Prof. Steve Horwitz: Are We Running Out of Resources?
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- Опубликовано: 27 фев 2011
- Prof. Steve Horwitz addresses the common belief that the world is running out of natural resources. Instead, there are economic reasons why we will never run out of many resources. In a free market system, prices signal scarcity. So as a resource becomes more scarce, it becomes more expensive, which incentivizes people to use less of it and develop new alternatives, or to find new reserves of that resource that were previously unknown or unprofitable. We have seen throughout history that the human mind's ability to innovate, coupled with a free market economic system, is an unlimited resource that can overcome the limitations we perceive with natural resources.
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"For example, copper..."
:holds up a zinc penny:
Its a fallacy to claim that oil reserves will continue to grow when the trend of growing oil reserves comes from technological advances of exploration. This can in no way be logically construed that the supply of oil (or copper) are limitless.
*EXCELLENT POINT. Very well said.* The tobacco industry employed shyster dirtbags like this clown “professor” before the Surgeon General’s Warning in the 1960s to spit out false propaganda.
The only resource we are lacking is other people's money.
😂😂😂😂😂 exactly
How to fix pollution
Step
1) Make it profitable
Pollution tax could be profitable for the government the only problem is the government is not being efficient 😂
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No educated person is predicting that resources will run out AKA deplete. Oil will not deplete for a long time.
However, depletion is not the concern peaking is the concern. At some point probably sooner than most people realize world oil production will peak. That is we will be producing the most oil we will ever produce. The up swing of oil production is a good place to be for an expanding population but the down swing is NOT as more people and less oil drastically drives up prices. Every resource has its peak (even the Sun's energy will eventually have a peak but this particular resource is so far off from peaking it's called renewable) as this is a physical property of a finite universe. No one can argue with resource peaking as it's baked right into the laws of thermodynamics. Furthermore for us to use energy we need ordered energy such as oil which is used ONCE by society then it is gone. Our society has to continually tap into new sources of ordered energy because what runs society five minutes from now is different energy from what's running it now. Humans cannot create ordered energy nor can we order energy all we can do is tap into sources of ordered energy (also called thermodynamic free energy). Ordered energy is not like Copper because Copper can be reused. Society, the human body, and all machines and animals are thermodynamic engines running off of ordered energy.
I hate how they say "well society will always figure out a way to fix the problem." This is NOT true. Societies have not always fixed problems and entire societies with a large amount of brains involved can still manage to fuck things up. People have too much reliance on society thinking it's some sort of super creature. It's NOT it's just a whole bunch of humans and it's capable of screwing things up as much as any human can. Putting the problem under the rug and expecting someone else to fix it for you is not the way to go but that's what people expect from society. The only way problems are fixed is if people face those problems. Science is NOT magic and it doesn't always have the answers. Some people think science is magic today because of how many technological advances we have made but we CANNOT guarantee continued advances into the future. In fact the industrial revolution powered by cheap oil and energy allowed society to have the necessary resources to create those advances.
Hey bro thx for typing all of that, but I don't think I have the patient to read it all.
Hope u understand
He isn't just saying that will always find more or be more efficient, but that as we run out or it gets more expensive we will look for alternatives. Which has been shown to be true
This is really based on the assumption that we will always find a way to replace or refill a certain resource but there's always going to be a point when it stops and at the population we have, the technology, and the consumption rate, it's a much more plausible threat than it was 100 years ago.
Not to mention environmental threats that accompany digging up scarce resources.
And even then you can't guarantee that we'll come up with an affordable replacement.
In the video he mentions this with our move from copper to fiber optics. As price goes up, we look for more options (drilling previously too expensive sites OR new technologies). This is why we have seen a larger push for electric cars and hybrids in recent years from varying car brands.
Did he not just make a point against himself with the copper argument? People feared we would run out of copper, but the switch to fibre optic, a more plentiful product, meant that we could continue wiring without fear. Surely this should be the same concept for how we look at energy. Crude Oil will eventually run out, it is a finite resource, no matter how many new deposits we crack into. And so, is it not wise to invest in something more renewable/efficient like nuclear?
psyssi Actually we've been able to create some sort of oil (id remember what kind) but if we continue with these advances, we might just start creating it instead of digging it up. But i do agree that we should start investing more time into nuclear, especially fusion.
psyssi Yup. The best alternative now (for most travel needs) is battery electric vehicles + solar/wind. It is so much cheaper to operate than oil based transportation. Great time to be alive!
psyssi and that's what he said, as people feared the resource of copper would run out, they found an alternative to continue making profit and see expansion. If investors and the company's head itself fear that a resource will be completely depleted, in other words, there are not very many places left where the resource is known to be at any price, they will begin to invest in other resources to act in the original's place.
+psyssi the problem is, does the market decide the switch, or does government fiat/activists decide the switch?
