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Sure, for any sort of mineral or metal there's a hard limit to how much there is in the Earth's crust, and while the oil was created by a natural process, that
by repiret 3y ago
Sure, for any sort of mineral or metal there's a hard limit to how much there is in the Earth's crust, and while the oil was created by a natural process, that process doesn't take place on a time frame that's useful to humans (and might not take place at all now that bacteria has evolved).
We don't sit around fretting about the limited supply of palladium or something, because there's never been as much of it that was easy to extract as we wanted. We do worry about lithium, because right now it's economic to extract it in very large quantities and we know that won't last forever. But my point is that we won't transition from the current abundance to "every last atom of mineable lithium has been extracted and if you want more you have to dig up a landfill and pull it out of discarded CR2032 batteries" overnight. When we've dug up all the lithium available at the current price, there will still be plenty more at a slightly higher price, and when that's used up, there will be more at a price slightly higher still, and so on. Yeah, there's a limit, but long before we hit the limit, the gradual price increases will have push society to find a way to go on without copious amounts of newly mined lithium.