6 ms·

Why most resources don't run out

48 points by troystribling 12y ago

beat 12y ago
Interesting to dovetail that against the recent top article here that we are reaching the end of the antibiotics era. I hope we have a replacement for fossil fuel when the time comes, but I worry about too much "rational optimism". Tragedy of the Commons is a real thing, and Pangloss was sarcasm, not a role model.
sharemywin 12y ago
I think if you combine vertical farms with nuclear fusion the skies the limit. As long as we can get fusion to work. otherwise we better hope solar and battery prices drop enough to leave coal in the dust.
- whythehellnot 12y ago
  Our environment can't handle the damage by the time we get fusion to be useful for us or solar/battery become efficient/cost effective. We need to be thinking for today, as in right friggen now. Everyone I have ever seen or heard talk about this issue is always proposing the solution won't be too far away because of X. NO IDIOT. We have the technology to stop all this right bloody now! One of which is so overlooked it's offensive. Latest Gen Nuclear fission should be replacing coal plants en-mass. The fact that it's not is so disheartening that I just want every coal lobbyist to choke on his own toxic waste...
jal278 12y ago
There's a seemingly reasonable fallacy embedded in the argument that so far technology has been able to dig us out of the holes that it itself digs: That past performance is indicative of the future. Of course, the past often does predict the future -- yet, we can't bank on it, because there are sometimes qualitative shifts, and exceptions. The problem with hoping that technology will solve climate change before it happens, is that we're gambling something we can't afford to lose. So, it may well be the case that we do solve the problem -- but what if we don't? There are limits to technology, after all. To me, the danger in placing excessive faith in technology is that it can bypass our critical thinking. For example, right now our own technology (nuclear weapons, or biological weapons as that technology develops) is the greatest threat to humanity's existence. So while technology is a great thing, it may well be our species undoing rather than its savior -- at least until (if) we survive long enough to colonize other planets or enhance our own morality such that we can handle the responsibility our technology demands.
- polemic 12y ago
  Good analysis. I like to think that it's a bit like investing in a vehicle that may or may not be a ponzi scheme. It's worked so far, but that doesn't mean you bet the house on it.
- mikeash 12y ago
  This is indeed a problem. If there is an event which causes the extinction of humanity, then by definition we will not find a parallel event in the past to use for prediction. Yet to conclude that humanity will never go extinct is ridiculous. It's only going to happen once. There's also another problem from the opposite direction. Resources have run out plenty of times. Entire civilizations have collapsed because they could no longer sustain themselves, because they used up something important and couldn't find more or come up with a substitute. Yes, peak oil now could end up being like peak stone in the stone age, where there's plenty of it and we move on to better things well before we run out. But peak oil now could also be like peak forest on Easter Island, which resulted in the collapse of civilization there. I don't see anything in this article beyond naked hope for why peak oil must follow the former path rather than the latter. Yes, the history of resource exhaustion is extremely optimistic if you ignore all the times when it led to disaster, but that doesn't tell me anything.
  - glenra 12y ago
    The Easter Island story told by Jared Diamond in Collapse is arguably a myth. Do you have any other examples? An alternate view of Easter Island includes these sorts of points: - Forests on Easter Island were largely killed by rats (an invasive species) and to (productively!) clear land for agriculture, not to make statues. - Civilization there grew and persisted and thrived even well after the trees were gone due to human cleverness at finding and making new resources. (The Islanders ate fish and rats and eggs and chickens at that time) - When their civilization eventually collapsed it was because they were pushed. It was due to war and diseases brought by outside invaders who sold a lot of the locals into slavery. Mark Lynas sums up the situation here: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myth-of-easter-islands-ecocide/ http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myth-of-easter-islands-... Jared Diamond, sticking to his guns, responds to Mark: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myths-of-easter-island-jared-diamond-responds/ http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myths-of-easter-island-... Lipo and Hunt in turn respond to Jared's response filling in lots more detail: http://www.evobeach.com/2011/10/diamond-attempts-to-defend-myths-of.html http://www.evobeach.com/2011/10/diamond-attempts-to-defend-m... Leading quote: "Diamond would have readers believe that the majority of archeologists who have studied Easter Island support his thesis. It is simply not true. The new evidence that we and other serious scholars have provided over the past decade not only contradicts the old story that Diamond has so heavily invested in, but has led to a new consensus among the majority of scholars around our work." UPDATE: Okay, now THIS is my favorite thing I found revisiting this old argument. Diamond thinks the statues were moved on logs but Lipo thinks they were "walked" into place upright...and here is a video showing how one does that - walks a multi-ton statue upright using only people and ropes: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/easter-island/walking-statue-video http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/easter-island/walk...
facepalm 12y ago