I could write a fiat that we have to breed hoards of hamsters to run on hamster wheels to provide power: after all, hamsters are a renewable resource. Similarly, government can legislate on "belief" and political considerations, rather than letting the market decide on commercial considerations.
+psyssi Nuclear energy isn't renewable. You need minerals like uranium in order to perform nuclear fission.
I Am glad that I stumbled onto this video.
You are right, we are not running out of resources. We are just handing these resources over to the private sector and make people pay money for them.
So we are running out of people with money, not resources.
Yes, when resources are exhausted, prices will soar and only the asshole elites can afford to drive their fancy cars.
This RUclips Channel is Koch Brother funded. Look it up. They know that oil is becoming scarcer and they are having trouble finding oil; They know they will be out of business in the near future so they bribe politicians and lobby to get more subsidies (with our taxes). Ayn Rand likes to say the parasites are the poor and middle class, well, the plutocrats are behaving like parasites.
You lost me at 1:45 when you said "oil reserves grow."
Eventually those resources will run out. You can't deny this fact.
It is a fact ? This isn't a fact for chemistry, like Lavoisier once told. And in a free market society, we learn how to maximize the use of each resource. Maybe we run out someday, who knows. But the absence of capitalism and free markets makes that process faster.
Yeah I think he knows that, but what the message of the video is that the running out part is not so bad because that's the incentive that drives innovation forward. For instance optic fiber is a lot faster and efficient than copper. If copper was virtually limitless we would never need to go out and find something better. Even when oil runs out there will be a huge incentive to discover or use other forms of energy like solar, wind and eventually nuclear fusion. And most resources are never really lost: oil for instance is just ancient organic matter, meaning that all we need to do to recover it is to grow organic matter. This is probably something that will be done in the future with biofuels (most likely algae).
Do you have ANY idea how much oil is in every single thing around you every day of you life, in your home, in your food packaging, in your car, in your furniture, in your tv's computers, clothing, etc, etc, etc? Oil is not simply energy. Energy is one small aspect of what we get from oil. When oil runs out, we can't simply replace it with solar, nuclear, wind etc....sure, we can make up some of the power loss from the absence of oil with those things, but every other aspect of life will be majorly and irreversibly affected by having no oil. Hospitals will not function. Not in the way of any kind of safe practices anyway. How are you going to package food? How are you going to GROW food on a global scale? You won't...that's how. When oil runs out, civilization as we know it comes to an end. But, don't worry about that.....abrupt climate change will put an end to society as we know it LONG before we run out of oil.
Harley, Oil can be replaced with other materials. We use oil, because the tecnology for that is cheaper. When oil prices goes up, that incentives people to find other ways to produce the same goods, like fuel or plastic.
Renan, you are absolutely right, and absolutely wrong. We can replace the energy from oil, with Solar, wind, etc....except for the very fact that the cost benefit ratio is too high to be of any interest to anyone. We personally can replace the energy in our homes with it, but, that's the only real way it's any kind of tangible. And if you're thinking about ethanol...don't. Any report that states that ethanol has a positive energy yield, is full of garbage. Those reports still fail to take into consideration how much fossil fuel energy is used PRE production, during production, and after the production of corn. They don't count the fertilizers, pesticides used, ALL of which come from fossil fuels, they don't consider the amount of fossil fuels used to irrigate the crops, etc, etc, etc. Ethanol will NEVER be a positive energy yield. As for everything else....OK...tell me exactly what we're going to replace everything else with? There is 10...count them 10...fossil fuel energy calories in EVERY single calorie of food you eat. Unless you grow all of your own food...in which case, you might whittle that down to 5 or 6. Want to run cars on hydrogen? OK...great...what are you going to make the tires out of? (And all the moving parts would still need oil by the way) There's 8 gallons of oil in every car tire. There's thousands of gallons used in making a single car, when you take into consideration everything that goes into producing one....even your precious electric cars...which people idiotically believe are a clean energy solution. ( never-mind all the nasty stuff that goes into making and lol...disposing of the batteries) HA! Most electricity in America comes from coal or natural gas. Anyway...got off point there. OK....so...what are we going to replace everything hospitals use every single day with? Everything in a hospital comes from fossil fuels...except for the steel instruments...which of course, use a crap ton of fossil fuels to make in the first place. You literally have ZERO clue just how much fossil fuels have completely overtaken our lives do you? There is nothing, and I literally mean NOTHING, that will replace fossil fuels on the epic global scale in which they are used.Every single thing you touch in your life every day took hundreds, if not thousands of gallons of fossil fuels to get to you....by way of exploration, production, and shipping. And that's just if the thing isn't made out of them to begin with.....which it most likely is... We HAVE passed peak oil....oil production, the last I heard, is DOWN about 9%, and it's not down because of any reduced demand. It's down because of many factors.The main ones being that the stuff that is easy to get is gone, and the stuff we do get, takes longer and is much more expensive to produce. We passed peak oil globally in 2016. (ie, if Saudi Arabia, the worlds largest oil reserves, has so much of it right there in Saudi Arabia, why are they spending tons more money to get it by drilling in the ocean....answer for that is pretty simple....if you can't figure it out, there's no point even having a conversation with you) The earth has been scoured over and over for new reserves....there aren't any. We have run into the era, where we are spending more energy to get the energy source, than the energy that is yielded. Welcome to the end of civilization as we know it. I'd be getting ready if I were you. Prices for everything are going to go through the roof very very soon. You're going to start seeing sporadic shortages of everything from food, to goods, to yes...gas. Altho, gas will be the least affected right away. But, don't take my word for it.....look it up, like I have, and am. Oh...and lmao....that is JUST the economic collapse I'm talking about right now. I won't even begin to go into abrupt climate change.
