From the article: "the view of many of our economics colleagues (...) that technology will always find a substitute for any depleted resource" Natural resource

From the article: "the view of many of our economics colleagues (...) that technology will always find a substitute for any depleted resource" Natural resources depletion has been deliberately overlooked by classical economics from the beginning of this field: "Natural resources cannot be exhausted, otherwise, we couldn't get them for free. As we can neither multiply them, nor deplete them, there are out of the scope of economic sciences." (Jean-Baptiste Say, Traité d'Economie Politique, 1803) (That might have made sense at the time, since we were using much less of them.) The idea that technology can make up for resources depletion is maybe a rationalization of this principle.