14.

ARE WE
DRAINING
THE WORLD’S
LAST RESOURCES?

In the morning of 13 May 1908, several hundred of the US’s leaders and opinion-makers were gathered in the East Room of the White House in Washington DC. In fact, the room was packed, and among those present were governors from each of the nation’s 44 states and selected members of Congress. There were also members of the Supreme Court and the cabinet, as well as experts in natural resources. It was a fantastic turnout, but for a good reason, for the day’s topic was a looming national crisis: the US’ imminent depletion of natural resources.²¹⁷

The atmosphere was very hopeful now, because attendees were due to hear a speech by President Roosevelt himself - a man whom many of the participants had never seen. Everyone knew that protection of natural resources was a key issue for the president, for he had talked about it before, but, so far, without generating the desired interest. This time, however, he had decided to do everything possible to grab people’s attention; he had sent extensive advance briefings to all mainstream media, some of which had already begun to write about the conference in advance. So it was hardly surprising that a considerable number of journalists had shown up from near and far.

Shortly before 11 o’clock, the Senate chaplain, Dr Edward Hale, rose and said a short blessing, after which the assembly prayed together. Then there was a brief, expectant silence, until a trumpet fanfare resounded through the room at exactly 11 o’clock, as the president strode in and walked to the podium. The governors now stood up and applauded, and there were supportive shouts. The whole assembly then stood up, and the scene became almost tumultuous until the president succeeded in quietening people down so he could begin his speech.²¹⁸

The US was still a young nation, he explained, and the country’s mentality was characterized by the many years during which men could simply wander further west and find new land and resources. He warned that now the country was about to be filled up, and the resources might swiftly run out. “We began with an unapproached heritage of forests; more than half of the timber is gone,”, he said. “We began with coal fields more extensive than those of any other nation and with iron ores regarded as inexhaustible, and many experts now declare that the end of both iron and coal is in sight.” He added: “The mere increase in our consumption of coal during 1907 over 1906 exceeded the total consumption in 1876, the Centennial year.” So coal consumption was completely unsustainable, and it was even worse with gas and oil. As Roosevelt said: “The enormous stores of mineral oil and gas are largely gone.”

Soil quality also worried him: “We began with soils of unexampled fertility, and we have so impoverished them by injudicious use and by failing to check erosion that their crop-producing power is diminishing instead of increasing” he said.

His message seemed to hit home this time, as he was interrupted by applause no less than 18 times, but although the subject matter was deadly serious, he also managed to elicit smiles and laughter among audience members. “That is like providing for the farmer’s family to live sumptuously on the flesh of the milk cow”, he said at one point, after which he was interrupted by laughter. “Any farmer can live pretty well for a year if he is content not to live at all the year after.” That brought even more mirth, followed by lengthy applause.

All in all, Roosevelt’s talk lasted some 50 minutes, and if you they had not known it beforehand, it should be clear to everyone afterwards that the US was running out of water, timber, metals, coal, oil, gas and good soil – a disaster was approaching, and soon.

Everyone embraced the message, and journalists opined afterwards that it had been one of the most important initiatives in Roosevelt’s political career. The industrialists agreed with the message too. For example, industry magnate Andrew Carnegie commented after the conference: “By 1938, about half the original supply of iron will be gone, and only the lower grades of ore will remain, and all the ore now deemed workable will be used long before the end of the present century.”²¹⁹

You can only have sympathy for Roosevelt’s concerns, and doubtless something good came out of his initiative. But neither he, nor his technical experts, nor Carnegie got any of their predictions even remotely right. Instead, the US production of energy, iron, timber and food continued to accelerate after the speech was made, and that increase has never slowed. In fact, since the meeting, on several fronts, this increase is even now – more than 100 years later - accelerating. Who would have expected it?

Not many people, because we always seem to think that we are about to run out of resources. Just listen to the words of Bishop Cyprianus from Carthage, writing in the third century: “The layers of marble are dug out in less quantity from the disembowelled and wearied mountains; the diminished quantities of gold and silver suggest the early exhaustion of the metals, and the impoverished veins are straitened and decreased day by day.” The depressed bishop wrote these words approximately 1,700 years before Roosevelt’s conference took place.²²⁰

In the late Middle Ages, famine was a recurring problem in Europe, partly because of a phenomenon known as the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1250 to 1830 (approximately), during which growing glaciers wiped out entire villages, while people held markets on the frozen waters of the River Thames in London.²²¹ In this chilling period, harvests often failed, leading to recurrent famine. So at that time, they really did seem to run out from time to time, as they also did when bishop Cyprianus lived and moaned.