I ve never heard of that for bio fuel, I did some reaserch thanks to you but I can not find the energy return, do you know it, for each unit of energy used to create the algae and procces it to bio fuel, how much energy you get?
"prices are an incentive wrapped in knowledge"
this is awesome
"What we're doing over time is learning to use resources more efficiently, and finding substitutes for resources as they do begin to deplete." - Steve Horwitz
This guy must have forgotten that there have been more efficient forms of energy production for quite a while now. Like the electric car, hydrogen power, or even much more efficient combustion technologies, due to much more strict European efficiency standards. The main difference between oil and copper, is that the copper industry is not nearly as devious and greedy as the oil industry is. He spoke about how we have found oil in places we didn't know existed due to oil companies being able to afford to look in more expensive areas. Maybe that should be a lesson in understanding how badly we are being ripped off, and how much of a monopoly the oil industry actually is.
First of all, using tags like "greedy" and "evil" to describe actors fosters an unhealthy and ill-informed discussion. Corporations seeks profits, and profits translate to increased production and wealth for societies. Greed yes, but evil no. The founding principle of capitalism is that greed, when used as a proper motivator and controlled for, isn't evil.
Second, your argument that electric vehicles (EVs) are more efficient than conventional internal combustion vehicles (ICVs) is only half true. Yes, they are more efficient in terms of fuel consumption since the cost of recharging a battery from the electric grid is lower than the cost of gasoline. However, there are other factors that contribute to a consumer's definition of "efficiency":
1) EVs have lower range than an ICV of comparable price and size. For people than live in dense urban centers this is not an issue, but for suburban and rural residents this makes EVs less efficient at satisfying their needs. If someone needs to drive farther than 80ish miles per day, EVs are a worse choice for them.
2) EVs are also far more expensive than traditional vehicles, especially at the time of purchase. Studies funded by the federal government have found that, over the lifetime of a typical EV, a consumer pays $14,000 for than he would for an ICV, even with lower fuel costs. The government currently offers tax credits to offset this figure by $7500, but the $6500 difference is still daunting to a typical buyer, especially when most of that will be spent on the showroom floor.
Why are they more expensive? Because the cobalt used in their batteries is amazingly expensive, and because economies of scale do not benefit EV production as it does ICV production. Both these factors can change over time as cobalt substitutes or reserves are found and production scale increases, but at present only subsidies imposed on the market can make them competative with cheaper ICVs.
3) The infrastructure necessary to recharge either EVs or natural gas vehicles (NGVs) isn't established and is very expensive to construct. Because the market for both alternative vehicles is small, companies have little incentive to invest billions in building charging stations for so few customers. Again, only government intervention or a change in consumer behavior can change this incentive structure.
So if you step back from the admittedly inspiring fact that the EV's expense at the pump is a fraction of the ICV, you can see there are a host of other factors that keep them from flying off the shelves. Attributing it to a single malicious actor with a nefarious agenda is an intellectually lazy explanation.
Ekko Foxtrot I didn't say evil. I don't think what oil companies do is evil. I said devious and greedy. Devious because oil companies will use sneaky tactics to prevent competition, with such examples as "Who killed The Electric Car?" (movie, 2006) or "The General Motors streetcar conspiracy". Greedy because they are so reluctant to allow ICVs to surpass a set efficiency specifically in America, as an example "The Future of Diesel in the US: Analysis" [Popular Mechanics].
You are correct about differing EV efficiency for types of people with various needs. However, it should be addressed that the same argument applied in searching for new sources of oil for ICVs can also be applied for EV research. The more money we invest in something, the more we can typically see come out of it. If we invest lots of money searching for more locations to drill for oil that we never knew existed, then the same should apply for EV research providing better efficiency that we didn't know could be achieved. The cost of cobalt, like anything else, is affected by supply and demand. And, as you said, there needs to be an incentive for that ratio to change in order to lower the cost.
