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.)
9
Jan
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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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.
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.
I for one plan to invest in leather and piercing equipment, for the Mad Max future we’re clearly staring down. Who run Bartertown?
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
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.
mcCarthy, not McCormack. Sorry. Brain’s mushy thanks to the weekend.
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.
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?
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.
Don’t these people watch Battlestar Galactica?
I’m scared now. Very very scared.
All hail Malthus, predicting the depletion of everything for only a couple hundred years now.
Man… Sure could use some Unobtainium right about now…
I’m going to bookmark it and wait until the end of the year, see if this claim stands up.
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Well, at least our global supplies of skepticism and apathy are inexhaustible.
@ Hyperion
I’m guessing it’ll be more like Escape from LA without LA being in a containable region.
The desert wasteland crap is just not going to happen. There will be no spice. There will be no solarbabies.
Nobody angry that the us consumption is well out of line with their population percentage? Greedy fucks.
I thought I’d seen that somewhere before…
FYI, that graphic was lifted from the following New Scientist article (from 23 May 2007) which is well worth a read: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19426051.200-earths-natural-wealth-an-audit.html?full=true
I hate to say it, but that seemed like a poor visualization to me. Why round?