In 1798, when the Little Ice Age was still not over, and where grain prices were increasing rapidly due to poor harvests, reverend Thomas Malthus famously wrote that population growth inevitably would lead to eventual global famine. Population growth was exponential, he pointed out, while growth in food production, in the best case, was linear. To solve this problem, he proposed to exterminate the poor in the most practical way, which he described as follows:

“Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.”²²²

Harsh words from a reverend’s mouth, because few priests would recommend killing the poor. However, as the Mini Ice Age began to retreat from approximately the year 1830, the harvests improved, but attention turned to coal. In 1865, the economist William Stanley Jevons predicted that Britain was on the verge of running out of coal, which would grind the entire country’s industry to a halt.²²³ The following year, this evolved into a full-fledged coal panic, which led the then finance minister, William Gladstone, to promise to repay Britain’s foreign debt quickly, while the country still had some coal left.

In 1926 - 18 years after Roosevelt’s speech - the US Federal Oil Conservation Board announced, to great public concern, that the country only had enough oil for another seven years.

However, when these seven years had passed, there was still oil. Two years after it should have run out, the US Department of State issued another report which predicted (as they clearly hadn’t learned from the past) that the US would run out of oil within 13 years – that is, in 1948.

There was still oil in 1948, but in this year the American conservationist Fairfield Osborn published a book called Our Plundered Planet, in which he predicted imminent acute resource shortages and famine.²²⁴ That same year, ecologist and ornithologist William Vogt published Our Road to Survival, in which he warned about the lack of farmland and minerals, which would force the US to go to war to gain access to zinc.²²⁵ Luckily they didn’t do this, but on September 15 - again in 1948 – you could read an article in New York Times describing “the dark outlook for the human race” because of “overpopulation and dwindling of natural resources.”

In 1951 – three years after the US should, yet again, have run out of oil - the US Department of State predicted the supply would run out in 1964, 13 years later. There was still oil in 1964, but, at that point, a new forecast was issued, according to which the oil would run out… within 13 years. So, by 1977 there should have been no more oil.

No, really, the end of oil was very near, and gas was also a problem. In 1974 the US. Geological Survey (USGS) issued an analysis, which indicated that “by 1974 technology and the 1974 Prize”, the US had only enough gas for another ten years, so it should run out by 1984 unless something surprising came up. The following year, The Environment Fund took out full-page adverts in several magazines in which they wrote: “The world as we know it will be destroyed in 2000.”

Although all previous predictions of impending shortages of raw materials had been found to be incorrect, the fear of running out developed into veritable panic from the mid-1960s and early 1970s, at which point US president Jimmy Carter joined the fray and stated that there was a great risk that they would run out of oil within ten years.

One of the driving forces behind this never-ending resource panic was the biologist Paul Ehrlich, who must be one of the worst public forecasters of all time. In 1968, he published the book The Population Bomb, in which he wrote that the population explosion would be stopped by a combination of disease, war and famine.²²⁶ “I don’t see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980”, was one of his many odd forecasts. But he was wrong, because there are more than 1.2 billion people living in India today. The very first sentence in the forword, written by environmentalist David Brower, sounded: “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash program embarked on now.” And on page 3, Paul Erlich elaborated “a minimum of ten million people, most of them children, will starve to death during each year of the 1970s. But this is a mere handful compared to the numbers that will be starving before the end of the century. And it is now too late to take action to save many of those people.”

As for the US, he provided in an article a scenario of what it would be like in year 2000: 65 million Americans would have starved to death between 1980 and 2000, and the population would have fallen to 22.6 million due to resource shortage and pollution (In actual fact, the population increased to 273 million, and there was no famine, but significant problems with obesity).²²⁷ Later in the same article he predicted four billion deaths globally due to famine within the 20 years.

Ehrlich had many other Domesday predictions. As for England, he wrote: “I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Good for him that he didn’t, because in year 2000, England’s population and gross domestic product had both reached all times highs.

But lots of people really believed what he and other doomsday preachers predicted, and the resource panics came, wave after wave. In 1968, William and Paul Paddock published their bestseller Famine 1975!, in which they predicted confidently that there would be global famine in 1975, where basically only the US would have surplus food.²²⁸ The US should, then, ideally only distribute food to nations that imposed harsh birth control; people in other nations should be left to starve. Denis Hayes, who was the leader of the first environmental protection event, Earth Day, had a similar view. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” he said in 1970. The world was doomed. Billions would die!

By contrast, the world’s average life expectancy has increased by approximately ten years since Ehrlich and others came with their doomsday predictions, and the proportion of people who are undernourished has fallen from around 30% in 1970 to 10% today - all this, despite the fact that the world’s population has, simultaneousy roughly doubled. In fact, we have increased the daily caloric intake per capita in developing countries from an average of 2,054 in 1964-66 to an estimated 2,850 in 2015.²²⁹ This is an increase in average (per person) food consumption among the poor of almost 39% over a period during which the world population doubled.

It is no less impressive when you consider that, in the US - where Ehrlich and others had predicted famine - a growing percentage of the farmland was no longer used to produce food, but instead to produce biofuels. In the EU - one of the world’s most densely-populated regions – authorities struggled with the so-called butter mountains and wine lakes, where excess production piled up; the EU even paid farmers to stop farming and local governments introduced campaigns to counteract the growing trend of obesity.