- Catastrophes happened in the past that killed lots of people. Technology did not always save our ass - Read "Collapse" - What about resources like housing? It sounds to me as if housing in SF has run out? Build lots of skyscrapers everywhere? Then what about sunlight in your apartment?
- Kerrick 12y ago
  > What about resources like housing? It sounds to me as if housing in SF has run out? Build lots of skyscrapers everywhere? Then what about sunlight in your apartment? I think in a tradeoff of "There's literally no more room for anybody to live," and "I have to go outside to get sunlight," I'd choose the latter.
  - facepalm 12y ago
    Sure, but I don't think it really qualifies as "see, science solves every problem". And what if there are houses everywhere? There will be time slots for rooftops. After a certain size of the houses, there will not be enough rooftops for everyone to get sunshine.
  - manicdee 12y ago
    I'll take option 3: encourage smaller families and lower fertility rates.
thunderbong 12y ago
Finally. Someone who makes sane and balanced points rather than take a binary position.
- mikeash 12y ago
  This is about as unbalanced and binary as you can possibly get. That alone doesn't make it wrong, but this article is so far from the middle ground that you'd need a telescope to see it.
  - damon_c 12y ago
    "this article is so far from the middle ground that you'd need a telescope to see it." This assumes one is standing on the middle ground. ;)
    - mikeash 12y ago
      Or "it" refers to the middle ground, and you're standing on this article.
- beat 12y ago
  Ugh, I hate the "balanced" argument for "middle ground". If one person says 2 + 2 = 4 and another says 2 + 2 = 6, the truth is NOT that 2 + 2 = 5.
  - Abraln 12y ago
    At least he included multiple positive stories of government interference. If the free market says something nessesary is not worth it, tip the scales to MAKE it worth it. Tax hikes on polluters and non renewables and tax cuts for going free would go a LONG way. Too bad it won't ever happen.
- manicdee 12y ago
  "If we run out of phosphorous reserves, we can just dredge the rivers of the world to get it back!" Yup, that sounds sane to me. "If we run out of easily accessible gas and oil reserves, we can just destroy the arable farmland of the world to find more!" Yup, perfectly sane. "If we run out of fresh water, we can just recycle sewage and run solar-powered desalination plants." Says the economist who has never looked into the power required to desalinate sea water at the scale required to support a city. Next he'll be saying, "oh, we can just power the desalination plants and hydroponic sheds with nuclear power" (which just means we'll run out of fissile material faster). No mention of 'sustainable production' in his screed at all. There is absolutely nothing sane about that essay. You can't live on money. You need food and water, and for the sake of food security you can't rely on power supplies other than the Sun to grow that food and bring you that water. A nation dependent on its power grid for food and water is ripe for terrorism, industrial sabotage or corporate oligarchy.
mkempe 12y ago
Two fundamental arguments of the thesis that we will not "run out" of natural resources for productive purpose have been made eloquently in: - The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon [1] --the human mind has limitless potential to select and pursue the use of materials; and - Capitalism by George Reisman [2] -- the phenomenon of price responds to actual supply and demand, and prompts profit-seekers to develop and switch production accordingly. [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691003815 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691003815 [2] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0084RU67S http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0084RU67S, see Part One, Chapter 3
- coldtea 12y ago
  >The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon [1] --the human mind has limitless potential to select and pursue the use of materials Only if those materials exist in the actual world first. So not that limitless after all. (And that's if we indeed accept that the mind's potential is "limitless", which is non-scientific mumbo jumbo). >Capitalism by George Reisman [2] -- the phenomenon of price responds to actual supply and demand, and prompts profit-seekers to develop and switch production accordingly. Says nothing about resources "not running out" -- just about distribution and demand of them, when they are available. A tribe of capitalists in a desert without water would still die of first.
  - mkempe 12y ago
    Have you read either or both of these books? you seem to be arguing with straw men.
    - coldtea 12y ago
      I'm arguing with the very phrases used here supposedly to describe the gist of each book. If those are accurate, then there's no point in reading the books at all (like I wouldn't read a book described as "the best arguments why the Earth is flat"). Now the descriptions might not be accurate, and those could be excellent books. But, alas, the only information I have had to judge whether I should read those books comes from the OP introducing them with those descriptions.
ForHackernews 12y ago
Just because things have worked out in the past doesn't mean they always will. Despair might actually be the correct response: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-he-feels-fine.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-th...
ebbv 12y ago
This view is so childish it is only taken seriously by those who already agree with it. > Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered But not before many types of whale were nearly wiped out, and may yet go extinct. > or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, What? Fertilizers have been known for centuries. Modern fertilizers are hardly a panacea. They come with costs of their own. > or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls. This has nothing to do with any of the other arguments, and demand for copper is still high enough that people are stripping it out of vacant buildings via breaking and entering. Risking injury, jail time and even death. > But optimists see economic growth leading to technological change that would result in the use of lower-carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long before it does much harm. It's pretty obvious if you look objectively at the data that "much harm" has already been done. This blog post is the epitome of biased garbage.
