You know all those resources we're about to run out of? No, we aren't

Where's Lewis?

Not written anything for a couple of months. Gap year?

Forecasting is so depressing

Any worthwhile economic forecast should include a reference to the previous one. So the next time you see a price prediction for oil, gas or similar in a years time it should include a comparison of today's price and the previous forecast.

Maybe you will be surprised by their accuracy, but I doubt it.

Is part of the problem that only hysterical forecasts and reports get any coverage?

In the Western world, Sales type personalities are far more compelling than Engineer types.

All of our politicians and many of our senior managers/directors are all in the business of Selling stuff and rely on charisma and force of conviction to persuade others.

The people who actually know stuff are usually consigned to advisory committees and the problem is that these committees are rarely listened to, particularly by politicians.

That's why China is eventually going to stuff the lot of us.

Incidentally, I see the point of recycling not so much that it's about saving natural resources - after all, the first things to be recycled were glass and paper, and there's practically limitless quantities of both. No I thought the point is to reduce the amount of waste going into landfills.

Energy return on investment.

Yes there is a vast amount of resource under the ground. These can be divided fairly neatly into two - minerals that are used to build things /grow food, and minerals/liquids/gas used as a source of energy. Extracting anything from the ground uses energy. An energy source that use more energy to extract than it usefully provides is not an energy source, it is a sink. We may get to the point where drilling for oil is a net energy sink, because oil is so much more useful to society than coal, that we are prepared to still extract it using energy from coal at a net loss. However, we will never mine coal at a net energy loss. And coal is still the single biggest source of energy in the industrial world. All the easy sources of energy are mined first. That means, unless technology improves exponentially, the net energy from each KWh of energy extracted must decline, relentlessly, regardless of how much is under the ground. All the easy sources of all minerals are also mined first. They need ever larger amounts of energy for each Kg on mineral extracted over time, unless technology can improve exponentially. And the mining of energy needs ever more kg of minerals as people dig and drill deeper and further.

So over time, we spend more and more energy extracting the same amount of minerals, and more and more energy and minerals extracting the same amount of energy. More and more of the global resources of both minerals and energy are used to keep the mining industry expanding, and less and less is left over for the rest of society.

This is not sustainable. Long before the total energy budget peaks, industrial society peaks. Demand for the ever more expensive minerals and energy cannot be sustained, the price falls below that required to invest in further mines and oil fields in ever more extreme environments, and investment collapses. Then industrial society collapses.

We are at that point. All the major private oil companies are way past peak production, and are cutting their capital budgets because they cannot find more oil to drill at an affordable price, even though the price rose FIVE FOLD in a decade.

Yesterday, the official estimate of shale oil (as in fracking) resource in California was cut by 13 billion barrels, or 95%. That oil is still down there, but it is going to stay down there. For ever.

Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias.

It needs repeating over and over again.

Policy lobbyists genuinely believe what they say, and think they've seen the evidence.

But the only evidence they see is the evidence they look for. And it doesn't have to be "arts graduates".

It's the same for all sorts of areas.

For nutrition . Because of a bias in nutritionists who don't seem to believe that food can be pleasurable, ( roughly summed up as if it's nice it must be bad for you).

For Education, because of a grouping of policy makers who think that rote learning and slogging are the way to learn (Only phonics work. And we must have a lousy education system because we do poorly in a set of tests that is biased towards that type of slogging ).

Health. I have a deep suspicion that the people who want to ban e-cigarettes work in this way. I've never smoked, but the claims of anti-ecigarette campaigners do seem to be based on desperately looking for reasons why these things can't be as good as they seem.

And I'm sure many other areas too.

Of course that could be my confirmation bias.

One resource that's limitless

Stupidity.

You might want to dial back on the smugness . What about unobtanium ? If that was so plentiful then why do we have to go so far to get it ?

Don't panic (in large friendly letters)

There'll be another Chicxulub impact that will replenish all the minerals mankind consumes.

Shock, horror, Scargill was right - minerals no use without miners!

We may well be "pretty much built on a bed of coal", but it's no use to us under the ground, and I can't see any future government reversing the Thatcher-orchestrated destruction of the mining industry, so we probably are going to 'run out' - in the sense of no longer producing any of our own - when the remaining few mines are tapped out in the fairly-near future.

Sadly, quite representative of a lot of green- endeavours

Take a real problem, screw up the science, propose half-baked solutions.

Get the politicians aboard. Screw things up some more.

Just as an hypothesis, let's postulate that climate change, due to CO2 is a problem (I do think it is, but that doesn't matter to my argument). How do we respond?

Germany - go all solar & wind. No more nukes. No more nukes. Oh, wait, that nasty little problem of needing to provide backup capacity to said renewables? I know, let's use brown coal for baseloads. Result: more CO2 and more expensive energy.

