If raging population and economic growth don’t cause important resources to be depleted, what will? He doesn't get it. The point isn't that something magical h

If raging population and economic growth don’t cause important resources to be depleted, what will? He doesn't get it. The point isn't that something magical happens to repeal scarcity, to give us all the [pick your commodity] that you'd like. Instead, the scarcity drives up prices (yes, prices do rise in the short run) which leads those who would have liked to buy the commodity to instead learn to use a substitute instead. The reason we're concerned about gasoline now is because we found a better way to do things than the wood, or whale blubber, that we'd been using previously. At some point in the future, our descendants will think of fossil fuels as we think of blubber. Now, talking outside of my specific knowledge, but just building from what I understand... I bet that if you went and looked at the price of whale blubber today, you'd find it significantly higher than back when it was used in lamps. That would be because nobody is much interested in it anymore, so any economies of scale in its production have been lost.