- restless 12y ago
  "Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered But not before many types of whale were nearly wiped out, and may yet go extinct. > or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along" The old correlation!=cause problem...
- batmansbelt 12y ago
  Not to mention that modern fertilizer is petro-chemical and it is very much limited by the finiteness of those resources.
lasermike026 12y ago
Must man destroy everything?
- lavamantis 12y ago
  yes. http://www.npr.org/2014/02/12/275885377/in-the-worlds-sixth-extinction-are-humans-the-asteroid http://www.npr.org/2014/02/12/275885377/in-the-worlds-sixth-...
  - lasermike026 12y ago
    No. Our species must make the small evolutionary step to change general behavior or die. I am willing to make every ethical change to make that possible and I think I would like to live in that world.
    - lavamantis 12y ago
      You're a bit of an idealist, which I admire. I don't think the human race will die any time soon, but the same can't be said for countless other species of plants and animals that we are CURRENTLY wiping out. Our environment is getting a little crappier every day. I really hope as a whole we can follow your lead and make some changes. But my expectations are low.
    - base698 12y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4 Maybe, it's just the Earth plus plastic.
vsbuffalo 12y ago
> But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed. They will run out one day, but only in the sense that you will run out of Atlantic Ocean one day if you take a rowboat west out of a harbor in Ireland. As an economist, how can the author not see that the hidden environmental costs are growing? As markets demand natural gas within a cost range while resources are limited, the solution becomes to pass this cost off on the environment. The environment doesn't have a powerful advocacy and can't fight back. I am disappointed that economists buy these models so readily without doing real accounting as to all costs. I think this is a problem in modern economics — we can easily measure monetary costs through accounting and prices, but other costs are hard to measure so the model treats them as residuals. Then, they run predictions with their models that completely ignore environmental costs. Don't argue markets don't have a cost on the environment when you've failed to include environmental costs in your models.
- beat 12y ago
  The author's view is terribly shortsighted. "I'm going to run out of money next month" versus "I'm going to run out of money next year". Same outcome. His fallacy, and it's a common one, is thinking that because the problem may be postponed past his own lifetime, that it doesn't matter. What about a hundred years from now? A thousand? Ten thousand? I for one don't relish leaving my descendants a future in which environmental equilibrium is reached by starving or shooting a few billion surplus people.
znull 12y ago
You want to settle a dispute between economists and ecologists? Ask a physicist: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/about-this-blog/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/about-this-blog/
- beat 12y ago
  Or ask a cartoon physicist on xkcd. http://xkcd.com/793/ http://xkcd.com/793/
danford 12y ago
So in short: The free market will save us.
- marknutter 12y ago
  It always has.
  - orthecreedence 12y ago
    The world climate is collapsing (hypothetical scenario). The proponents of free market say: "The market will adapt to fix the problems causing climate change!" What really happens: "I've built a mask that lets you breath the Earth's new poisonous atmosphere!" "Well my mask lets you breath twice as much air per minute!!" "My mask does all this !but! shows an interactive map of the next sulfuric acid rain storm so you can find your way to our nearest BioShelter2000. Buy now, and you get a month BioShelter pass, letting you stay for free up to 4 hours per day, including use of the bathroom!"
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Not really. Catastrophes have happened before and they will happen again.
sharemywin 12y ago
I think if you combine vertical farms with nuclear fusion the skies the limit.
coldtea 12y ago
"Rational opimist"? Sounds rather dellusional to me, one of those guys that made a religion out of science and/or technology. >"But here's a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again." Yeah, just like Bertrand Russel's inductivist (and rational optimist) turkey: The turkey found that, on his first morning at the turkey farm, he was fed at 9 a.m. Being a good inductivist turkey he did not jump to conclusions. He waited until he collected a large number of observations that he was fed at 9 a.m. and made these observations under a wide range of circumstances, on Wednesdays, on Thursdays, on cold days, on warm days. Each day he added another observation statement to his list. Finally he was satisfied that he had collected a number of observation statements to inductively infer that “I am always fed at 9 a.m.”. However on the morning of Christmas eve he was not fed but instead had his throat cut.
hxrts 12y ago
Time lag is a critical issue that needs to be accounted for. If we assume that innovation will mediate the worst effects of global warming then we neglect the possibility that forcing conditions created today may have consequences that manifest themselves over the next 20 or 50 years. Global warming is not like any problem that humanity has ever had to confront and it's dangerous to wave away the scale and complexity of the problem as something innovation will eventually rectify.
- orthecreedence 12y ago
  Yes, but the free market will invent time machines and we can go back 50 years and warn ourselves. The free market will save us.

