Now where have we read things like this before? Oh, yeah.

The very headline is absurd. For it to make any sense, one must believe that "resources" are some fixed quantity, rather than a product of technology and human ingenuity. Which was of course exactly the same mistake that Dennis Meadows made in "Limits to Growth." Not to mention Paul Ehrlich.

[Update at 2 PM]

Phil Bowermaster has further thoughts. He also has some great SF movie titles. I'll bet these are being optioned as I type.

There are plenty of examples of resources having been used up by societies in the past. The question is whether or not we are better able to deal with the reduction of resources and the like than they were.

The answer is almost certainly yes. But it is still valid to point these things out.

While it is not accurate I have this image of you being prepared to blog something similar even if you lived on Easter Island in the 16th century.

You, like Ehrlich and Meadows and the latest doom'n'gloomers continue to miss the point. The Easter Islanders didn't have a technology base on which to draw and create the resources they needed. They also probably didn't have anything resembling a market system to allocate resources and price things accurately. Modern civilization (and particularly the West) does.

I was careful to say that the comparison was not accurate so don't misrepresent me Rand. Thanks.

Certain resources we can substitute, (I think "create" is a highly misleading word to use here), if not replace. It's not clear to me at the moment if that's ideal. Nor am I convinced the market is all powerful in this context. Reading "Why Societies Chose to Fail" by Jared Diamond, the "market" has been responsible for some environmental disasters in Montana and other parts of the US which the public sector, i.e. the tax payers are going to be paying for for a long time.

While over time we can solve anything, I do fear for the short term issues which things that certain societies and markets are doing will prove to be an undue cost on everybody. China's massive dam and river divergence projects for example, or the market's inability to avoid over fishing as another.

Neither China or overfishing are market failures. Rather, they're failures to apply the market.

*sigh* there you go again, I didn't suggest China had anything to do with market failures.

Could you explain your fishing comment please.

If China isn't about market failures, then I'm not sure what your point is, other than perhaps they will make themselves another Easter Island. That seems unlikely to me somehow. My fishing comment relates to the fact that we have a tragedy of the commons, because no one has assigned property rights to the fisheries.

Dennis Wingo quotes the World Wildlife Federation to say we need 2 or 3 planets worth of resources to give all 6 or 7 billion of us a decent standard of living.

Okay, fine. Lets start with lunar mining and NEO mining and use these exact same theories to provide the justification for going and doing it.

Lunar mining will promote clean air and water on Earth. Seems like a politically astute way to widen the base of support for space exploration.

Neither China or overfishing are market failures. Rather, they're failures to apply the market.

Rand is 100% correct.

IMHO, pollution is another example where externalities are not properly factored into the market equation.

If a childless man fells the last tree on Easter Island why should he care about the suffering of future generations? Our current market system ignores such externalities.

= ==

In essence, the polluters are stealing from me and my children. ;-)

I find your general attachment to the market in these circumstances to be rather naive. Without even trying I can think of lots of reasons why the market is quite irrelvent to a lot of these things and it's not just to do with the tragedy of the commons.

"Tragedy of the Commons" is also too simple to describe what actually happens in essentially private regional in-shore fisheries.

Interesting comments.

Actually, it's anybody's guess if the sky is falling or not. I'm not that much of an eco-catastrophist, but I am familiar with the Mayan example. Basically, the Maya were factionalized in hundreds of competing city-states (each home to rival lineage factions). They competed through warfare and displays of wealth, all of which was fueled by solar energy collected mainly through maize agriculture. Over time they developed elaborate technologies to maximize agricultural yields.

Unfortunately, their maximization strategies ran into diminishing returns. That and short term gains started coming at the expense of long-term productivity. The nasty thing about this is that you *had* to maximize for the short term, because if you didn't, you'd get beaten by a rival (and maybe sacrificed!). Even if you wanted to be "sustainable" you couldn't, since you'd lose in the short term.

We actually do see lots of evidence for soil erosion, poor nutrition, and intensified competition (wealth and war) immediately before the Maya collapse.

Good reasons for space and other tech investments to find new ways to fund competition! (World government won't help, competition and competitive escalation will still happen).

My 2 cents.

Interesting comments.

