Jan

Perhaps the most important JPG you will see this year

Posted by MGK Published in The Internets

Seriously: that is just about every single policy problem (or a contributing factor to one) that humanity has, wrapped up in a colorful, easy-to-understand nutshell. (And some of their numbers – like phosphorous – are probably optimistic.)

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solid snake said on January 9th, 2010 at 10:52 am

That is absolutely frightening, because if I don’t have zinc, how will I build thr trigger mechanism for gun the I will use to shoot myself with to escape the apocalypse when it happens.

plus C said on January 9th, 2010 at 11:20 am

I was surprised that Tungsten didn’t make the list. A teacher once told me the world would run out it around 2015, but now that I think about it, he was the same guy who taught lab safety by having kids sniff a beaker of undiluted HCl.

PMMJ said on January 9th, 2010 at 11:31 am

I for one plan to invest in leather and piercing equipment, for the Mad Max future we’re clearly staring down. Who run Bartertown?

Anton P. Nym said on January 9th, 2010 at 12:31 pm

To me, the important story is on the right side of the drawing; we need to be much better at reusing/recycling these materials. Just because we’ve mined them out of the ground doesn’t mean that they vanish; unlike oil, metals and other elements usually aren’t destroyed by use.

Alas, some of the processes necessary tend to chemically bind the elements into compounds that’re harder to extract them from than from ores… and some (phosphorous, as used in agricultural fertilizers and pesticides in particular) get washed out to sea and become too dilute to easily retrieve. But that’s not the case for all of them and we need to do better.

(One of the reasons I’m pro-nuke is that recycling and marginal extraction gets easier and more affordable when you’ve got lots of electicity. Of course, fission actually does destroy the element used… we do need to push fusion research, and get more efficient at using the fissionables we do have.)

— Steve

karellan said on January 9th, 2010 at 1:35 pm

This doesn’t take into account the fact that as we use up the materials scheduled to run out earliest, like zinc, copper, uranium, and tin, our production/manufacturing capabilities will be greatly hindered, so the deadline for later ones will be extended.

But we’ll all be living like the people in McCormack’s The Road by then, so I suppose it’s a moot point.

karellan said on January 9th, 2010 at 1:37 pm

mcCarthy, not McCormack. Sorry. Brain’s mushy thanks to the weekend.

Lawnmower Boy said on January 9th, 2010 at 3:32 pm

Hey, I read that book in high school. In cuneiform.*
(http://www.amazon.ca/Limits-Growth-Project-Predicament-Mankind/dp/0451136950/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263065284&sr=8-4)
It was wrong then. And it’s wrong now.
Don’t we have enough real problems (hint: global warming) to deal with?

*You young kids today don’t appreciate the nice cuneiform you have. When I was young, a tablet weighed 50lbs, and we had to carry it to school five miles every day. Through the snow. Uphill. Both ways. And we were lucky.

Hyperion said on January 9th, 2010 at 4:06 pm

Alright, let’s place our bets. Will our depleted husk of a planet be more of a “Mad Max” scenario, or something closer to Dune?

njs said on January 9th, 2010 at 4:58 pm

I’m shocked Helium didn’t make the list. Lots of critical industrial uses (cryogenics, etc.), and unlike most of those — which, when you get desperate enough, you can start “mining” out of landfills — helium slowly leaks from any storage container you can come up with and then it floats off into space.

I’m a little skeptical, though, of their decision to conflate “total amount available before we run out” and “current reserve base”. Most of these things do exist in only limited quantities, and we’ll run out at some point, but that may or may not be when we’ve run through the reserves we currently know about. Claiming further exploration will lead to *no* further deposits is just as dishonest as the oil apologists who claim that further exploration will *always* lead to new deposits.

dev said on January 9th, 2010 at 7:36 pm

Don’t these people watch Battlestar Galactica?

Tessa said on January 9th, 2010 at 8:59 pm

I’m scared now. Very very scared.

hudson said on January 9th, 2010 at 10:54 pm

All hail Malthus, predicting the depletion of everything for only a couple hundred years now.

CB said on January 9th, 2010 at 11:47 pm

Man… Sure could use some Unobtainium right about now…

Remora said on January 10th, 2010 at 1:04 am

I’m going to bookmark it and wait until the end of the year, see if this claim stands up.

olilolo blog » Blog Archive » Ways The World Will End: Addendum said on January 10th, 2010 at 3:21 am

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