US. Ethanol, ethanol. Corn-based, 1st gen. Save the planet. And it looks green too. Does it save CO2 over oil cradle-to-grave? Hmmm, no, but the farming states' voters are grateful for the $ubsidies.

UK and its windfarms? Nice, but what about the intermittencies? No matter, it loooks green.

Canada - I could probably get a subsidy for a Tesla S, if I had the cash to buy it. Good of all the taxpayers to chip in for my chick magnet, neh?

If we ever get the public behind real CO2 limitation, the first thing to do is to _price_ CO2. I.e. tax it and offset other taxes downwards. Once dollars and cents get involved, the emperor's clothes will flutter away and people will find real solutions.

Same thing with the metal shortages. Given a shortage, there will be more recycling, less use and more prospecting. Let it come.

One exception being the Helium shortages the US govt might be running us into by forcing a premature cheap sell-off of what is admittedly their reserve. Politicians meddling again.

OK, not in 15 years, but...

Lots of sensationalism, as always in the news, but even with deadlines in the thousands of years, I find it scary. Does it mean that human civilization relying on technology is doomed at such a short term notice (in historical terms)? This eventual shortage of resource availability is certain of causing wars between countries on the scale that will make WWI and II look like how we look at some African or Balkans regional conflicts today, except it will be us involved directly, nor far away countries.

We'll eventually need to remove the concept of countries and national governments, or to ensure there is a full cooperation and distribution of resources with no possibility of one country attacking another, or to go past the dependency on such metals and chemicals for a more sustainable technology, or some other solution to address the problem before it arises and takes catastrophic proportions.

I recall someone in the Thatcher goverment saying that we had 800 years worth of coal

There 50 years worth of Oil under Surrey/Buckinhamshire but the snobs do not want drills in THERE backgarden

Between Brazill and Austrailia alone we have at minimum 300 years of minerals and Oil for the whole world

Research history, there a little building in central london who controls the world "grain market" supply and demand is just a balance of profit

The Planet is fine, the people are fucked!

George Carlin - "The Planet is fine, the people are fucked!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL8HP1WzbDk

Thanks for the facts...

People who do bad science should be taken out the back and beaten with a hefty stick.....

@theModge

'We're ruled by arts graduates' - Correct speaking as an ex-arts graduate I fully agree that the situation is bleak. (Hey the course was easy and 70% female).

What you have to remember is that an Arts graduate doesn't have to know 'facts' as such (yes to a limited degree but wait a moment longer). They have to know how to present what facts they do know to successfully create a theory that matches those facts. ie its all about the spin.

Arts Graduates are good at spin.

Understanding a topic takes time to learn. Most people are more interested in hockey then working hard to understand something. So people listen to the spin, and believe it.

If you really want to teach people anything, then teach them to think and how to find and judge informations and sources.

I get the point of the article as it chooses to phrase the problem - and very interesting too.

But that's too narrow a definition of "resources", just to talk about elements or even compounds. Here are some resources of special interest to me, as hobby of stone carving and jewellery.

Spoiler alert: if your only definition of value is to weigh the stuff, then yes we have plenty. But for much of the real world, that rather misses the point.

Blue John fluorite. Only two sources known: classic Derbyshire mine is finished. There is NO MORE. Fragments, but if you want to carve a small bowl like those that were done a century back, you are out of luck. There is a Chinese mine, and it is nice, but just not the same - not as veined and decorative.

Alabaster. The largest and best quality mines are all mined out. You can still get good quality stuff, but only relatively small chunks now. "The ancients" had access to fault-free chunks at multi cubic meter sizes, and there are existing sculptures to prove it. Now, at whatever price, to get a single fault free cubic meter is no longer possible. There just aren't any left.

Marble - not as extreme as alabaster, but we are starting to suck the dregs on top quality vast chunks. Kitchen work tops, fine. If you wanted to carve Michelangelo's Slaves out of top quality Carrara, tough. You live three centuries too late, you missed your chance.

Diamonds. These are plentiful, made rare only by monopoly. But if you want a flawless 1000+ carat, the last of those was found in 1905 (cullinan). Despite the total diamond mining throughput being orders of magnitude greater now, the goodput of vast diamonds dropped through the floor nearly a century ago.

Good quality nephrite jade. Hundreds of tonnes plentifully available still mined. But by comparison to classic sources, small and flawed. Only useful for tiny dragons now.

Emeralds. Modern emeralds of significant size AT ANY PRICE are basically shitty, flawed and with lousy colour. I have some old photos of my grandmothers emerald necklace. Central stone 30 carat flawlesst, plus another 20 carats in medium size stones. Today - that would buy palaces. Then, a middle class woman could wear it on an evening out.