The bottom line is that I was surprised that the idea of alternative forms of energy for transportation was not even mentioned in this video. We can talk about the pros/cons of ICVs and EVs... but why isn't it being discussed in the video we're commenting on? After all, the title of this video is "Are We Running Out of Resources", not "Are We Running Out of Oil?"
Travis Ross
Some of those points are fair, but most technologies upon startup are less efficient - especially cost efficient - than existing alternatives because nearly everything improves in efficiency over time. The ICV has had a century to become more efficient, and it has. Advancing fuel efficiency in cars has reduced the demand for crude in the transportation sector quite significantly, and continues to do so.
When you say that "we" should invest more money in EVs, I think we disagree on who "we" is. The free market evolves to meet perceived demand and to exploit profitable opportunities, and in my opinion "we" are the entrepreneurs that think they can sell EVs at competitive prices. The reason EVs have more readily been embraced is primarily that they AREN'T competitive at their current prices. Will that change? Sure, but until they reach parity with ICVs, they won't be replacing them.
If you think "we" is the government, which should sponsor or even mandate electric vehicle research and penalize ICV owners, I think you are allowing government to overstep its intended function. If there is a profit opportunity, "we" - the market - will make it happen. It hasn't happened yet because it isn't profitable...yet. We are talking about oil because it is still, by far, the most efficient resource on the market for making things move. Replacing it with a higher-cost alternative makes no economic sense.
Oil and coal are the most efficient forms of energy, do your research
+theoneleft18 Sure, lets all build cars that run on coal. You must be so brilliant.
This doesn't really do much to reassure me - all it really does is make a good argument that it will take a while for us to run out of resources, not that we won't ever do so, and that's my concern - we need to be living sustainably so that resource exhaustion isn't an issue for us.
The point is: by the time we do actually really run low on a specific resource we would have already found substitutes within other technologies already being developed. Nanotechnology being a very clear example of one.
Frignes is correct, but you're also missing the point that we will never run out of resources. The reason for this is pretty straight forward but so many fail to grasp it and I'm not sure why. If prices are a thing, and they are, then as any resource becomes more scarce, the price will rise to a point that no one would buy - assuming we are actually running out of a resource. There will be a point where no one will want the resource because it is simply too expensive to acquire. And human ingenuity, as Frignes points out, leads us to find alternatives for the resources we are "running out of."
That is not to say we shouldn't live "sustainably," but the price system forces that upon us whether we like it or not. Resources remain "cheap" as long as there is a steady supply to meet demand. As prices rise, due to scarcity, people will adjust their behavior, using less of a given resource due to its cost. Also, many resources are recyclable in that they do not disappear as they are used.
Did I see something that said the amount of oil you could sell per annum was some fraction of the amount of oil you had... this led to everyone vastly over-estimating their oil reserves so they could sell more oil?
It is almost IMPOSSIBLE to ever completely "run out" of any resource! As price naturally rises, usually gradually, substitutes and replacements WILL BE FOUND and put into place! Energy: See change from wood to whale oil, from whale oil to coal, from coal to kerosene, from kerosene to petroleum, etc. This professor is exactly CORRECT! Thank you Dr. Horowitz!
Basically every aspect of this video is wrong.
Using non renewable resources more efficiently does not cut down on the amount that is used per year. Rather, paradoxically, it makes people use the resource even more than they would have.
Equating copper to oil is a really really bad idea. The fiber optic cable is superior in many ways to copper, however, if you take every single source of alternative energy and put it against oil, or coal, these two individually fuel more machines than geothermal, wind, solar, nuclear, etc combined, and each alternative source is either intermittent (wind, solar) requires mining of other non renewable resources (nuclear, solar), or it can only fuel us if we used 200%of the farmland we use today for it (ethanol)
The biggest mistake in the video, though, is the premise. We are running out of both oil and coal. We have used more of them in the past ten years than in all years they have been in use combined. This is because as the global population exponentially increases, there is more need to use highly productive machines to support them, machines which are powered by non renewable resources.
The only thing you need to realize is that we currently use more oil every year than we discover. Don't take my word for it. With the current use of oil, we will need to discover a Saudi Arabia every 3 years to sustain our civilization. Recent 'big finds' of billions of gallons of oil in places like the gulf of Mexico and Alaska only have enough fuel for around 48 days of US oil demand.
Part of the reason that we haven't already run out of oil is that the price of oil is artificially jacked up by OPEC. In effect, by price gauging us for oil, they make the average person use less of it, but this only delays the inevitable.
By the way, the Keystone pipeline would not lower gas prices anywhere in the world for this reason, nor would it make the US oil independant. OPEC controls the price and distribution of oil, and the oil from the pipeline could give us oil to last the world a few weeks at current use. But remember, the population of the world is growing, 255 people a minute, so use is always going up.
