OPINION
It’s the constant litany of the Cult of Gaia: “You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet.” Ever since Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb, the green-left have been consumed by an almost fanatical Malthusianism.
But is it all just so much bullshit?
In a famous case of Malthusian egg-on-face, the godfather of modern green apocalypticism, the ever-wrong Paul Ehrlich, made a bet with economist Julian Simon that the price of a mutually agreed selection of scarce resources would rise over the next decade. Ehrlich lost.
But being wrong about nearly everything has never dampened the Jeremiad zeal of Ehrlich and his legion of green-left acolytes. Still, doesn’t it at least make sense that the Earth has to run out of resources some day?
Just as Thomas Malthus was wrong in the 18th century, his descendants may be just as wrong today.
The world’s population has increased eightfold since 1800, and standards of living have never been higher. Despite increases in consumption, and contrary to the prophecies of generations of Malthusians, the world hasn’t run out of a single metal or mineral. In fact, resources have generally grown cheaper relative to income over the past two centuries. Even on the largest cosmic scale, resources may well be limitless.
If the Malthusians were right, then resources should have grown more expensive as more and more people consumed more and more of them. But the exact opposite has happened.
How is this possible?
How can a growing population expand resource abundance? Some of the ways are well known. Consider increased supply. When the price of a resource increases, people have an incentive to find new sources of it. Geologists have surveyed only a fraction of the Earth’s crust, let alone the ocean floor. As surveying and extracting technologies improve, geologists and engineers will go deeper, faster, cheaper and cleaner to reach hitherto untouched minerals.
Not only have we got better at finding stuff, we’ve got more and more efficient at using it.
Efficiency gains also contribute to resource abundance. In the late 1950s an aluminum can weighed close to three ounces. Today it weighs less than half an ounce. That smaller mass represents considerable environmental, energy and raw-material savings. Market incentives motivated people to search for opportunities or new knowledge to reduce the cost of an input (aluminum) to produce a cheaper output (a Coca-Cola can). Technological improvement drives a continual process whereby we can produce more from less.
Technological innovation also means that we can do infinitely more with vastly less.
For centuries spermaceti, a waxy substance found in the heads of sperm whales, was used to make the candles that provided light in people’s homes. Long before the whales might have run out, we switched to electricity. Are you worried about having enough lithium to power all those electric vehicles on the road? Quick-charging sodium-ion batteries are already on the horizon. There is far more sodium than lithium on or near the surface of the Earth.
We’re living in an era of dematerialization. Not long ago, every hotel room in the US was equipped with a thick blue copper cable to connect the guest’s laptop to the internet. Nowadays guests use Wi-Fi – no cables necessary. Likewise, the smartphone has minimized, if not eliminated, the need for paper calendars, maps, dictionaries and encyclopedias as well as for metal or plastic radios, cameras, telephones, stereos, alarm clocks and more.
Ah, but, the doom-sayers retort, what about all the phosphorus we need to grow food? What about metals?
Apparently these clowns never did basic chemistry at school. Phosphorus, aluminium, iron, copper and magnesium are all elements.
Perhaps less appreciated is that apart from a minuscule amount of aluminum and titanium that we have shot into outer space, all of our material resources are still here on Earth. Vast quantities of steel may have been ‘used’ to build our skyscrapers, and copper in power cables, but all that metal could be recovered and reassigned. During World War II, 14,000 tons of silver in the US Treasury’s West Point Bullion Depository were made into silver wire for electromagnets as part of the Manhattan Project. Virtually all of it was eventually returned […]
Long before humans have extracted all the useful atoms in the Earth’s crust and oceans, we will develop the technological sophistication to obtain vastly more atoms and energy from asteroids, planets and beyond. In that future, just as has always been the case, the only bottleneck will be the rate at which new knowledge can be created.
The Wall Street Journal
And if history teaches us anything, it’s that you should never, ever, underestimate human ingenuity.