48 points by troystribling 12y ago

beat 12y ago

Interesting to dovetail that against the recent top article here that we are reaching the end of the antibiotics era. I hope we have a replacement for fossil fuel when the time comes, but I worry about too much "rational optimism". Tragedy of the Commons is a real thing, and Pangloss was sarcasm, not a role model.

sharemywin 12y ago

I think if you combine vertical farms with nuclear fusion the skies the limit. As long as we can get fusion to work. otherwise we better hope solar and battery prices drop enough to leave coal in the dust.

whythehellnot 12y ago
Our environment can't handle the damage by the time we get fusion to be useful for us or solar/battery become efficient/cost effective. We need to be thinking for today, as in right friggen now. Everyone I have ever seen or heard talk about this issue is always proposing the solution won't be too far away because of X. NO IDIOT. We have the technology to stop all this right bloody now! One of which is so overlooked it's offensive. Latest Gen Nuclear fission should be replacing coal plants en-mass. The fact that it's not is so disheartening that I just want every coal lobbyist to choke on his own toxic waste...

jal278 12y ago

There's a seemingly reasonable fallacy embedded in the argument that so far technology has been able to dig us out of the holes that it itself digs: That past performance is indicative of the future. Of course, the past often does predict the future -- yet, we can't bank on it, because there are sometimes qualitative shifts, and exceptions. The problem with hoping that technology will solve climate change before it happens, is that we're gambling something we can't afford to lose. So, it may well be the case that we do solve the problem -- but what if we don't? There are limits to technology, after all. To me, the danger in placing excessive faith in technology is that it can bypass our critical thinking. For example, right now our own technology (nuclear weapons, or biological weapons as that technology develops) is the greatest threat to humanity's existence. So while technology is a great thing, it may well be our species undoing rather than its savior -- at least until (if) we survive long enough to colonize other planets or enhance our own morality such that we can handle the responsibility our technology demands.