Basically, the only answer to these problems is to cut back. So who's first?
+HeartlessGorre Yes, Jevon's Paradox. He knows this and is deliberately lying to lull the sheeple back to sleep, after all they almost woke up when conventional oil peaked in 2005-8! He's also lying about the US peak, US DID peak in 1970-1, this number has never been surpassed, not with Alaska or Shale(though it got bloody close last year because of tight oil/shale), he, of course, fails to mention this!
The problem with his bullshit about the pricing mechanism is that it's shot to shit with all the funny money that the central banks(mainly the Fed) have printed over the last 8 years. It push oil up to very high prices and caused the shale boom/bubble which is now popping. Conventional economic theory would say that high prices would have brought more oil to market, but with the exception of Tar sands and Shale this hasn't been the case. Shale is uneconomic at below about 80-90$ per barrel, witness all the drillers /producers going bankrupt now. A lot more would be but for the Fed practicing maximum forbearance(directive from Atlanta Fed to lenders...).
Lots of nasties on the economic front this year, and the Fed has NOWHERE TO GO!
We need to globalization and look for resources bon other planets & such. We need to work together or we will go back to the stone age.
Furthermore he lies about the price mechanism because the price does NOT reflect the true consequences of oil extracion and consumption (externalities). In Portugal, where I come from, last year we had the most devastating fires since there is record, killing more than one hundred people, and all experts said it was due to global warming, since we never had a peak of heat such as in the last Summer. I ask the author of the video: are my countrymen’s lives reflected in the price that American consumers are paying for the oil?
If your recommending we shrink our population then yes, as resources run out we will nead to find newer ways of doing things but that would stil not Saul the problom because of our growing population and nead for products, one thing that we really nead to cut back on is paper products, we are cutting down trees faster then they can grow witch takes year's and putts a real strain on the environment wen we do it because cutting down trees means mor Carbon being released in to the atmosphere adding to the carbon that millions of cars trucks ships trains ETC. already do, our carbon to oxygen ratio is messed up and it's killing our planet.
The Q not necessarily, but sometimes in order to go forward we have to go back, doing things in the 18th and 19th sentry was mor sustainable like haveing mechanical devices and machines that didn't require things like batteries, gasoline, or electricity to work, sure it may have been work to get those machines to run but I would rather have to work to get what I wanted then to be dependent on those things.
The thrust of his argument is that peak oil is wrong because we'll either:
1) keep finding new sources of oil, forever, or
2) easily find replacements for it
Both of these scenarios are highly unlikely.
He didn't say to wait until resources are "scare" to start searching for new sources of energy. He was talking about PRICES.
When our current system of obtaining energy gets too expensive, only then will companies have a profit incentive to look for energy in places where it was previously TOO EXPENSIVE to look for energy. New reservoirs of energy will be opened up, and our supply of energy will be replenished.
If they did it TOO EARLY, they would lose all their money.
If you believe that the world economy can grow exponentially forever in the world of finite resources, you are either crazy or an economist! haha
That is quite possibly THE most ignorant post I have ever seen in this channel.
Congratulations!
Humor? Never heard of it? Now go and challenge my argument! Tell me, how the world economy can grow forever in the world of finite resources! I might give you a hint for a counterargument if you struggle!
+Martin Růžička technologic advances creates higher productivity and discovering of substitutes
I am absolutely aware of this. So even if this true in general, there is a point where this won't work for us anymore.
You will never replace natural resources like oil with technological substance just to create technology that creates these sbustances are highly depentend on oil lol so if oil runs out civilization will go hundreds years back in time
Sounds like an Economist's view to me
Definitely not a Geologist.
Ignoring any detriment to our natural surroundings, the question comes down to "wait for us to run out of affordable oil (a line different for many people) and assume we'll have a solution before any negative effects take place vs realize what's happening, and create a solution before hand"
this thinking can backfire sometimes. blue tuna is a highly desired fish and on the road to extinction. fishermen are beginning to catch blue tuna and put them in freezers for storage. as the tuna move closer to extinction the price will rise and the fishermen will make even more money. they then can either retire or move on to whales or rhino horns or elephant tusks.
Couldn't have put it better myself. Thanks for putting this video up.
Isn't global climate change more pressing?
+Bob “Bobsiken” Olsemann Isn't global climate change more pressing than what?
+Learn Liberty Presumably, more important than resource depletion.
+Bob “Bobsiken" Olsemann From the point of view of Horowitz's utopian fundamentalism, nothing matters ultimately, but the growth of capital. What the Austrian subalterns of Neoclassical economists idealize is a set of doctrines that embrace the logic of growth for the sake of growth, which also happens to be the ideology of a cancer. It is hardly coincidental that corporately funded university Economics departments put robes on goofs like this and award them PhD's while fundamentalism is on the rise worldwide.