As regards Paul Ehrlich’s forecast of more than a hundred million starvation deaths in the 1970s, the actual figure was around 3.5 to 4 million, of which around half were due to the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal policies in Cambodia during the period 1975-1979.

Later, in the 1980s, it is estimated that between 1.22 and 1.63 million people died of starvation worldwide, and in 1990s, the number was approximately 400,000-600,000, if you exclude North Korea, where 2.8 to 3.5 million people died (but again not due to lack of soil but because of Marxist policies). In comparison, between 30 million and 33 million people died in China between 1958 and 1962 due to forced collectivisations in agriculture – yet again not because lack of natural resources, but due to Marxism.²³⁰ So the number of famines has declined significantly since Ehrlich and others made their doomsday predictions, and they would have fallen even faster, had it not been for the harmful politics of China, North Korea, Cambodia and elsewhere.

Perhaps the worst thing about all this is not the irrational fear and pessimism that the Domesday forecasters made roused in people, but the mentality that Ehrlich and others displayed; a world view that has since been described as anti-humanism, and which is still very much alive, if not increasing. These views are following directly in Malthus’ tracks and have often come unpleasantly close to what various dictators have expressed, not too long ago. Paul Ehrlich described, for example, the planet’s growing population as a “cancer” (exactly the same term that Hitler often used about the Jews), and explained what needed to be done about it:

“We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survival.”²³¹

Among his suggestions were mandatory sterilization and forced abortions. This message was exceedingly popular, and The Population Bomb sold more than three million copies, while Ehrlich probably became the only author ever to be interviewed for the a full hour of US television programme The Tonight Show.

Six years after this book’s publication, he wrote another publication with his wife, The End of Affluence, where he predicted that “before 1985, mankind will enter an era of real shortage”, where “available resources of many key minerals will be close to being exhausted.”

This had now become a widespread opinion in much of academia and the general public. On 4 May 1969 the Nobel laureate George Wald made a speech at MIT, during which he said:

“There is every indication that the world population will double before the year 2000; and there is a widespread expectation of famine on an unprecedented scale in many parts of the world. The experts tend to differ only in their estimates of when those famines will begin. Some think by 1980, others think they can be staved off until 1990, very few expect that they will not occur by the year 2000.”²³²

This speech was later reprinted in numerous newspapers and Canadian newspaper The Globe published it in 87,000 copies. In 1970, Harrison Brown, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, predicted in an article in Scientific American, that the world would run out of lead, zinc, tin, gold and silver in 1990. The same year (1970) aforementioned Earth Day founder Denis Hayes told the magazine Living Wilderness that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

One could go on and on, but let’s just add Lester Brown of environmental research group Worldwatch Institute. In his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, statistician Bjørn Lomborg explains how Brown, incessantly, throughout his a life-long career, has made similar, if not almost identical, “doom sermons” about how we will soon have acute shortages of this and that. As one example among countless, Brown predicted, in 1981, that the world’s available oil reserves would very soon be gone: “Yet, most of the readily accessible reserves of oil formed over hundreds of millions of years will be consumed within a single generation, spanning the years from 1960 to 1995.”²³³

The message was clear: Western civilization and relentless technological development and economic growth was a Domesday machine, which should immediately be halted. In 1971, journalist Gordon Taylor launched his book The Doomsday Book, where he extrapolated, from the fact that the US used half of all the world’s resources, that in 2000 the US would use all global resources, unless it was stopped by the world!

The following year saw the publication of aforementioned book Limits to Growth, based on an extensive computer analysis from MIT, which showed that the world would run out of gold in 1983, silver and mercury in 1987, tin in 1989, zinc in 1992, lead and copper in 1995 and aluminium in 2005. Somewhat comfortingly, the book contained an alternative forecast, which was far more optimistic as it assumed that reserves of limited resources were five times larger than in the worst case. If this was true, we would have enough metals for a few decades longer. This book also became a global bestseller as it was translated into 30 languages and sold 12 million copies.

The whole problem could actually be summed up simply, and none made it simpler than Paul Ehrlich, who launched the so-called “IPAT equation” to explain it. It read as follows:

I = P × A × T

“I” stood for the impact, “P” for population, “A” for affluence and “T” for technology. It meant this: the more people there were, and the more technology and wealth they produced, the worse the impact on the environment and resources would be. Therefore, we should enforce a reduction of the world population and living standards for the protection of the environment and resources, and we should limit the use of new technologies. The creative society should be put on hold, for it was simply too dangerous.