Actually, it's anybody's guess if the sky is falling or not. I'm not that much of an eco-catastrophist, but I am familiar with the Mayan example. Basically, the Maya were factionalized in hundreds of competing city-states (each home to rival lineage factions). They competed through warfare and displays of wealth, all of which was fueled by solar energy collected mainly through maize agriculture. Over time they developed elaborate technologies to maximize agricultural yields.

Unfortunately, their maximization strategies ran into diminishing returns. That and short term gains started coming at the expense of long-term productivity. The nasty thing about this is that you *had* to maximize for the short term, because if you didn't, you'd get beaten by a rival (and maybe sacrificed!). Even if you wanted to be "sustainable" you couldn't, since you'd lose in the short term.

We actually do see lots of evidence for soil erosion, poor nutrition, and intensified competition (wealth and war) immediately before the Maya collapse.

Good reasons for space and other tech investments to find new ways to fund competition! (World government won't help, competition and competitive escalation will still happen).

My 2 cents.

Jerry Pournelle wrote a great counter argument to the Limits to Growth report entitled "Survival with Style". It look at the effect of mining a medium size Iron/nickel asteroid. Wish I could find it on line, but I read it in one of his anthologies "A step further out"

What I read of Limits to Growth suggested that it was a throughput problem more than a resource problem. Limited resources could be a problem if no revolution occurs to change usage habits, but revolutions don't similarly reduce the resources passing through the pipes, so to speak. We don't have to grow and distrbute as much hay now that we have cars instead of horses, but we are still distributing other resources. The pipes themselves become a type of resource too.

I'm not a doom-and-gloomer though. While I am concerned that space exploitation will create long supply line situations, I think we are pretty smart and will solve the problems. Some things that don't need to be on Earth will move and the incentives will be enough to make it happen.

Shawn, I read that same essay by Pournelle. He pointed out that, assuming minimal quality ore (when the available evidence is thats its a higher grade), and desiring only asteroids that would meet the entire worlds metal supply for a year, that there were over one hundred thousand suitable asteroids. He also made some excellent points about how to reduce population. As he put it, none of the Four Horseman reduce population growth in any significant way. The only factor proven to cut back population growth is wealth. For wealth to be created, resources must be discovered, developed and consumed.

Ha! What a bunch of stinking hooey.

I'd like to posit a rarely articulated theory: Ecosystems are NOT fragile. Set off a nuclear bomb, like in Hiroshima, and guess what? A few days/months/years later there is a thriving ecosystem at ground zero. Same with massive oil spills, toxic waste dumps, etc.

What's really nice about ecosystems is that they are very, very, very non-fragile because they are adapting and self correcting.

As for humans using up resources, I thought we had moved beyond that falacy hundreds of years ago. It is hardly worth my time to comment at this point. Free markets, tragedy of the commons, substitution, technological inovation; google them and learn. The net net is that while it is possible for some things to become rare and uneconomically expensive, people learn to moderate their comsumption or substitute other things (either known or newly invented).

Empirical data however, shows the vast, vast majority of raw materials becoming more available, at cheaper prices even as we use more and more of them. How can this be, you ask? Well there are two major reasons. One, technology to produce/extract resources is improving much more rapidly than consumpion, and two, the wealth available to us makes everything seem very cheap. Those are the facts -- get used to it.

Will cheap oil become more rare and not so cheap eventually? Yes. That is true. We already know of many other energy sources (and we use them in some limited cases). Solar, Wind, Oil sands, Nuclear, etc, etc. When oil is no longer dirt cheap, these other sources will be used more heavily. And it won't take any gov't actions to make the transition either.

Nothing to cluck about henny-penny.

I would grant that the world has serious environmental problems.
However, consider their origins.
The most massive environmental damaged is caused by societies that are poor or misgoverned (very often both).
Look at the massive stripping of trees and bushes caused by people from African refugee camps scouring the countryside for firewood.
Or the deforestation of tropical areas due to lack of secure property rights, government corruption, large-scale criminality and small-scale desperation.
The best cure for environmental degradation is obvious from the history of the West: wealth via markets and technology, government accountability, and the rule of law.
The route of industrialisation may cause other environmental problems in the short-term, as in China today, Europe and the US during the 19th Century, but these are remediable by the wealth, technology and social advances the process generates.
The Green Dream of a "sustainable, caring, sharing" future means one-way path to a planet of billions of peasants in a zero-sum system. A better recipe for complete environmental catastrophe I cannot imagine.