The best odds for unchecked growth until the moment of collapse is is to to mythologize growth as a force of nature or the will of God while guided by the cynical premise, that when we finally destroy the source of all resources there will be no one left to tell the tale. Economists are simply answering the market's imperatives by attempting to short circuit our capacity to recognize the evidence of ongoing catastrophe by positing disaster as another growth industry. Economist Joseph Schumpeter described the esthetic beauty of Horowitz's suicide pact with market fundamentalism, as a, "perennial gale of creative destruction.". What's up here is that Horowitz would rather bite his tongue off than allow us to exercise the political will to stop the destruction and reject the logic he embraces as inexorable, by rejecting his religion and finally facing reality.
How would Uncle Sam preserve his petrodollar system then, if, such as in copper, Mankind would find good alternatives for oil?
The video wasn't about climate change. It was about resource depletion.
Do the phrases "tragedy of the commons" and "negative externality" mean anything to you?
Question, at the end he says that getting new energy resources would be discovered faster if free competition were to be allowed instead of "restricting their use." Not that I believe this is a good idea, but if you taxed oil (for example) a lot, wouldn't it make it less and less profitable to the point where say (for example) solar energy was more profitable? (to get rid of it) Wouldn't doing the opposite of letting things go freely and compete actually result in alternative more profitable resources/methods? (Again, just a question, not politically charged)
This video is misleading. Just because you're finding more oil in different places doesn't mean that you will not eventually run out. Another thing to consider is population increase over the last century or so. In 1900, the population was only around 1.2 billion people. Today, we have around 7.5 billion. Our use of fossil fuels is also exponentially increasing. Yes, we will run out, and we have more efficient technology, but there isn't money in that. So oil companies are postponing it as long as possible. Problem is, we need those resources in the ground. This is a real issue that is being avoided with clever use of semantics here.
it might last till 2200 A.D.
it won't last forever
Anyone that believes there can be an infinitely growing economy in a world of finite resources is either a madman or an economist
You’re forgetting about space. An infinitely growing economy would not be strictly confined to one world. There are way more untapped resources out in space that we don’t even know about yet and the universe is practically infinite.
is food (like fish) considered a natural ressource as well in this model?
We are still running out of resources, but we keep finding new ways to limit or stop using those raw materials. That's what he is actually telling us. But eventually we will run out of earth's natural resources.
Unsuscribed.
0:23 ...In fact we are not running out of resources ......0:33 as they DO begin to DEPLETE
nice contradiction
There is no contradiction. Resources began to deplete, so people find new sources and alternatives.... which means we do not run out.
There are currently companies looking into mining resources from asteroids. So even if the resources on earth begin to 'deplete' this does not imply that we will inevitably 'run out' of resources.
The point that you missed though was that we find other sources as the product becomes less affordable. We can't just stop using oil all of a sudden. As oil becomes more expensive consumers are less enthusiastic about paying for it. When consumers don't want to pay the price, alternatives are found. Hybrid cars, ethanol, etc.
His argument is basic economics, never does he assert a finite resource will be magically "infinite" but that as prices go up more exploration becomes profitable, and more reserves are found. Once it is so expensive to explore that searching for new reserves becomes economically unfeasible, the market moves on, new technology is developed, the old is abandoned...ie. copper vs fiber-optic telephone wires.
"we are not running out of resources - what we are doing overtime is learning how to use resources more efficiently"
why would we bother about efficiency is we are not running out of it anyway?
Haha, I was going to mention flaws in the line of thinking in this video, but the existing comments are doing that for me.
Why do you think that? Do you have some numbers to back it up?
Its easy to say that if someone wants a commodity to just pay market price for it because its scarce. Its a different story to let people get harmed or die because they have the inability to pay the market price for food and water. People cannot just become more efficient at using basic necessities.
You really need to listen to the whole movie. He makes a point that technology can increase a supply of a resource, but can also replace one. That is why he gave the copper example with phone lines and how it was replaced with fiber optics made from sand. We'll probably be using new sources of energy like solar, before we run out of oil.
It is sad the negative comments section. Please take attention from 3:41. When resources are scarce the prices goes up, and produces will try to found alternative of substitute of the resource. He does not say resources are infinite.
So, is it the case that, in a sense, using subsidies to promote production might have the opposite effect, decreasing the incentive to explore?
What exactly do you mean 100% pure electric? How would you generate this electricity?
this professor just explained how we are depleting our resources . EXPONENTIAL GROWTH !! just because we keep finding more more and more of it does not mean we have a never ending supply. all the low hanging fruit is gone, we are using all our great technology to keep up with our exponential growth.