Of course, all these Doomsday sermons were not unopposed. For instance, after USGS’s dramatic analysis in 1974 predicting that the US would have enough natural gas for only a further ten years, the American Gas Association issued a rebuttal, claiming that it had sufficient resources for between 1,000 and 2,500 years of consumption.²³⁴

And then there was Julian Simon, an economist with a Doctorate from the University of Chicago, who had specialized in population growth, economic development and resources. Just like most of his peers, Simon had been, in his younger days, concerned about the increasing world overpopulation, but he had then come across studies which showed, first, that commodity prices had fallen in absolute or inflation-adjusted terms for hundreds of years and, second, that the most densely-populated countries often did best economically.²³⁵

This discovery had made him think and had caused him to trawl through countless other statistics on population and resources, and these had constantly confirmed the same astonishing picture of, yes, increasing resource abundance. How odd was that?

Very strange, but numbers are numbers, and over time, he came to the conclusion that the ultimate resources on the globe weren’t any particular raw materials, but simply human creativity. And this explained why densely-populated areas often grew richest: the greater the number of people living close together in an area, the higher the number of ideas they would come up with, by combining their thoughts.

Most people would credit at least part of this theory. But Simon’s views differed from the majority in that he claimed that our creativity is so great, mankind, given a dynamic economic system, will never suffer from lack of resources.

Never? Many couldn’t agree on that and Ehrlich was obviously one of them. It wasn’t long before there was an ongoing debate between Simon and Ehrlich, which eventually attracted wider attention. After all, it was an entertaining story, because here you had two professors, peers, who funnily enough, had both grown up in a suburb of Newark, New Jersey, and were both ready to argue their case loudly, even though Ehrlich always refused Simon’s offer to meet and discuss the subject directly in public; the debate took place through articles.²³⁶ The two combatants had, in particular, a sharp exchange of views via articles in the journal Social Science Quarterly, and in September 1980, Simon took it to a new level, as he challenged anyone to a bet:

“I’ll put my money where my mouth is. This is a public offer to stake $10,000, in separate transactions of $1,000 or $100 each, on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run. If you will pay me the current market price of $1000 or $100 worth of any standard mineral or other extractive product you name, and specify any date more than a year away, I will contract to pay you the then-current market price of the material. How about it, doomsayers and catastrophists? First come, first served.”²³⁷

Ehrlich announced, almost immediately, that he would “accept Simon’s astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in”. He now formed a consortium with two resource experts from the University of California at Berkeley, and, together, they selected those five commodities, which they believed would rise very much in price: chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten.

However, over the next ten years, the price of these five metals didn’t rise. In fact, they all fell dramatically, despite the world population increasing more than ever, and that the cumulative inflation for the same period being 50%. At the end of the period, Ehrlich had to send a cheque to Simon for $576.07.

One of the important tasks of a scientist who makes predictions is to compare these with the actual statistical outcome. You will typically undertake “back-testing”, i.e. check if your model could have predicted the past accurately. And, of course, as time passes, you pay attention to whether what you predicted actually comes true. If models and reality do not match, you must change your models. However, none of this seems to happen among the doomsayers who constantly, year in and year out, make the same kind of failed forecasts about coming resource shortages. Apparently, they find the logic of their models so obvious, that there is no need to examine the actual facts.

But as we have seen, such models are clearly making systematic errors, so what is it really going on here? How, for example, could the prices of all five metals in the Simon and Ehrlich bet, fall in a time of high inflation, economic growth and population growth? In fact, the same five metals actually declined in terms of inflation-adjusted prices over the 100 years from 1900 to 2000?²³⁸ So again: how come?

INDUSTRIAL COMMODITY PRICES; 1800 TO 2014, ADJUSTED FOR US INFLATION. THE LONG TERM TREND FOR INDUSTRIAL COMMODITIES CORRECTED FOR INFLATION HAS BEEN DOWN FOR SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS IN SPITE OF REPEATED WARNINGS OF SHORTAGE THROUGHOUT THE PERIOD.

Let’s start with the concept of reserves. One might easily assume this means the available amount of material. It doesn’t; it is the quantity that can be extracted profitably at current prices given the current technology. So, if technology improves, or if prices increase, so do the reserves.

If people misread the concept of reserves, they may also completely misjudge the size of mineral resources that are actually available. Wilfred Beckerman, a leading commodity economics expert from Cambridge University and the University of London, explains it like this:

“At no point is it worth prospecting for enough to last to the end of eternity, or even some compromise period, such as a hundred million years, or even 1,000 years. New reserves are found, on the whole, as they are needed, and needs do not always rise exponentially at past rates. In fact, given the natural concentrations of the key metals in the Earth’s crust, as indicated by a large number of random samples, the total natural occurrence of most metals in the top mile of the Earth’s crust has been estimated to be about a million times as great as present known reserves. Since the latter amount to about 100 years’ supplies, this means we have enough to last about one hundred million years.”²³⁹ In other words, we have so far defined only in the region of 0.0001% of the actual metals in the upper kilometre of the Earth’s crust as reserves.

