Every Generation Does Indeed Exhaust Its Mineral Reserves

Anthony Watts has great fun with the predictions of the doomsters over here. He’s picking up on this by economics professor David Mustard. And we can clearly see that those who have been screaming at us for years that we’re just about to run out of minerals are wrong.

But what’s important to understand is why they are wrong. Why, consistently, have all of these projections that we’re about to run out of mineral reserves been so flamingly, aghastly, inaccurate? Fortunately, this is a question to which I have an answer. Indeed, I have the answer. The reason is that these various catastrophists are quite simply ignorant on the matter under discussion.

And the real truth is that every generation does indeed run out of mineral reserves.

No, really, current reserves of copper will be gone soon enough. Current reserves of tin, of tungsten, tantalum, any other metal or mineral you care to think about. All those reserves really will be gone in a generation or not much more than that.
For, and here’s the crucial point, to an acceptable level of accuracy mineral reserves are those ores and minerals that we expect to use in this coming generation.

Watts has this lovely chart showing the results of the Limits to Growth predictions.
we can see, absolutely none of these predictions have come to pass. We haven’t run out of the things we are supposed to have run out of by now.

The usual explanation is that we’ve been in some manner lucky. We’ve just been able to find a few more outcrops of interesting looking rock. We shouldn’t relax though, for we might not continue to get lucky in this manner. There might not be any more interesting rocks to find and then where will we be?

A more sophisticated argument is that as technology changes then the amount of any mineral or metal that we can extract changes. This is most certainly true. For example, the early 1980s deployment of SX-EW technology hugely increased the amount of copper available to us. Before that we could only produce copper metal from deposits of copper sulfides. Now, with it, we could do so from copper oxides. And we knew very well that there were vast mountains of copper oxides out there.

Both arguments have a truth to them. And it is most certainly true that there is some absolute limit to the number of atoms of this or that on the planet. Beyond which we really would be truly stuffed.

We could also become economists and thus begin to understand that everything, but just everything, is substituitable. For example, that copper that we’ve not been running out of. We can use it for telephone wiring or for pipes for water. And we can use fibre optic cable for the telephone cables and thus have more copper to use for the water pipes.

And again, there’s a great deal of truth in this argument.

However, while it is indeed true that the catastrophists have misunderstood these various points, that’s not actually the real reason they’ve been so consistently wrong. That real reason is that they’ve all been seemingly ignorant of what the phrase “mineral reserve” actually means.

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