shares in e.g. Microsoft, Tesla and Berkshire Hathaway each? probably you don't imagine it working that way, but you won't say how you do imagine it working.

You say 2 options, but I'm not clear what you think the other one is. We have many possible options.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#68

Post by chii »

beaconstudios wrote: post #42
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…

> we have poor people in other countries doing it instead.

and they become less poor afterwards. Eventually, they will no longer accept the low wages as their own wealth increases. i think this is a good outcome - all parties benefit from the transaction.

This will take a long time to play out, and in the mean time, the research and development of tech would progress enough to find a solution to the energy and resource problem - increasing efficiency, or finding new sources to extract (my money is on asteroids).

But the way it will play out, means that there's always a gradient of relative "conditions" - from the lowest, to the highest. As long as this gradient is always shifting up - aka, everyone's condition is improving - i think it is acceptable.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#69

Post by slothtrop »

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…

Population is projected to level out, so it's a moot point. We're facing a crucial need specifically for curbing emissions in the short-run, but we're unlikely to too rapidly exploit resources by virtue that growth in demand will stall and efficiency will continue to improve. Incidentally that can be a catalyst for change in the way society functions. The significant choice facing us is determining the path we take towards post-scarcity and nil GDP growth, because it's happening one way or another.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#70

Post by chii »

jotm wrote: post #62
marginalia_nu wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to the inhabitants of Easter Island.

I mean, yeah, it perfectly describes humanity - we'll die on this planet while knowing there are unlimited resources outside of it. But it was a small island and they couldn't even read/write.

but if the island originally had enough resources to produce a seafaring vessel, but due to the mismanagement, they failed to save and invest enough, and finally squandered so much that there's not enough left to build one, then they're stuck on the island until everything runs out.

So do we have, today, enough resources on earth extract resources away from the island called earth? What if we run out of petroleum before we built enough rockets and launch systems and fuel?

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