polemic 12y ago
Good analysis. I like to think that it's a bit like investing in a vehicle that may or may not be a ponzi scheme. It's worked so far, but that doesn't mean you bet the house on it.
mikeash 12y ago
This is indeed a problem. If there is an event which causes the extinction of humanity, then by definition we will not find a parallel event in the past to use for prediction. Yet to conclude that humanity will never go extinct is ridiculous. It's only going to happen once. There's also another problem from the opposite direction. Resources have run out plenty of times. Entire civilizations have collapsed because they could no longer sustain themselves, because they used up something important and couldn't find more or come up with a substitute. Yes, peak oil now could end up being like peak stone in the stone age, where there's plenty of it and we move on to better things well before we run out. But peak oil now could also be like peak forest on Easter Island, which resulted in the collapse of civilization there. I don't see anything in this article beyond naked hope for why peak oil must follow the former path rather than the latter. Yes, the history of resource exhaustion is extremely optimistic if you ignore all the times when it led to disaster, but that doesn't tell me anything.
- glenra 12y ago
  The Easter Island story told by Jared Diamond in Collapse is arguably a myth. Do you have any other examples? An alternate view of Easter Island includes these sorts of points: - Forests on Easter Island were largely killed by rats (an invasive species) and to (productively!) clear land for agriculture, not to make statues. - Civilization there grew and persisted and thrived even well after the trees were gone due to human cleverness at finding and making new resources. (The Islanders ate fish and rats and eggs and chickens at that time) - When their civilization eventually collapsed it was because they were pushed. It was due to war and diseases brought by outside invaders who sold a lot of the locals into slavery. Mark Lynas sums up the situation here: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myth-of-easter-islands-ecocide/ http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myth-of-easter-islands-... Jared Diamond, sticking to his guns, responds to Mark: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myths-of-easter-island-jared-diamond-responds/ http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myths-of-easter-island-... Lipo and Hunt in turn respond to Jared's response filling in lots more detail: http://www.evobeach.com/2011/10/diamond-attempts-to-defend-myths-of.html http://www.evobeach.com/2011/10/diamond-attempts-to-defend-m... Leading quote: "Diamond would have readers believe that the majority of archeologists who have studied Easter Island support his thesis. It is simply not true. The new evidence that we and other serious scholars have provided over the past decade not only contradicts the old story that Diamond has so heavily invested in, but has led to a new consensus among the majority of scholars around our work." UPDATE: Okay, now THIS is my favorite thing I found revisiting this old argument. Diamond thinks the statues were moved on logs but Lipo thinks they were "walked" into place upright...and here is a video showing how one does that - walks a multi-ton statue upright using only people and ropes: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/easter-island/walking-statue-video http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/easter-island/walk...

facepalm 12y ago

- Catastrophes happened in the past that killed lots of people. Technology did not always save our ass - Read "Collapse" - What about resources like housing? It sounds to me as if housing in SF has run out? Build lots of skyscrapers everywhere? Then what about sunlight in your apartment?

Kerrick 12y ago
> What about resources like housing? It sounds to me as if housing in SF has run out? Build lots of skyscrapers everywhere? Then what about sunlight in your apartment? I think in a tradeoff of "There's literally no more room for anybody to live," and "I have to go outside to get sunlight," I'd choose the latter.
- facepalm 12y ago
  Sure, but I don't think it really qualifies as "see, science solves every problem". And what if there are houses everywhere? There will be time slots for rooftops. After a certain size of the houses, there will not be enough rooftops for everyone to get sunshine.
- manicdee 12y ago
  I'll take option 3: encourage smaller families and lower fertility rates.

thunderbong 12y ago

Finally. Someone who makes sane and balanced points rather than take a binary position.

