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Unaccustomed as we are to seeing good sense about the world’s resources come from the media, we sat up upon reading BBC publish something that suggests we will not run out of anything.
Of all the world’s materials, which one will “run out” first? The more we consume as a society, the more we hear about how vital ores and minerals are dwindling, so it seems logical to assume that a few may be about to disappear.
Yet that may be entirely the wrong way of looking at the problem. According to natural resources experts, many of the materials we rely upon in modern life won’t “run out” at all. Unfortunately, the scenario they paint about what will happen instead in the near future is hardly rosy either.
Some of our most cherished devices – smartphones, computers and medical equipment, for instance – rely on a rich list of elemental ingredients. Mobile phones alone contain a whopping 60 to 64 elements. “Many of these metals are present in only minute amounts, a milligramme or less,” says Armin Reller, a chemist and the chair of resource strategy at AugsburgUniversity in Germany. “But they are very important for the function of the device.”
This includes things like copper, aluminum and iron, but also less well-known materials, like the “rare earth elements”, what the Japanese refer to as “the seeds of technology”.
The latter class of materials has come under particular scrutiny because they’re a vital ingredient in smartphones, hybrid cars, wind turbines, computers and more. China – which produces around 90% of the world’s rare earth metals – claims that its mines might run dry in just 15-20 years. Likewise, if demand continues for indium, some say it will be gone in about 10 years; platinum in 15 years; and silver in 20 years. Looking farther into the future, other sources claim that things like aluminum might run dry in about 80 years.
Other studies indicate that rhodium, followed by gold, platinum and tellurium, are some of the rarest elements in terms of their percentage in the planet’s crust and their importance to society.
As startling as these figures sound, however, the complete loss of silver, platinum, aluminum or any other mineral resource will likely never come to pass, according to Thomas Graedel, director of the Center for Industrial Ecology at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. We have never completely run out of a natural resource, he says, and we almost certainly never will. …
The above from BBC brought to mind the famous wager between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich. We turn to John Tierney writing in the NY Times Magazine about the end of the 10 year wager. This article was first published Dec. 2, 1990. Yes, Pickerhead has a long memory.
In 1980 an ecologist and an economist chose a refreshingly unacademic way to resolve their differences. They bet $1,000. Specifically, the bet was over the future price of five metals, but at stake was much more — a view of the planet’s ultimate limits, a vision of humanity’s destiny. It was a bet between the Cassandra and the Dr. Pangloss of our era.
They lead two intellectual schools — sometimes called the Malthusians and the Cornucopians, sometimes simply the doomsters and the boomsters — that use the latest in computer-generated graphs and foundation-generated funds to debate whether the world is getting better or going to the dogs. The argument has generally been as fruitless as it is old, since the two sides never seem to be looking at the same part of the world at the same time. Dr. Pangloss sees farm silos brimming with record harvests; Cassandra sees topsoil eroding and pesticide seeping into ground water. Dr. Pangloss sees people living longer; Cassandra sees rain forests being decimated. But in 1980 these opponents managed to agree on one way to chart and test the global future. They promised to abide by the results exactly 10 years later — in October 1990 — and to pay up out of their own pockets.
The bettors, who have never met in all the years they have been excoriating each other, are both 58-year-old professors who grew up in the Newark suburbs. The ecologist, Paul R. Ehrlich, has been one of the world’s better-known scientists since publishing “The Population Bomb” in 1968. More than three million copies were sold, and he became perhaps the only author ever interviewed for an hour on “The Tonight Show.” When he is not teaching at StanfordUniversity or studying butterflies in the Rockies, Ehrlich can generally be found on a plane on his way to give a lecture, collect an award or appear in an occasional spot on the “Today” show. This summer he won a five-year MacArthur Foundation grant for $345,000, and in September he went to Stockholm to share half of the $240,000 Crafoord Prize, the ecologist’s version of the Nobel. His many personal successes haven’t changed his position in the debate over humanity’s fate. He is the pessimist.
