Really nicely written and researched piece. I wasn’t that surprised that you didn’t find anything that had run out. This is exactly the economics of scarcity. Once something starts to run out, its price goes up so it’s consumed less and the value of finding other less easy to access supplies becomes more worth while.
Maybe you should have read Julian Simon`s books: ultimate resource 1 and 2. He clearly told that in a market economy there is no way you could exhaust 100 % of the good, because the price will increase and a new, maybe more expensive than the old one, will be found. Funniliy enough, then the price could go down. J. Simon bet against P. Ehrlich (the crazy "ecologist") that ten resources chosen by Ehrlich will decrease in prize. And He won the bet.
It happens to oil in the 2010`s, it happened with lithium in the last five years. Also show the folly of charging monopoly prices for something (like China is trying to do with rare earths), you will lose the monopoly and the markets.
In an idealized model, this may be true, but in practical terms it's not necessarily the case. The passenger pigeon for instance was a market resource (people killed and traded it as a food source,) and it went from extreme abundance to total extinction, not because people never reconsidered whether it was a good idea to keep killing them as populations fell, but because their ecological niche turned out to rely on their existing in extremely abundant populations. Once people decided it might be worth making an effort to preserve their population, it was already too late.
Silphium may or may not have gone extinct, we're not sure today what sort of plant it actually was. But the ancients who traded it at least *thought* it became unavailable, and they stopped trading in it because they couldn't find it anymore. At a point where you've reduced the silphium population to a small fraction of what it once was, you might find it economically preferable to use other plants as substitutes (but not necessarily, silphium was said to be effective as a method of birth control, and other plants which could substitute for it in that regard may not have existed, although substitutes for its culinary uses were found.) But silphium was a plant which existed in the wild and was never effectively cultivated, and below a certain population it may also have been unable to persist and gone extinct, without humans ever needing to harvest the last of it.
With goods like minerals, which persist indefinitely whether people make use of them or not, it's unlikely for them ever to be harvested to complete exhaustion. But with goods which exist in some position in an ecosystem, their persistence is not guaranteed if their place in that ecosystem is destabilized.
Fascinating stuff and quite surprising too. I still think Material World is the best book I’ve read for years and often dip into it. I’m quite an avid DIYer and restorer and maybe there’s some interest in a “lost products” series, products that were plentiful but now largely or totally unavailable mostly down to climate concerns over the product constituents or the need for such products has diminished so much that manufacture of them is uneconomic. Solvent-based paints is one thing that springs to mind, 20 years ago they were easy to obtain now much more difficult. I’m still of the opinion that water-based paints are nowhere near the durability of solvent paints and that produces its own problems
It is surprising to me how many people are anxious to jump on the doom and gloom bandwagon when it comes to human utilization of the materials of our planet. This fits with the climate catastrophe ideology, pushing us to revert to the collection of energy from the wind and sun. What we know from your brilliant book and a study of history is that human ingenuity never fails to astound.
This is a different topic, but now that the western world is looking for rare earth metals, it occurs to me that they are associated with uranium ore; and there are piles of uranium tailings which likely contain them in both North America and Australia. Back in the day I doubt REs were extracted, so they are just sitting there, out of the ground. I haven’t heard of any program to use such a resource.
Hi Ed, thanks for this post. Cameron Hepburn, Alex Teytelboym, et al have a working paper that explains this - essentially, the rise in price prevents complete exhaustion. As George said, it's the economics of scarcity in action. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4457854
It's one of those matters of precise definition, isn't it? We do make plenty of sodium aluminum fluoride by synthetic means to do the job . . . but the reason we do that seems to be that, after decades of looking, we never found another good mine for the stuff.
(In a slightly-alternate world where the Greenland mine was never discovered, does aluminum limp along for decades as an important but rather more expensive, and thus less-used, metal? Until maybe some chemist comes along in the 1970s and accidentally discovers that sodium aluminum fluoride makes a great flux?)
This is fascinating, and not at all obvious (as some other commenters are suggesting), since, as you point out, many animal species have gone extinct. If there were some universal principle that resource exhaustion is impossible, then the great auk would still exist.
Excellent article - thank you Ed. I too found your Material World book an unusually riveting read. You present us with facts, not an entrenched position. Your writing style is also exceptional - I've had to put quite a few books aside on account of the fascinating material being obscured by turgid and tiring text. I'm delighted to have recently discovered your substack.
Best wishes for Christmas and the new year, and I look forward to what is to come.
I have heard mumblings that humans have run out of "old growth lumber", but I've never investigated the veracity of those claims. Not a mineral, and not necessarily something that would cause any sort of economic shortage, but I wonder if that's something that you looked into at all.