The point is this, that as the price increases, it becomes more profitable to seek alternatives. Eventually two things will happen. First that oil will become so expensive, that no one can afford it, it will reach a ceiling, at this point the producers can't jump to the next level of cost to produce. Say the max anyone will pay is $200, and all the reserves are only $201+. At this point it will no longer be profitable to use oil. However the cost of fuel cells is $199, so we switch.
So, it might be that resource depletion is not happening right this instant, but given the fact that this is indeed a finite planet, doesn't that mean that in the future, even if it's a far future, resources WILL eventually be depleted? Could someone explain this to me?
Yes, and if you watched the video thoroughly he also suggests that a market with no restrictions, once the price of oil begins to rise due to depletion, will incentivise competition for producers to provide something better and at a cheaper price. So "we" don't need to do anything besides not getting stressed about this for no reason and being a part of competitive market.
As an economist and a fan of facts, this video makes my skin crawl.
Sure that works for oil but what about helium, beach sand and phosphorus?
Even using the video's example of copper, the solution to the shortage was not to create the vague idea of a "more free market" it was to pursue alternative and more sustainable technologies. This is why we need to find substitutes for oil in our economy in the form of solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear power sources.
Furthermore, this also works in the oppose direction. If you bought land near a factory, you wouldn't get the compensation like what the original owner received, as you knew before hand that the land was near a factory. So, people also wouldn't build houses near factories. And there you have zoning, using a free market system.
Wind?? do you know how many wind mills it would take to run a city? what happens if your wind stops blowing in the middle of summer?
I like that your being optimistic regardless of your credibility
I get his point, but also the video should be retitled "A series of arguments that don't answer the question". Also, when will this be published in a good physics journal?
Thank you for the information, kind sir.
What we really need to do is find out how do use our byproducts as energy/turn them into energy, because the law of conservation of matter says that nothing can just disappear, it just changes into another form. We aren't destroying resources, just turning them into something else
Great video, raises many great points, to summarize: Natural resources are not running out because they haven't been depleted so far, even though science has stated it is a FACT that things such as oil are NON-renewable resources.
Gotcha. What an intelligent man he is.
I also believe that the free market can decide what's best
ONCE you remove all subsidies in energy
ONCE you internalize all external (hidden) costs
ONCE nuclear starts paying full insurance
at the moment there is no free market in energy. That's what I am trying to tell :)
Doesn't mean we are going to have the resources forever because eventually we won't be able to find anymore.
The copper example is a bad one since most copper is used not for data transmission but power transmission (in greater quantities).
I agree
A post-scarcity economy will eliminate the worries about running out of resources but that will only be achieved when we learn how to manipulate the atomic structure of chemical elements and produce whichever ones we need and how much of them we need and also find ways to produce lots of matter out of energy.
He forgot to talk about how technology allows us to be more efficient with the resources so smaller and smaller amounts allow for more uses. Something I think most economic theorist just don't take into account.
Well, in a nutshell, he said, "Not really, but even if we were, we'd find substitutes."
Peak oil was predicted in the US to hit in the 1970's and it did. The estimates given in this video show other reserves that where not taped until a later date and have yet to reach peak production.
The rule of thumb for predicting peak oil is 40 years after peak discovery of oil fields you hit peak production and 40 years after that the reserves dry up. But with a growing civilization with growing rate consumption at a hyperbolic rate it may be 10 to 15 years.
***** Production subsidies for oil make the numbers look more favourable while hiding the reality. They can also make the global analysis unreliable.
***** It's unreliable on a global scale due to the OPEC quota war. OPEC changed their rules to a new system where production quotas were based on claimed reserves, so the balance sheets of major OPEC nations doubled & tripled overnight and a very large portion of global oil reserves only exists on paper.
This explains why fish is falling in price and the number of threatened fisheries is falling
The problem is net energy for oil. For the rest of resources, scarcity doesn't necessarily matter as much as technology and our ingenuity will allow us access to deposits that previously were not profitable.
For oil however, even if the price is $1,000,000 per barrel, it's still pointless on a large scale to pursue it when you have to use more than a barrel of oil to get it. It requires energy to get at oil, and that's what I'm worried about.
So I guess you know how much oil there is, and how much it will cost to get it to market. Wow, you are a very smart man, no wonder you worry so much.
Ed Waggoner Sr. The figures are out there. Is it possible there is some vast undiscovered easily ex tractable source of oil somewhere? Sure. Is it likely? Definitely not. The easy oil has likely been found. There is still more out there, but it requires much more energy to get it out.
That's the problem.. when we start to move closer and closer to an extraction process that requires as much energy as you get out from it... that's when the danger arises. Net energy is currently at about 3 for most oil extraction including fracking. Just 40 years ago, it used to be around 80. That's a massive difference. :S
UnknownXV No one knows how much oil there is, how long the finite supply will last, how much future extractions costs will be or how it will be priced relative to other known and yet unknown sources of energy. Anyone with such omnipotence could and would make billions in the futures markets.