What about fossil fuels? To date, we have extracted approximately one trillion barrels of oil, and it is estimated that there is a similar amount left in so-called conventional oil fields, which very simply put, are fields where you stick a tube into the ground and pump it out. Actually, the fact that we still have so much left is quite remarkable, given all the aforementioned predictions of imminent oil depletion. However, apart from this trillion, there are huge discoveries of other types of oil deposits in the form of shale and tar oil, which is why known oil reserves now are massively higher than in the 1970s or when Roosevelt addressed his conference more than 100 years ago. We know, for instance, that US shale oil reserves alone now are higher than all conventional oil reserves worldwide. The American Green River Formation alone, which stretches through Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah, is assumed to have approximately three trillion barrels (480 billion cubic metres) of shale oil, of which $1-1.5 trillion is assumed to be recoverable. That is at least as much as all the oil that has been consumed, worldwide, over the past 200 years in that formation alone.

It does not end there. After 2000, giant gas fields in the shale oil deposits have been discovered in many places, and due to new so-called fracking technology, much of this is now commercial reserves. Even before this technique was developed, the world’s natural gas reserves had increased steadily, but global reserves had in 2014 reached approximately 250 years of consumption and were still climbing.²⁴⁰ And while they should continue to do so for a long time, scientists are beginning to investigate methods for extracting methane hydrate, a flammable hydrocarbon that is believed to be two to ten times as prevalent as natural gas, so that it could potentially extend to centuries or millennia of consumption.

Now, of course there is the issue of global warming (we will address that later), so we shall have to stop burning fossil fuels before too long. However, many other sources and technologies are evolving rapidly.

One of these areas is biofuels. The so-called first generation of this is only profitable in limited areas such as parts of Brazil, but the second generation is potentially two to three times more efficient because it will use not only plant sugars, but also their cellulose, hemicelluloses and lignin, which make up a much larger proportion of the biomass. However, perhaps this stage will be largely bypassed to focus instead on third generation biofuels, which is produced in water tanks with genetically modified algae. These will extract CO2 from the air and convert it into oil. This requires very high capital investments but give yields per land unit that are 15-300 times higher than for first-generation biofuels.²⁴²

CHANGE IN PROVED OIL AND NATURAL GAS RESERVES 1980 – 2013²⁴¹

Other interesting energy technologies include so-called photovoltaic solar panels, which generate electric power from sunshine. Due to new technologies and price wars, these have reached so-called grid parity in many sunny areas (grid parity is reached when the electricity costs the same as if produced locally by conventional sources such as coal).

There is also growth and development in geothermal energy, where fluid is pumped into the ground and back via closed pipes, whereby it can be used for heating purposes. This is already competitive in areas with especially warm underground, but can be further developed into much larger installations elsewhere. In Switzerland and Sweden, approximately 75% of all new houses use geothermal energy.

Other technologies are focused on energy savings. For instance, cars have become far more efficient due to combinations of cylinder deactivations, cruise control, turbo-charging, hybrid technology and the use of lightweight materials such as aluminium, titanium, ceramics and carbon fibre. Similarly, the new light bulbs (diodes) are often eight to ten times as energy-efficient as the ones they replace. Aircraft have also become more efficient. According to Airbus, global air traffic increased by 45% between 2000 and 2010, while their total fuel consumption increased by only 3% due to improved fuel efficiency. ²⁴³

And then there is nuclear power which could (and probably will) become the ultimate energy source. In 2012, there were about 440 nuclear reactors around the world, which together supplied some 7% of total world energy use and 17% of the electric power. A significant portion of the fuel used came from the recycling of fuel in the Russian nuclear bombs in disarmament agreements.

Nuclear power is a compact technology, since a kilogram of uranium delivers as much energy as two to three million kilograms of coal.²⁴⁴

Most nuclear systems in use today belong to the second generation of reactors, and they are typically individually designed, which has made them very expensive. However, a number of new designs have been developed, including pebble bed technology. Such reactors are based on placing heat-generating uranium balls into a large tank from which they are tapped out from the bottom when worn, in the same way that gumball machines work. Helium, which cannot become radioactive, is circulated between these balls (we will look at the problem of waste in a later chapter). With this technology, one obtains an endless and continuous process, which is cheap to run and where meltdowns are impossible.²⁴⁵

Given current technologies and resources, we have enough uranium for about 280 years of consumption, but if we re-use the waste, resources stretch to several thousand years, and if we further extracted uranium from seawater, it could stretch for several hundred thousand years. That is longer than the human race has existed.

So uranium is a huge source of energy that can be made much safer, and a number of new technologies for its use are in the pipeline or testing phases. An example is the company Terra Power, which is financially supported by Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold, who are, respectively, cofounder and former chief technology officer of Microsoft. This company is working on “travelling wave” technology which, through transmutation, may be able to utilize much of the remaining energy in nuclear waste (currently, approximately 99% of the energy potential is typically wasted). Making a transmutation means transforming one element into another, like medieval alchemists dreamed of doing.

With travelling wave you would, to state it very simply, place nuclear waste in a tube that may stick into the ground. Then it may gradually degrade itself from one end to the other in a process that should take at least 40 years, and it would release the remaining 98-99 % of its energy potential in the process. If this worked, it could deliver the entire world’s energy supply for 16,000 years with the current global energy consumption based alone on the current waste.