mikeash 12y ago
This is about as unbalanced and binary as you can possibly get. That alone doesn't make it wrong, but this article is so far from the middle ground that you'd need a telescope to see it.
- damon_c 12y ago
  "this article is so far from the middle ground that you'd need a telescope to see it." This assumes one is standing on the middle ground. ;)
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Or "it" refers to the middle ground, and you're standing on this article.
beat 12y ago
Ugh, I hate the "balanced" argument for "middle ground". If one person says 2 + 2 = 4 and another says 2 + 2 = 6, the truth is NOT that 2 + 2 = 5.
- Abraln 12y ago
  At least he included multiple positive stories of government interference. If the free market says something nessesary is not worth it, tip the scales to MAKE it worth it. Tax hikes on polluters and non renewables and tax cuts for going free would go a LONG way. Too bad it won't ever happen.
manicdee 12y ago
"If we run out of phosphorous reserves, we can just dredge the rivers of the world to get it back!" Yup, that sounds sane to me. "If we run out of easily accessible gas and oil reserves, we can just destroy the arable farmland of the world to find more!" Yup, perfectly sane. "If we run out of fresh water, we can just recycle sewage and run solar-powered desalination plants." Says the economist who has never looked into the power required to desalinate sea water at the scale required to support a city. Next he'll be saying, "oh, we can just power the desalination plants and hydroponic sheds with nuclear power" (which just means we'll run out of fissile material faster). No mention of 'sustainable production' in his screed at all. There is absolutely nothing sane about that essay. You can't live on money. You need food and water, and for the sake of food security you can't rely on power supplies other than the Sun to grow that food and bring you that water. A nation dependent on its power grid for food and water is ripe for terrorism, industrial sabotage or corporate oligarchy.

mkempe 12y ago

Two fundamental arguments of the thesis that we will not "run out" of natural resources for productive purpose have been made eloquently in: - The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon [1] --the human mind has limitless potential to select and pursue the use of materials; and - Capitalism by George Reisman [2] -- the phenomenon of price responds to actual supply and demand, and prompts profit-seekers to develop and switch production accordingly. [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691003815 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691003815 [2] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0084RU67S http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0084RU67S, see Part One, Chapter 3

coldtea 12y ago
>The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon [1] --the human mind has limitless potential to select and pursue the use of materials Only if those materials exist in the actual world first. So not that limitless after all. (And that's if we indeed accept that the mind's potential is "limitless", which is non-scientific mumbo jumbo). >Capitalism by George Reisman [2] -- the phenomenon of price responds to actual supply and demand, and prompts profit-seekers to develop and switch production accordingly. Says nothing about resources "not running out" -- just about distribution and demand of them, when they are available. A tribe of capitalists in a desert without water would still die of first.
- mkempe 12y ago
  Have you read either or both of these books? you seem to be arguing with straw men.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    I'm arguing with the very phrases used here supposedly to describe the gist of each book. If those are accurate, then there's no point in reading the books at all (like I wouldn't read a book described as "the best arguments why the Earth is flat"). Now the descriptions might not be accurate, and those could be excellent books. But, alas, the only information I have had to judge whether I should read those books comes from the OP introducing them with those descriptions.

ForHackernews 12y ago

Just because things have worked out in the past doesn't mean they always will. Despair might actually be the correct response: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-he-feels-fine.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-th...

ebbv 12y ago

This view is so childish it is only taken seriously by those who already agree with it. > Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered But not before many types of whale were nearly wiped out, and may yet go extinct. > or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, What? Fertilizers have been known for centuries. Modern fertilizers are hardly a panacea. They come with costs of their own. > or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls. This has nothing to do with any of the other arguments, and demand for copper is still high enough that people are stripping it out of vacant buildings via breaking and entering. Risking injury, jail time and even death. > But optimists see economic growth leading to technological change that would result in the use of lower-carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long before it does much harm. It's pretty obvious if you look objectively at the data that "much harm" has already been done. This blog post is the epitome of biased garbage.

restless 12y ago
"Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered But not before many types of whale were nearly wiped out, and may yet go extinct. > or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along" The old correlation!=cause problem...
batmansbelt 12y ago
Not to mention that modern fertilizer is petro-chemical and it is very much limited by the finiteness of those resources.

lasermike026 12y ago

Must man destroy everything?