Ed Waggoner Sr. There are no guarantees. I'm merely looking at past trends (how often we find new rich oil fields) and how much we're consuming now. It doesn't look good.
The standard cornucopian argument is that this will not happen because, basically, we're so terribly amazingly clever that we'll always "think of something." For instance, we'll figure out how to transmute other metals in to Copper if need be (a highly respected economist actually said this) or just fly in to space and start mining resources from asteroids and other planets.
In theory, The law of conservation of mass basically proves that we will never "run out" of resources. Realistically, as the population grows certain things like fresh water will become much less plentiful.
That's not a problem with oil extraction from sand. That's a problem with releasing polluting waste products (assuming your description is correct).
im not scientist but i like to learn about things and what is possible for humans do in the future
how are they progressing on that making oil from garbage techonology?
We are limited to 500 characters here, I cannot write a dissertation on the subject but there are scientific articles out there which lend credence to the theory and some books and videos. But, with people like you, you will never change your mind about anything because your mind is already made up and you have invested yourself morally in the beliefs that you dearly hold.
My source is the first PDF link (from a university) from google when you type in: annual consumption of oil
Why isn't fiberoptic cable cheaper than copper if it's made out of sand? I realize I'm over-simplifying, but I'm too lazy to look up the production process of fiberoptic cable.
For instance, a gallon of oil in a pocket is really inexpensive to retrieve and therefore inexpensive to buy. But a gallon of oil spread out all across 1 square mile of land is much more costly to retrieve and is only profitable to the corporation to retrieve because it can pass on the extra costs to its customers. So even though the corporation is "profiting" the economy suffers because transportation costs skyrocket and the average person wastes their excess income on gas instead of products.
You watched and didn't question , perhaps it all sounded so good to you , and after all he's a professor !
Now, imagine what would have happened if government subsided copper wires to make the ends meet artificially.
Such is power of price system and the perilous consequences of tinkering with it.
Its not to avoid taxes; but rather to keep the prices from declining. Oil companies reap massive profits from wars and other scenarios which inflate oil prices...
This video does not take into account the effects of extraction of resources. While it is true that as resources become more scarce, the price goes up and other sources that were previously unprofitable become profitable. Like if you were at an apple tree, and you picked all the low hanging fruit but were still hungry, you would start to exert more energy to get more fruit, ie climb the tree.
Thanks rob.
The unlimited resource is human knowledge and ingenuity. The beauty is: that's the resource that makes every other resource worth ANYTHING, and it's the one that helps us figure out how to get more resources!
With increasing technology your assertion is just that, an assertion.
I mean there are plenty of metals which have been mined from nearly all easily accesible locations, yet the price is lower than it was due to both increased productivity from technology improvements and the fact that substitutes can be discovered as was mentioned in the video.
No one's denying the Earth has finite resources, what it's being denied is that we're anywhere close to using them all up.
Here is a little more information on the topic that you guys might find useful:
storm-news.tk/overshoot-day-2015-earth-is-now-officially-in-the-red/
Ah. I never thought of it like that before. This was a nice conversation. Thanks, buddy! :)
I think people are pointing at one guy when it's really a team work. It's up to the government to create new laws, automobile companies to make more energy efficient vehicles, society to accept the transition (if they see any value in the transition), etc. Oil companies are doing their business just like a normal person would go about their daily life. Hell how would it be like to tell a baker to start making sushi. Sure he makes food as usual but it will cost him more, require different skills.
No we cannot of course completely run out of things.. But as this man just said prices mount. Which isn’t sustainable in the long run! and these were very nice examples of resources that we do not run out of soon. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t rarer examples of resources that we HAVEN’T found any substitutes of and are slowly depleting. Potash is one example.. Good luck with keeping billions fed without it
Your solution being what exactly?
Is there really a difference from the average person's point of view between running out of oil and oil being prohibitively expensive to use?
the point of this video is to tell people that we are running out of some Resources but we are getting more of other Resources and finding replacements for the one we are loosing we don't need to be afraid of running out steel but we do need to be afraid of running out of oil but we can find replacements for oil
Because the discretionary consumption of families decrease by the fact they need spend more money in oil and less in other things, so the production decrease, etc.
Enter the 3D printer, where all sorts of stuff can be made simply by printing it. So things that used to take lots of resources to make can now be simply printed.
Reserves According to the Society of Petroleum Engineers, reserves are “those quantities of petroleum claimed to be commercially recoverable by application of development projects to known accumulations under defined conditions.”
Resources is everything that falls outside of that definition. There are estimates showing trillions of barrels of oil in the US.
And what is even sadder is that your measured and reasonable comment got marked as spam by the very people that needed to read it.
Masterful!