Nuclear power gets better still, though, because one kilogram of thorium has the same practical energy potential as 200 kilograms of uranium (without using travelling wave or breeder technology). It also has the same energy potential as 400-600 million kilograms of coal, and a modern man’s total lifetime supply of energy for all purposes could be accommodated in a thorium ball the size of a golf ball, which, in mass production, would not cost more than a few dollars – perhaps $2.

Thorium itself is not radioactive and is a common metal alloy – you prepare it for nuclear power use by bombarding it with neutrinos. It is very clean: thorium only creates 1% to less than 0.1% of the nuclear waste components you currently get from similar power generation with uranium – and this waste could be transmutated. If it isn’t, it would be largely harmless after approximately300 years.

Unlike conventional uranium reactors, thorium reactors work without high pressure and are technically unable to explode or melt down, if you use a molten, liquid salt configuration. If one cuts off the power to such a thorium reactor, the process just stops by itself. And because the process is relatively safe and simple, the thorium reactors can be made very compact and installed in ships, trains and even rockets - where a nuclear thermal rocket might, in principle, accelerate to up to perhaps 20% of the speed of light (that equates to travelling around the Earth in less than one second). However, the obvious first use is to replace coal-burning chambers in coal-based powers stations with thorium reactors. There is currently ongoing work on thorium reactors being undertaken in Norway, China, U.S., Israel, Russia and especially India.

So how big is the energy potential from this? With molten, liquid salt configuration thorium reactor technology, we have potentially enough thorium to supply the world with energy for several hundred thousand years.²⁴⁶

Nuclear power based on uranium or thorium are both based on nuclear fission, which means splitting atoms. However, the ultimate alternative is to create nuclear fusion. Potentially, the most effective forms of fuel for this are deuterium and tritium. The fusion happens if you can slam atoms together with such a force that their cores merge. This requires either extreme heat or a massive compression (or both, as in the centre of the sun, where it happens), and it releases vast quantities of energy.

For many years, scientists have been working to create and sustain this, but progress here has been painfully slow. However, in recent years, there have been significant achievements in many places. One such is in the National Ignition Facility in California, and there is ongoing work to create the 30-metre-high, internationally-funded ITER reactor in France. In parallel with that, many of US’s brightest venture capitalists and others, including Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) and Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon) plus banking group Goldman Sachs, have invested in alternative projects that seek to achieve nuclear fusion with much simpler, smaller machines. Companies involved include Focus Fusion, General Fusion, Polywell, LENR, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics and Tri Alpha Energy.

Larger companies are also on the task, and one of the newer initiatives by aerospace giant Lockheed Martin is called High Beta Fusion Project. Its hope is to develop mass-produced reactors with dimensions of approximately 2^*2^*4 metres that can be installed almost anywhere.

If any of this works (obviously still a big “if”), what is the size of our reserves? A study in 2001 concluded that only the known mine-based lithium reserves could provide the Earth with nuclear power for approx. 3,000 years, and lithium from sea water for 60 million years (yes, million). That is approx. 300 times as long as humans have existed. If you went a step further and used deuterium from sea water, there would be enough to supply the world with energy for 150 billion years - ten times as long as the universe has existed.²⁴⁷ So if that works, we’re done, and sooner or later it should work, since it doesn’t violate the laws of physics (the sun does it).

And it will be vastly cleaner and safer than any existing energy technology today, including wind turbines and solar panels. The waste products will only be quite small quantities of helium, which cannot become radioactive and which can be sold commercially for industrial use or even to fill up gas balloons for children’s parties. Even the core shield may be harmless once a reactor is decommissioned, if it is made of carbon fibre. In addition, a fusion reactor will automatically come to a halt if, for example, you disconnect its power supply. It would be similar to when you stop the power supply to a car engine: it doesn’t explode, it just stops, and there is no waste that can leak out.

Given access to such infinite, cheap and clean power, we would readily make artificial liquid fuel by combining atmospheric CO₂ with hydrogen over the catalysts of copper and zinc or in some other synthetic way. The result would be methanol, which burns cleanly and does not alter the atmospheric CO₂ content. Of course, we wouldn’t have much need of that as everyone could drive electric cars, but internal combustion machines do sound good in sports cars, and life should be fun.

As mentioned, in the distant past, humans suffered frequently from acute lack of resources, and we have, for example, seen that many of the Roman colonies constantly hovered on the edge of starvation.

In the West, scarcity is now completely over and in 2015, farmers amounted to approximately 1% of the British population, 2% of the US population and 3% of the French population; the US and France were, in fact, net food exporters. If it wasn’t for farm subsidies to keep farmers afloat in mountain areas, for example, 2% of the population of Western civilization could easily feed all its citizens.²⁴⁸ The reason for this is simply the West’s fast-paced creativity.