Interesting. Don't know. Quite a lot of pieces about various wood shortages over past centuries have turned out to be (probably) apocryphal so it might fall into the same category. Anton Howes had a good substack piece on wood/coal which is worth looking up
I guess this isn't technically a shortage, as much as it is a decline in quality. I don't think anyone's running out of material but I keep hearing from disparate sources that the "wood just isn't as good anymore" since all the 200 year old trees have been felled and replaced with 50 year old trees.
The relative price of extraction is probably the more interesting and important thing for humans. The return on energy invested in many materials is changing, and given energy as a/the master resource that means the price.
We won’t “run out” of many things, but we may well run out of the energy to get them - at least relatively to the alternative uses of the same energy.
I should caveat that, because much like many materials, we won’t actually “run out of energy“. It is only a question of whether we decide not to use certain types of energy because the consequential pollution would negate any benefits. However, on the current trajectory, we will be setting fire to coal seams underneath the North Sea rather than making a proactive election not to damage the atmosphere further.
If that is true we have no problem whatsoever. Because the Earth is like an enormous fireball, enclosed by a thin crust, with a geo-reactor in its core that continuously produces heat. Around this sits a cosmic oven that stores it all, and which, astonishingly close to the surface, safely forms an inexhaustible source of energy.
Well you can dream Peter, fantasies cost nothing, and then there’s Hopium, but whatever, "Anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist." — Sir David Attenborough
I'm a petroleum engineer whose career has focused mostly on using technology to extract hydrocarbons from poorer, and poorer still, quality reservoirs. It turns out that the poorer the reservoir, the MUCH larger amount of resource exists. So if we have X amount of high quality stuff, we have 1 MILLION times more of mediocre stuff, and 1 MILLION times more (i.e. a trillion times) still of low quality stuff.
This isn't just the case with hydrocarbons, but also of many other things that are mined (copper, iron, coal, gold, uranium, lithium, etc). The amount in place in low quality reservoirs and ore bodies is very large. Historically we only tapped the highest qulity reservoirs (oil and gas) and ore bodies (mining).
Really nicely written and researched piece. I wasn’t that surprised that you didn’t find anything that had run out. This is exactly the economics of scarcity. Once something starts to run out, its price goes up so it’s consumed less and the value of finding other less easy to access supplies becomes more worth while.
There are a bunch of beautiful graphs in "Limits to Growth" that show this trend.
Maybe you should have read Julian Simon`s books: ultimate resource 1 and 2. He clearly told that in a market economy there is no way you could exhaust 100 % of the good, because the price will increase and a new, maybe more expensive than the old one, will be found. Funniliy enough, then the price could go down. J. Simon bet against P. Ehrlich (the crazy "ecologist") that ten resources chosen by Ehrlich will decrease in prize. And He won the bet.
It happens to oil in the 2010`s, it happened with lithium in the last five years. Also show the folly of charging monopoly prices for something (like China is trying to do with rare earths), you will lose the monopoly and the markets.
Thanks Cesar; the Simon - Ehrlich bet features in Material World!
In an idealized model, this may be true, but in practical terms it's not necessarily the case. The passenger pigeon for instance was a market resource (people killed and traded it as a food source,) and it went from extreme abundance to total extinction, not because people never reconsidered whether it was a good idea to keep killing them as populations fell, but because their ecological niche turned out to rely on their existing in extremely abundant populations. Once people decided it might be worth making an effort to preserve their population, it was already too late.
Silphium may or may not have gone extinct, we're not sure today what sort of plant it actually was. But the ancients who traded it at least *thought* it became unavailable, and they stopped trading in it because they couldn't find it anymore. At a point where you've reduced the silphium population to a small fraction of what it once was, you might find it economically preferable to use other plants as substitutes (but not necessarily, silphium was said to be effective as a method of birth control, and other plants which could substitute for it in that regard may not have existed, although substitutes for its culinary uses were found.) But silphium was a plant which existed in the wild and was never effectively cultivated, and below a certain population it may also have been unable to persist and gone extinct, without humans ever needing to harvest the last of it.
With goods like minerals, which persist indefinitely whether people make use of them or not, it's unlikely for them ever to be harvested to complete exhaustion. But with goods which exist in some position in an ecosystem, their persistence is not guaranteed if their place in that ecosystem is destabilized.
Fascinating stuff and quite surprising too. I still think Material World is the best book I’ve read for years and often dip into it. I’m quite an avid DIYer and restorer and maybe there’s some interest in a “lost products” series, products that were plentiful but now largely or totally unavailable mostly down to climate concerns over the product constituents or the need for such products has diminished so much that manufacture of them is uneconomic. Solvent-based paints is one thing that springs to mind, 20 years ago they were easy to obtain now much more difficult. I’m still of the opinion that water-based paints are nowhere near the durability of solvent paints and that produces its own problems
It is surprising to me how many people are anxious to jump on the doom and gloom bandwagon when it comes to human utilization of the materials of our planet. This fits with the climate catastrophe ideology, pushing us to revert to the collection of energy from the wind and sun. What we know from your brilliant book and a study of history is that human ingenuity never fails to astound.
