Why most resources don't run out

Must man destroy everything?

> But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed. They will run out one day, but only in the sense that you will run out of Atlantic Ocean one day if you take a rowboat west out of a harbor in Ireland.

As an economist, how can the author not see that the hidden environmental costs are growing? As markets demand natural gas within a cost range while resources are limited, the solution becomes to pass this cost off on the environment. The environment doesn't have a powerful advocacy and can't fight back.

I am disappointed that economists buy these models so readily without doing real accounting as to all costs. I think this is a problem in modern economics — we can easily measure monetary costs through accounting and prices, but other costs are hard to measure so the model treats them as residuals. Then, they run predictions with their models that completely ignore environmental costs. Don't argue markets don't have a cost on the environment when you've failed to include environmental costs in your models.

You want to settle a dispute between economists and ecologists? Ask a physicist: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/about-this-blog/

If there is a subtle fallacy embedded in the idea that innovation will always save us, there's a blatant fallacy in the idea that we're inevitably doomed because we're absolutely guaranteed to continue on our current course with no changes until we consume all the resources that we are consuming in the current static snapshot of the world. Looking back over the past couple of hundred years of us overcoming challenge after challenge, and drawing the conclusion that it is absolutely certain that can't happen more, is simply an absurd position to take on a rational basis.

If you do not wish to completely flip to the "everything's going to be peachy keen!" side, hey, fine. I'm not even sure anyone's really advocating that. But trying to salvage the panicky pure-ecologist view is in my mind frankly irrational. The one guarantee in life is change, and projecting out the present conditions into the indefinite future as a static precondition is always wrong. Mind you, it may be wrong because the nuclear exchange of 2021 wipes out 98% of humanity and not because the Happy Fun Solar Company solved all world energy problems in 2025, but still, change is inevitable. And what's going forth into the future is not mindless automata who passively experience challenges and fall over dead at a feather's push... what's going forward into the future are several billion human beings, which for all their faults, are still the cleverest things in the Universe we know about.

By the way, trying to mitigate the fact we've overcome challenges by pointing out that there are still challenges in the world is just another way to try to dodge dealing with the fact that we have overcome challenges. I absolutely, positively guarantee you that if we survive another 20 years, that there will be even more challenges. I forsee no day coming where the human race can just sit back and declare total victory over challenges.

"Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered

But not before many types of whale were nearly wiped out, and may yet go extinct.

> or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along"

The old correlation!=cause problem...