So here is the basic mechanism which the catastrophists and panic mongers do not understand: in a dynamic society we will, on average, develop or find new resources faster than we use them, and eventually we will approach solutions without practical limitations. The methods we use are mainly combinations of efficiency, recycling, compression, substitution, digitization, virtualization, biological cultivation, synthesizing and sharing, as shown in the box below.

The observation that we gain more resources as we use more could be called the resource paradox. Obviously, this phenomenon is as counter-intuitive as anything can be, and this is probably why countless thinkers and laymen consistently ignored or denied it for centuries, even though the statistics are clear. It is one of the most radical implications of Western creativity, and few have described it as well as the American economist and politician Henry George, as he explained the reason for the increasing abundance of food in the US:

“There is more food, simply because there are more men. Here is a difference between the animal and the man. Both the jay-hawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jay-hawks the fewer chickens, while the more men the more chickens.”²⁵⁰

The remarkable point about this quote is that it is from 1879, which is 29 years before Roosevelt held his conference about dwindlng resources, and almost 100 years before the great panic over resources during the 1970s. His message was just ignored, and it largely still is.

But this quotation brings us back to the issue of food, which concerned Paul Erlich and others so much. Between 1970 and 2010, 80% of the growth in farm production came from productivity increases and only 20% from the cultivation of new land. If we take a longer perspective, the world population increased approximately 400% from 1900 to 2000, and its agricultural production increased by 600%, while agricultural land use increased only by approximately 30% , which meant that farm productivity grew approximately five times, why the inflation-adjusted food prices decreased by 90%.²⁵¹ This productivity growth in agriculture came from a wide range of creative ideas, including the so-called Green Revolution, launched by American biologist, humanitarian and Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, which included more efficient watering, fertilizing and spraying.²⁵²

One of the main effects, however, came from the development of new crop varieties. An example: Since 1901, the Japanese sprayed plants with a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis that kept larvae and insects away. This worked because when these bacteria entered the insects’ stomachs, they made crystals that cut holes in their intestines and killed them. But they could only do it in the stomach with alkaline liquid (which insects have), so they were completely harmless to other species which had acidic stomach contents (non-insects). This technology is now widely-used in organic farming worldwide, but it has the disadvantage that some of the spray can get carried by the wind to areas outside the farms, where it causes unintentional killing of butterflies and other insects.

To solve this problem, and to boost efficiency, scientists have incorporated a small part of the responsible bacterial genes into plant DNA, so that these could protect themselves without being sprayed by the pesticides. This was attractive, since about 40% of global agricultural production is lost to weeds and pests – the environmental and economic benefits of reducing this loss are enormous.²⁵³

Later, another idea was generated. In the 1970s, US company Monsanto developed a herbicide named Roundup, which destroyed all the plants and then very quickly decomposed. They now developed modified plants that could tolerate Roundup, and the result of these “Roundup Ready” plants was that farmers no longer needed to plough or spray as often. For instance, trials in Mississippi and Alabama showed that farmers using such crops could go from an average of spraying eight times a season to only one and half times. The result was less energy use, less need for agricultural land, less soil erosion and less need for spraying with herbicides.²⁵⁴

GLOBAL CROPLAND AND CROPLAND PER CAPITA, 1700-2005. AS THE ILLUSTRATION SHOWS, SINCE THE GREEN REVOLUTION AND THE INTRODUCTION OF GM CROPS, WE HAVE KEPT TOTAL FARMLAND ROUGHLY UNCHANGED IN SPITE OF A RAPIDLY GROWING POPULATION. THIS CORRESPONDS WITH APPROXIMATELY HALVING OF THE CROPLAND PER CAPITA.

Technological developments in agriculture continue unabated, and while, in 1996, just 1.7 million hectares of agricultural land had GM (genetically modified) crops, by 2010 this number had grown to 147 million hectares. For the same reason, well over two trillion meals based on GM crops have been served, without any indication of adverse health effects.²⁵⁵ If anything, it is the other way around; GM food can be healthier, as it may be deliberately enhanced with more vitamins or minerals and have fewer natural toxins.

A good example of how quickly progress can be made can be seen in US corn production. Since World War II, the average yield per hectare has increased by 400%. This trend is expected to continue, and one of the new contributing technologies is machines for what is known as seed chipping. This technology enables seed producers to take DNA samples from each seed without destroying its ability to grow. Each of these machines can undertake one DNA test per second or more. Based on this technology, the producers maintain a database of the seeds with various genetic traits, and each customer can now order seeds that will satisfy the most relevant requirements for local conditions.

Genetically modified plants may require less water, fertilizer and pesticides, be more resistant to wind and endure more rain, frost or salt water in the soil they grow in, and they may grow faster, become bigger and often be substantially healthier. An example of the latter is ongoing attempts to make a variant of the cassava fruit, which contains more protein, iron and zinc as well as vitamins A and E. In addition, an effort is being made to remove the poison cyanide from it, which it produces. Finally, the aim is to make these plants resistant to certain infections, so that they keep for two weeks after being harvested, rather than just for a single day, which is not long enough to take them to market and sell them. Such a project has the potential to make a huge economic and nutritional difference to some 250 million people in poverty.