lavamantis 12y ago
yes. http://www.npr.org/2014/02/12/275885377/in-the-worlds-sixth-extinction-are-humans-the-asteroid http://www.npr.org/2014/02/12/275885377/in-the-worlds-sixth-...
- lasermike026 12y ago
  No. Our species must make the small evolutionary step to change general behavior or die. I am willing to make every ethical change to make that possible and I think I would like to live in that world.
  - lavamantis 12y ago
    You're a bit of an idealist, which I admire. I don't think the human race will die any time soon, but the same can't be said for countless other species of plants and animals that we are CURRENTLY wiping out. Our environment is getting a little crappier every day. I really hope as a whole we can follow your lead and make some changes. But my expectations are low.
  - base698 12y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4 Maybe, it's just the Earth plus plastic.

vsbuffalo 12y ago

> But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed. They will run out one day, but only in the sense that you will run out of Atlantic Ocean one day if you take a rowboat west out of a harbor in Ireland. As an economist, how can the author not see that the hidden environmental costs are growing? As markets demand natural gas within a cost range while resources are limited, the solution becomes to pass this cost off on the environment. The environment doesn't have a powerful advocacy and can't fight back. I am disappointed that economists buy these models so readily without doing real accounting as to all costs. I think this is a problem in modern economics — we can easily measure monetary costs through accounting and prices, but other costs are hard to measure so the model treats them as residuals. Then, they run predictions with their models that completely ignore environmental costs. Don't argue markets don't have a cost on the environment when you've failed to include environmental costs in your models.

beat 12y ago
The author's view is terribly shortsighted. "I'm going to run out of money next month" versus "I'm going to run out of money next year". Same outcome. His fallacy, and it's a common one, is thinking that because the problem may be postponed past his own lifetime, that it doesn't matter. What about a hundred years from now? A thousand? Ten thousand? I for one don't relish leaving my descendants a future in which environmental equilibrium is reached by starving or shooting a few billion surplus people.

znull 12y ago

You want to settle a dispute between economists and ecologists? Ask a physicist: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/about-this-blog/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/about-this-blog/

beat 12y ago
Or ask a cartoon physicist on xkcd. http://xkcd.com/793/ http://xkcd.com/793/

danford 12y ago

So in short: The free market will save us.

marknutter 12y ago
It always has.
- orthecreedence 12y ago
  The world climate is collapsing (hypothetical scenario). The proponents of free market say: "The market will adapt to fix the problems causing climate change!" What really happens: "I've built a mask that lets you breath the Earth's new poisonous atmosphere!" "Well my mask lets you breath twice as much air per minute!!" "My mask does all this !but! shows an interactive map of the next sulfuric acid rain storm so you can find your way to our nearest BioShelter2000. Buy now, and you get a month BioShelter pass, letting you stay for free up to 4 hours per day, including use of the bathroom!"
- mikeash 12y ago
  Not really. Catastrophes have happened before and they will happen again.

sharemywin 12y ago

I think if you combine vertical farms with nuclear fusion the skies the limit.

coldtea 12y ago

"Rational opimist"? Sounds rather dellusional to me, one of those guys that made a religion out of science and/or technology. >"But here's a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again." Yeah, just like Bertrand Russel's inductivist (and rational optimist) turkey: The turkey found that, on his first morning at the turkey farm, he was fed at 9 a.m. Being a good inductivist turkey he did not jump to conclusions. He waited until he collected a large number of observations that he was fed at 9 a.m. and made these observations under a wide range of circumstances, on Wednesdays, on Thursdays, on cold days, on warm days. Each day he added another observation statement to his list. Finally he was satisfied that he had collected a number of observation statements to inductively infer that “I am always fed at 9 a.m.”. However on the morning of Christmas eve he was not fed but instead had his throat cut.

hxrts 12y ago

Time lag is a critical issue that needs to be accounted for. If we assume that innovation will mediate the worst effects of global warming then we neglect the possibility that forcing conditions created today may have consequences that manifest themselves over the next 20 or 50 years. Global warming is not like any problem that humanity has ever had to confront and it's dangerous to wave away the scale and complexity of the problem as something innovation will eventually rectify.

orthecreedence 12y ago
Yes, but the free market will invent time machines and we can go back 50 years and warn ourselves. The free market will save us.