Mining Nature's Ultimate ResourceRead the rest of the article on The Atlas Society website by clicking here.
by Robert L. Bradley, Jr.
In 1972, just two years after the first Earth Day, a team of scholars from MIT published a 200-page book called The Limits to Growth. Using the emerging instrument of computer models, they created a worldwide stir by suggesting that science had now put numbers to a few self-evident truths. Non-renewable resources are fixed; the consumption of such resources must eventually end; any civilization based on such consumption must collapse. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis called the work “likely to be one of the most important documents of our age” (January 28, 1972).Of course, the scholars acknowledged that they were dealing with variables. The consumption of resources might be steady or rising; resource supplies might be smaller or greater than estimated. But the logic could not be avoided: The growth of industrial society must run up against the physical limits of the natural world. How soon? That was where the computer models came in. The authors looked at nineteen key minerals, including copper, tin, petroleum, and natural gas. If consumption were immediately frozen at its present rate, they predicted, those four resources would last 36, 17, 31, and 38 years respectively. If consumption continued to grow at its 1972 rate, they would last only 21, 15, 20, and 22 years.
Say this for the young authors (the oldest was only 30): They were no rat-pack of jet-setting doomsayers, deploring the end of civilization as we know it, while hopping from one international conference to another with carbon credits in tow. Principal authors Dennis and Donella Meadows retreated to a New Hampshire farm in order to (in their words) “learn about homesteading and wait for the coming collapse.” Meanwhile, The Limits to Growth went on to sell nine million copies and to be translated into twenty-nine languages.
That was thirty-six years ago. None of the dire predictions came to pass. What went wrong for them (and right for mankind)? What did the authors of The Limits to Growth overlook? And why have these and other recurring projections of resource exhaustion never come true?
The answer is entrepreneurship applied to resources, or resourceship: the ability of man to continually generate his natural resources in a reason- and capitalist-based institutional framework.
Minerals cannot be naturally or artificially created in significant quantities within a human time-frame, giving rise to the natural-science concept of mineral fixity. But that concept has limited economic or business relevance. At one time, perhaps 10,000 years ago, gold and copper were simply gathered, picked out rocks in which they occurred in pure form. But just as man’s life as a hunter-gatherer ended with the Agricultural Revolution, so did his life as a hunter-gather of shiny metals end with the smelting of copper 6,000 years ago. Since then, the minerals that serve as man’s “natural resources” have not been gathered; they have been created, produced, and augmented by means of ever more complex technologies. In a very real sense, they have been and are being manufactured. But just how that is possible can be difficult to understand.
Malthusianism in Food and Fuel
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many people were convinced by Thomas Malthus’s calculation that population must outrun food supplies. Today, most people will concede that—at least in theory—a renewable resource like food can be expanded indefinitely at the rates needed to keep up with growing populations.
But what about mineral resources? The analogy does not seem applicable. After all, we cannot apply fertilizer to our tin mines and petroleum fields to sustain crop after crop and even increase their yield. We do not have mineral scientists developing faster-growing copper and natural-gas varieties. What we have are metals laid down at the time of the Earth’s formation, and hydrocarbons formed over tens of millions of years. These resources cannot be physically expanded, at least not in quantities that are economically significant. Consequently, it would seem, an economy that seeks to be sustainable must keep those resources that are not destroyed by use (such as metals) permanently available through recycling. As for those that are destroyed by use (such as hydrocarbon fuels), they must be eliminated from a sustainable economy.
The first major attempt to apply such Mathusian thinking to minerals came in 1865, when W. S. Jevons published The Coal Question. In that work, he questioned the continued availability of affordable coal to fuel England’s industrialism and global might. Specifically, he sought to uncover “the necessary results of our present rapid multiplication [of demand] when brought into comparison with a fixed amount of mineral resources.” Assuming a continued growth in demand of 3.5 percent annually, he projected a “threatening” rise in fuel costs, “perhaps within a lifetime” and certainly within a century.
Of course, the coal crunch never came. The growth in demand was far less than Jevons predicted. And interfuel substitution away from coal began with North Sea production of oil and gas in the late 1960s. England did have coal problems, but these were the result of man-qua-government and not of nature.
So, England avoided the Malthusian collapse predicated on the exhaustion of its coal mines. But was it just an accident? Was it the result of nothing but the lucky happenstance that petroleum came along in the nick of time? Or is the very idea that mineral resources exist as a fixed, constantly depleting supply somehow wrong in a fundamental way?
Article url: http://www.objectivistcenter.org/ct-2094-mining_res.aspx
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