10 ms·
Peak Everything?
- georgecmu 17y agosee also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283172 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283172
- TetOn 17y agoAlso peak helium: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/going_going_gone/ http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/going_going_gone/
- euroclydon 17y ago"Federal Helium Reserve", "Saudi Arabia of Helium", "The world's lone Helium Superpower" Wow!
- j_baker 17y agoThey also forgot "the helium capital of the world", one of Amarillo's nicknames (I happen to have family in Amarillo).
- cmars232 17y ago“Is it realistic to predict that knowledge accumulation is so powerful as to outweigh the physical limits of physical capital services and the limited substitution possibilities for natural resources?” Yes, unless we figure out the knowledge required to synthesize these elements, recapture them, or develop substitutes. Knowledge has a habit of disrupting what otherwise looks like a zero-sum game.
- cbell44 17y agoDespite regular evidence to the contrary going back for generations, so many are ready to fall in to the trap that advancement and innovation is done. If materials, goods, and skill markets are reasonably free and fair, the price signals alone will drive others to innovate and develop alternatives in resource use, resource access/extraction, or resource reduction through the use of other materials or technologies. As long as the rewards for innovation remain, alternatives are likely to be found and developed.
- j_baker 17y agoYou know, not every problem is solvable by creating another startup. :-) In particular, it takes a bit more than the spirit of innovation to move the developed world from a depleting energy source to a more renewable energy source.
- lukev 17y agoBut market forces will do it. For example, it's not like oil is going to disappear overnight. When gas prices get up to 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 dollars a gallon... at some point, people are definitely going to start buying electric cars. Same goes for trucks, ships, everything else that uses oil. But innovation to make alternatives available isn't going to happen until market forces make it profitable.
- InclinedPlane 17y agoFor pretty much any location in the world outside of perhaps France an "electric" car is, in most cases, a coal powered car. There is far too much coal in the ground for it to run out in the near future, market rates alone aren't going to get rid of coal power plants.
- pyre 17y ago> There is far too much coal in the ground for it to run out in the near future And "640K should be enough for anyone," right? The idea that something will never 'run out' is usually predicated on the assumption that consumption levels will remain the same (or at least only increase linearly rather than exponentially).
- doki_pen 17y agoIt seems natural that humans have always reproduced until they ran into some limiting factor. No matter how much we conserve, we will just have more babies. There is an out though. Research suggests that educated woman have less babies. http://www.eubios.info/EJ124/ej124i.htm http://www.eubios.info/EJ124/ej124i.htm . Just imagine a life where no one had to worry about limited resources because there are a lot less people on earth. _That_ would be a utopia.
- a-priori 17y agoThat rule, to reproduce until you reach a limiting factor (food, money, whatever) applied until the introduction of birth control. Today, we see that in places with good access to birth control people end up being quite conservative about reproducing, trending to replacement rates or lower.
- jdminhbg 17y agoActually, that change took place well before the introduction of reliable birth control. See "A Farewell To Alms" for an account of the transition from resource-limited birth rates to the modern world: http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282 http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princet...
- chaosmachine 17y agoThe problem is that some resources we just aren't getting any more of, no matter what the birth rate is. When they're gone, they're gone.
- eru 17y agoWhich resources? Please name some examples.
- Retric 17y agohelium and plutonium First is lost to space second is actually destroyed. Most other elements can be recycled. Arguably genetic/linguistic diversity might also count. Because the rate of creation of new species and languages is slower than the rate of their destruction. And finally total useful energy supply of the universe.
- wanderr 17y agoPeak [insert metal here] isn't directly comparable to peak oil/coal/combustible for the obvious reason that when the former is used up and discarded, it can be reclaimed, while the latter is gone forever. Obviously you can still hit limitations, such as when demand is greater than the entire supply on earth, but that at least puts the problem further out, buying more time for innovation and reducing demand for less valuable things that also require those resources.
- InclinedPlane 17y agoThe problem with the peak hydrocarbon argument is that there is more than enough of some variety of hydrocarbons in the ground to satisfy a world population 10 billion people all consuming hydrocarbons at 1st world levels for hundreds of years. The peak hydrocarbon argument relies on a chain of hypothesis, none of which have been backed up by evidence. Firstly, there must be no discoveries of new reserves. Secondly, there must be no advances in technologies in extraction or refinement. Thirdly, there must be no advances in technologies to convert different hydrocarbon sources into others (e.g. manufacturing gasoline from coal), worse than that there must be no adoption of known hydrocarbon conversion technologies (coal gasification is a decades old technology). Anyone who's looked at the numbers for reserves of coal, tar sands, methane clathrates, etc. is unlikely to take peak hydrocarbon arguments seriously, there's just too much of the stuff. Ultimately the peak oil argument comes back to a visceral hatred of petroleum and a wish to see a world without it, but wishes aren't reality.
- jseliger 17y agoUltimately the peak oil argument comes back to a visceral hatred of petroleum and a wish to see a world without it, but wishes aren't reality. I don't think this is true, and your argument ignores how expensive many of the technologies you cite are, like coal gassification, which has been available for decades but isn't used because of the cost. The question isn't only about reserves, but about how expensive those reserves are to access (and what kinds of environmental damage access will cause). And oil prices have, in real terms, gone steadily upwards through a boom and bust cycle: prices rise stratospherically, then crash, then find a new trading point higher than the previous trading point. For more on that, see Christopher Steiner's $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline will Change Our Lives for the Better: http://jseliger.com/2009/08/21/20-per-gallon http://jseliger.com/2009/08/21/20-per-gallon . Note that I don't believe the provocative claim in the title, but he provides a lot of useful historical data. And this argument mostly ignores the environmental cost of oil, both in terms of extraction and in terms of consumption. And in terms of the massive wealthy transfers from the West to charming places like Saudi Arabia that do a great job of churning out people who become terrorists and ideologies that are repressive. If the price of oil goes up—and it almost certainly will—the latter dynamic will only get stronger. People who cite peak oil aren't doing it because they have "a visceral hated of petroleum," especially if visceral refers to inward feelings rather than the intellect: they have rational concerns about the world in which we live. Those concerns might be misguided, but they might not be, and time will, as usual, be the judge.