The economist, Julian L. Simon of the University of Maryland, often speaks of himself as an outcast, which isn’t quite true. His books carry jacket blurbs from Nobel laureate economists, and his views have helped shape policy in Washington for the past decade. But Simon has certainly never enjoyed Ehrlich’s academic success or popular appeal. On the first Earth Day in 1970, while Ehrlich was in the national news helping to launch the environmental movement, Simon sat in a college auditorium listening as a zoologist, to great applause, denounced him as a reactionary whose work “lacks scholarship or substance.” Simon took revenge, first by throwing a drink in his critic’s face at a faculty party and then by becoming the scourge of the environmental movement. When he unveiled his happy vision of beneficent technology and human progress in Science magazine in 1980, it attracted one of the largest batches of angry letters in the journal’s history. …
… Simon’s fiercest battle has been against Paul Ehrlich’s idea that the world has too many people. The two have never debated directly — Ehrlich has always refused, saying that Simon is a “fringe character” — but they have lambasted each other in scholarly journal articles with titles like “An Economist in Wonderland” and “Paul Ehrlich Saying It Is So Doesn’t Make It So.” Simon acknowledges that rising population causes short-term problems, because it means more children to feed and raise. But he maintains that there are long-term benefits when those children become productive, resourceful adults. He has supported making abortion and family-planning services available to women to give them more freedom, but he has vehemently opposed programs that tell people how many children to have. He attacked Ehrlich for suggesting that governments should consider using coercion to limit family size and for endorsing the startling idea that the United States should consider cutting off food aid to countries that refuse to control population growth.
Among academics, Simon seems to be gaining in the debate. …
… The bet was settled this fall without ceremony. Ehrlich did not even bother to write a letter. He simply mailed Simon a sheet of calculations about metal prices — along with a check for $576.07. Simon wrote back a thank-you note, adding that he would be willing to raise the wager to as much as $20,000, pinned to any other resources and to any other year in the future.
Each of the five metals chosen by Ehrlich’s group, when adjusted for inflation since 1980, had declined in price. The drop was so sharp, in fact, that Simon would have come out slightly ahead overall even without the inflation adjustment called for in the bet. Prices fell for the same Cornucopian reasons they had fallen in previous decades — entrepreneurship and continuing technological improvements. Prospectors found new lodes, such as the nickel mines around the world that ended a Canadian company’s near monopoly of the market. Thanks to computers, new machines and new chemical processes, there were more efficient ways to extract and refine the ores for chrome and the other metals.
For many uses, the metals were replaced by cheaper materials, notably plastics, which became less expensive as the price of oil declined (even during this year’s crisis in the Persian Gulf, the real cost of oil remained lower than in 1980). Telephone calls went through satellites and fiber-optic lines instead of copper wires. Ceramics replaced tungsten in cutting tools. Cans were made of aluminum instead of tin, and Vogt’s fears about America going to war over tin remained unrealized. The most newsworthy event in the 1980′s concerning that metal was the collapse of the international tin cartel, which gave up trying to set prices in 1985 when the market became inundated with excess supplies.
Is there a lesson here for the future?
“Absolutely not,” said Ehrlich in an interview. Nevertheless, he has no plans to take up Simon’s new offer: “The bet doesn’t mean anything. Julian Simon is like the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and says how great things are going so far as he passes the 10th floor. I still think the price of those metals will go up eventually, but that’s a minor point. The resource that worries me the most is the declining capacity of our planet to buffer itself against human impacts. Look at the new problems that have come up: the ozone hole, acid rain, global warming. It’s true that we’ve kept up food production — I underestimated how badly we’d keep on depleting our topsoil and ground water — but I have no doubt that sometime in the next century food will be scarce enough that prices are really going to be high even in the United States. If we get climate change and let the ecological systems keep running downhill, we could have a gigantic population crash.”
Simon was not surprised to hear about Ehrlich’s reaction. “Paul Ehrlich has never been able to learn from past experience,” he said, then launched into the Cornucopian line on the greenhouse crisis — how, even in the unlikely event that doomsayers are right about global warming, humanity will find some way to avert climate change or adapt, and everyone will emerge the better for it. But Simon did not get far into his argument before another cheery thought occurred to him. He stopped and smiled.
“So Ehrlich is talking about a population crash,” he said. “That sounds like an even better way to make money. I’ll give him heavy odds on that one.”
Advising Paul Ehrlich on his losing wager was John Holdren who was science advisor to Bill Clinton and has the same position with the current president. So now you know why these Dem presidents are so ignorant. Here’s Holdren’s entry in Wikipedia.
… Holdren was involved in the famous Simon–Ehrlich wager in 1980. He, along with two other scientists helped Paul R. Ehrlich establish the bet with Julian Simon, in which they bet that the price of five key metals would be higher in 1990. The bet was centred around a disagreement concerning the future scarcity of resources in an increasingly polluted and heavily populated world. Ehrlich and Holdren lost the bet, when the price of metals had decreased by 1990. …
… Holdren served as one of President Bill Clinton‘s science advisors (PCAST) from 1994 to 2001. Eight years later, President Barack Obama nominated Holdren for his current position as science advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in December 2008, and he was confirmed on March 19, 2009, by a unanimous vote in the Senate. …
And that’s where stupid presidents come from.