<DrumBeat: November 21, 2008 The Oil Drum Cars or Wind Turbines? Time to Choose ?>

297 comments on An Overlooked Detail - Finite Resources Explain the Financial Crisis

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sofistek on November 21, 2008 - 3:31am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

What? Was this a sarcastic remark? No-one will get around the resource problem - that's nature for you. The only slight possibility is that someone figures out how to live on other planets or how to extract resources from other worlds, at no net resource cost and with no impacts on our habitat.

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MrMambo on November 21, 2008 - 9:39am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

There are possible solutions to the resource problem. The keywords are renewable energy and recycling, and ecosystem preservation.

One can probably extend material growth on this planet for hundreds of years if:
1) The energy system is converted to 100% sustainable energy or we develop fusion power
2) All material gods that are desposed get either fylly recycled into raw materials that can be used again, or they are part of a ecosystem loop where the waste is sent to the ecosystem in a form and a quantity so that the ecosystem is able to sustainably reproduce the original resource.
3) The footprint of human activity dos not surpass the carrying capacity of vital ecosystem services needed for the survival of life on this planet. So a preservation of key ecosystems is required.

Theoretically one could imagine that technologists came up with an artificial ecosystem, but not even fully understanding how climate and ocean currents operate we cannot hope to master such technology in the near future.

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The_Dude on November 21, 2008 - 11:23am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Haha, people didn't like my little post. Just because resources as we see them now are looking scarce doesn't mean resources as we know them in the future are "finite". 100 years ago Uranium wasn't a resource. Before the iron age, iron wasn't a resource. Humans have a habit of producing new technology that changes the resource picture as we know it.

Humans have been growing for how many years? My money is on growth. I guess I'm a little more optimistic than this "dark ages" crowd.

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veganmaster on November 21, 2008 - 5:06pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

You are also free to believe the earth is flat, but belief does not make it so. 100 million net resource-sucking, environment-raping humans added to the planet EVERY YEAR. Please tell us "dark agers" how that is sustainable?

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The_Dude on November 21, 2008 - 7:03pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Simple it isn't. Was the DOW at 14000 sustainable? No, it is retracting. Businesses and people will adjust, make smarter decisions and it will eventually grow past 14000.

Obviously population growth at the current rate is unsustainable the way we are currently using resources. Either we find a way to sustain this population growth or it will go down until we reach a point where resource usage matches population growth and growth continues. This doesn't mean the end of long term debt.

When oil is extremely scarce will people fall over and get rid of lending because growth is over? No, they will figure out a way around it and growth will take off again until it is unsustainable, retract and grow again. I just don't see how getting rid of lending would fit into this cycle.

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sofistek on November 22, 2008 - 5:59am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Growth is always unsustainable, The Dude. It will never be sustainable. Sustainable means "able to be sustained". If you need to add, "for some period of time", then add it. Sustainable growth is an oxymoron.

Resources will never be infinite, as your previous post said. Sure, some substitution will occur and maybe even resources thought of as unusable may become usable but, if we haven't already reached there, at some point those substitutions will start to be not quite as useful, not quite as abundant and not quite as easily extracted or processed as the resource it is trying to replace. At some point, we will use, or have used, the best resource for the job, after which, substitutes just won't quite make it.

Also, not all resources considered vital for our societies, or considered vital to maintain growth, will be able to be substituted, or substituted at anywhere near the same utility and scale as the declining resource. So we only need to some vital resource to become scarce for growth to cease for ever (apart from occasional minor spurts, if humans survive). That resource might be topsoil, water, habitable land or some rare metal. It might even be people (since the economy needs consumers, to grow).

The planet is finite. Get used to it. Humans aren't really as smart as you seem to believe.

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Engineer-Poet on November 21, 2008 - 5:19pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

They didn't like your little post because it was decidedly air-headed.  If you'd bother to note the changing nature of "resources" right off, you wouldn't have gathered 7 down-rates.

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dwcal on November 21, 2008 - 5:37pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

If you're talking nuclear fusion, deuterium for fuel may be limitless, but there are countless other bottlenecks. The power plants are built with enormous amounts of steel, concrete and fossil fuel powered construction equipment. If we use the deuterium-tritium reaction like ITER, tritium is another huge bottleneck. Nuclear fission is a mature technology where uranium fuel is a tiny fraction of the operating costs. Fusion will be more of the same, but with even higher costs.

In your example of the Iron Age, iron ore isn't much use without fuel for smelting, i.e. wood. In a resource-constrained world where all the wood is being used for cooking and heating, how do you bootstrap an Iron Age society? I know about the Bronze Age predating the Iron Age. For the sake of this example, say iron smelting needs much higher temperatures with higher fuel consumption and firewood is in short supply.

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297 comments on An Overlooked Detail - Finite Resources Explain the Financial Crisis

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