- dflock 17y agoThere's only one planet Earth, finite in size - and therefore a finite amount of natural resources exist within it. Once we've split all the uranium and washed all the phosphorus into the ocean, that's it - you can't think up more Zinc, Rubidium or Lithium - once it's gone, it's gone. I'm sure we could do vastly more recycling, use alternatives for some things, improve efficiency, develop magical new technologies, etc, etc... but almost no-one I've spoken to about this appreciates just how terrifyingly rapidly we're approaching these limits. If we run out of available mine-able Zinc & Copper in 30 years - which is quite possible - what then? Do we have enough time to switch to coping strategies? Will that be a smooth ride? It seems to me that the front of the train has already hit the buffers, but we've still got our foot on the gas pedal, back here in the cab. Most of the useful mineral resources on Earth are only available in vanishingly tiny quantities elsewhere in the solar system. We currently do almost no recycling of anything, compared to our consumption. The human population is huge, growing in number, affluence and resource usage per capita. We're on course to run out of the minerals required to run our economy & infrastructure within most of our lifetimes. Nice infographic with some estimated timescales for various resources: http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2605/26051202.jpg http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2605/2605120... The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race is our inability to understand the exponential function: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY I'm not being alarmist - sometimes things are actually alarming.
- eru 17y agoWe are sitting on a huge ball of matter. And with enough energy--which we can get from the sun for another 5 billion years or so--we can recycle almost anything. Of course coping may not be easy in the first place.
- khafra 17y agoThe problem is obtaining enough energy per cubic metre-second, so to speak--over the next 5 billion years, the sun will provide the earth with enough power to do just about anything we'd like to do today. But the reason we don't recycle rare earth metals is because it takes a lot of concentrated energy that we'd rather use for other things. This problem will only become worse as concentrated energy sources are used up, and we move on to more diffuse sources with lower EROEIs, but expect to have the same surplusses we had in the 1990s.
- nas 17y agoHow about peak arable land? http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March06/soil.erosion.threat.ssl.html http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March06/soil.erosion.thr... It is estimated that about 10 million hectares a year is lost (the size of the state of Indiana), 30% of the arable land in the last 40 years. 1mm of topsoil lost takes about 20 years to replace. The United States is losing soil 10 times faster -- and China and India are losing soil 30 to 40 times faster -- than the natural replenishment rate.
- eru 17y agoCan't we pop up soil artificially when that becomes a big enough problem? Sprinkle compost on it or so?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- nas 17y agoNot to be rude but I don't think you are comprehending the scale of the problem. Where would the compost come from? A rough calculation (10 million ha, assume a thin 80 mm layer of topsoil is lost, 1 mm of soil over 1 ha is 13 tons) estimates that 10 billion tonnes of compost would be needed per year to replace the lost organic matter. It's a feedback system since good land produces lots of organic matter. Once eroded away, it's extremely difficult to restore. I have a hard time figuring out how we could avoid serious troubles in this area in the not too distant future. Some years ago there was a big push in North American to improve farm practices (stop burning straw, reduction or elimination of tillage, etc). That helped a lot but developing countries have not or cannot adopt such practices.
- eru 17y agoThanks for the numbers and details. By the way, what's so bad about burning straw? Or is it just that composting straw gives more soil?
- 17y ago
- porter 17y agoExponential Growth is a magical thing. The doubling time of something growing at a constant rate is approximately 70 divided by that rate. For example, something growing at a 10% annual rate will roughly double in size every 7 years. I don't doubt the potential of human ideas, but unless the rate of growth in natural resource consumption goes to zero (or becomes negative), we will at best defer depletion. While the author points out some novel ideas, he doesn't show the math to prove these ideas will reverse the growth in consumption. Until that’s shown, we are at best just buying time.
- eru 17y agoYour approximation works well in a wide percentage range. But you can just as well us the exact thing--the logarithm instead. The universe (and even the earth) is pretty big. There's plenty of time, if we keep expanding.
- InclinedPlane 17y agoThis is a historically ignorant argument. It's unlikely we'll actually run short of any of these metals. The more likely scenario is that if and when we do start to exhaust the most easily mined sources prices will start to rise, spurring investment in new extraction technologies and exploitation of previously uneconomical sources. Increasing production and amortization of R&D costs will then lead to lower prices in the future. This has happened innumerable times with innumerable resources throughout history. Which is, indeed, the conclusion of the linked article as well.
- porter 17y agoUnless we stop consuming a finite resource we will eventually run out, by definition. Your argument simply demonstrates how rising prices will lead to extracting 'harder to get' resources. When something is harder to get that means it's scarce, which is the opposite of abundant. In other words, it means we are running out.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
- gills 17y agoAn important topic to keep in mind. We...or a distant future generation...will probably need to develop alternatives and agressive recycling. I wonder when we will reach "peak peak-resource stories"?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- eli_s 17y agoI guess at some point mining our solar system will become technologically and economically feasible. Maybe waiting for and 'roping in' a passing Asteroid would also work - aren't those things chock full of useful elements?