This is a different topic, but now that the western world is looking for rare earth metals, it occurs to me that they are associated with uranium ore; and there are piles of uranium tailings which likely contain them in both North America and Australia. Back in the day I doubt REs were extracted, so they are just sitting there, out of the ground. I haven’t heard of any program to use such a resource.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/uranium-from-rare-earths-deposits
It’s beyond me to follow this up, but a possible subject for a future post?
Very interesting, nice writeup. I did a similar, but less in-depth / well-researched investigation a while ago and came to a similar conclusion: https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/catastrophic-resource-shortages
Ah fascinating! Thanks Jason
Hi Ed, thanks for this post. Cameron Hepburn, Alex Teytelboym, et al have a working paper that explains this - essentially, the rise in price prevents complete exhaustion. As George said, it's the economics of scarcity in action. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4457854
Thanks Sugandha hope you're well
what about cryolite? i think the only commercially useful mine was in greenland, and ran out in the 80s
It's one of those matters of precise definition, isn't it? We do make plenty of sodium aluminum fluoride by synthetic means to do the job . . . but the reason we do that seems to be that, after decades of looking, we never found another good mine for the stuff.
(In a slightly-alternate world where the Greenland mine was never discovered, does aluminum limp along for decades as an important but rather more expensive, and thus less-used, metal? Until maybe some chemist comes along in the 1970s and accidentally discovers that sodium aluminum fluoride makes a great flux?)
I love your honesty.
You might write a different series about material substitutions. My guess is that you will find a huge amount of writing material there.
This is fascinating, and not at all obvious (as some other commenters are suggesting), since, as you point out, many animal species have gone extinct. If there were some universal principle that resource exhaustion is impossible, then the great auk would still exist.
Excellent article - thank you Ed. I too found your Material World book an unusually riveting read. You present us with facts, not an entrenched position. Your writing style is also exceptional - I've had to put quite a few books aside on account of the fascinating material being obscured by turgid and tiring text. I'm delighted to have recently discovered your substack.
Best wishes for Christmas and the new year, and I look forward to what is to come.
Wonderful to hear. Thank you Ian
I have heard mumblings that humans have run out of "old growth lumber", but I've never investigated the veracity of those claims. Not a mineral, and not necessarily something that would cause any sort of economic shortage, but I wonder if that's something that you looked into at all.
Interesting. Don't know. Quite a lot of pieces about various wood shortages over past centuries have turned out to be (probably) apocryphal so it might fall into the same category. Anton Howes had a good substack piece on wood/coal which is worth looking up
I guess this isn't technically a shortage, as much as it is a decline in quality. I don't think anyone's running out of material but I keep hearing from disparate sources that the "wood just isn't as good anymore" since all the 200 year old trees have been felled and replaced with 50 year old trees.
The relative price of extraction is probably the more interesting and important thing for humans. The return on energy invested in many materials is changing, and given energy as a/the master resource that means the price.
We won’t “run out” of many things, but we may well run out of the energy to get them - at least relatively to the alternative uses of the same energy.
I should caveat that, because much like many materials, we won’t actually “run out of energy“. It is only a question of whether we decide not to use certain types of energy because the consequential pollution would negate any benefits. However, on the current trajectory, we will be setting fire to coal seams underneath the North Sea rather than making a proactive election not to damage the atmosphere further.
If that is true we have no problem whatsoever. Because the Earth is like an enormous fireball, enclosed by a thin crust, with a geo-reactor in its core that continuously produces heat. Around this sits a cosmic oven that stores it all, and which, astonishingly close to the surface, safely forms an inexhaustible source of energy.
Well you can dream Peter, fantasies cost nothing, and then there’s Hopium, but whatever, "Anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist." — Sir David Attenborough
“Something Has Got To Give - Prof. Tim Garrett in Ecosophia - Collapse and Regeneration” https://youtu.be/3Lc8GD-39Us?si=tdLgb4a9228hGtY1 🤔
I'm a petroleum engineer whose career has focused mostly on using technology to extract hydrocarbons from poorer, and poorer still, quality reservoirs. It turns out that the poorer the reservoir, the MUCH larger amount of resource exists. So if we have X amount of high quality stuff, we have 1 MILLION times more of mediocre stuff, and 1 MILLION times more (i.e. a trillion times) still of low quality stuff.
This isn't just the case with hydrocarbons, but also of many other things that are mined (copper, iron, coal, gold, uranium, lithium, etc). The amount in place in low quality reservoirs and ore bodies is very large. Historically we only tapped the highest qulity reservoirs (oil and gas) and ore bodies (mining).
Julian Simon won a bet on this.
uncredited photo ... SeongJoon Cho [Bloomberg] ...