Another example of healthier crops is the rice variety known as “golden rice”, which was originally developed by two Swiss scientists. In contrast to conventional rice, this provides significant amounts of beta-carotene (which turns into vitamin A upon digestion), because it has incorporated a gene from maize that creates beta-carotene. It is estimated that using it could save up to two million lives annually in developing countries and it could prevent 250,000 to 500,000 new cases of chronic blindness and millions of annual cases of Xerophthalmia. Overall, it could mean a significant improvement in the lives of 200 million people in developing countries and also help them to find a way out of general poverty.

To help such people, scientists are also working to develop plants that immunize children against herpes, hepatitis, severe diarrhoea and even cystic fibrosis. These diseases (especially diarrhoea) kill up to four million people a year in developing countries, mainly children.

While bearing all this in mind, consider what is happening to the world population. The global population growth rate peaked in 1963 and has declined ever since. The world population grew 20% from 1970 to 1980, then 19% until 1990, 15% from 1990 to 2000 and 14% from 2000 to 2010. The UN expects it to grow 11%, 8%, 6%, and 4% respectively over the following decades and we may go below replacement fertility between 2020 and 2025 or at least before 2030, which would signal a coming population decline. And yet, as this happens, we have the tools to accelerate the productivity growth in farming due to significant breakthroughs in genetic engineering since 2000. For example, due to the the Monsanto seed chipping technology, the company expects to be able to accelerate productivity increases in corn fields by approximately 3.5% per year, equivalent to more than 40% per decade.²⁵⁶ This means we have the means of decreasing substantially the amount of farmland required, so that we can, instead, create natural parks.

All this comes about, quite clearly, because we live in a creative society; a society that often comes up with extremely elegant solutions to our problems. And although we cannot always describe exactly how the solutions of the future will work in practice, our experience, so far, tells us very clearly that as long as we believe in creativity and experimentation, there will be new technologies again and again, and many of them will surprise us completely.

That’s all very well, but what about water? We cannot produce water via genetic engineering, can we?

Perhaps we could, but it would hardly make sense, because the issue with water is not that we lack it or are running out in the strictest sense, since it is not a chemical that is broken down by application. But many countries are experiencing problems such as declining water tables or groundwater contamination or drying rivers due to contamination, and others simply have too little water easily available. Farming, for instance, often requires approximately 1,000 litres of water to produce just one kilo of food.

Consequently, there have been, for decades, forecasts of future catastrophic water shortages or even “water wars”. The astonishing fact about this is that access to clean water has actually been improving constantly, as we have become richer. By 1970, only about 30% of the population in developing countries had access to clean water, but despite the large intermediate population growth, this number had been increased to nearer 80% in 2010.²⁵⁷ Obviously this does not imply that everything now is ideal, since nearly 900 million people still lack adequate access to clean water, so the problem is there, it is big and, in China, its very big. But while many people continue to predict that the issue will grow even more problematic, it actually continues to get ever-smaller.

Let’s consider some figures. The average daily rainfall in the world is equal to approximately 40,000 litres per capita.²⁵⁸ Typically, you can expect people to need about 100 litres of clean water every day to use as drinking water and for washing and personal hygiene. And yet only 8% of the world’s water consumption is down to personal use. Almost three times as much - approximately 22% - is used for industrial purposes, and 70% for agriculture. If we add up all of this, we need about 2,000 litres per person, per day.

In practice, this is obtained by a combination of pumping up groundwater, draining from lakes and rivers, collecting rain water from roofs and so on. In more and more cases you would also use desalination of sea water, which costs $0.045 to $1 per 1000 litre, or from another perspective, filling up a pool of, say, 10*5*2 metres would cost $4.5 – $100.

Other solutions are focused on reducing water use, for instance with computer-controlled drip irrigation and genetically-modified plants that are better at utilizing and holding water. A large part of the solution is simply to place more farming where there is an abundance of water, and that is precisely what the Chinese and others do by buying and renting farmland in Africa - it can be easier to transport food than to transport the water needed for its production.

However, one of the ultimate technologies to alleviate the shortage of water is what is used in Singapore, Namibia, San Diego and Fairfax, Virginia, and, for that matter, in spaceships. It is what was, in its early days, called toilet-to-tap technology, which involves filtering and reusing all wastewater - including from lavatories - so that it can be reused indefinitely. It doesn’t sound too appetizing, but this water is actually cleaner than the purest bottled mineral water.

As Singapore illustrates so well, the solution to water shortages always comes down to money, and anyone can check out for themselves by visiting Dubai. This desert city has almost no natural fresh water, but today it has not only thousands of swimming pools, but even an indoor ski resort.

All this must not be construed as meaning that the necessary resources will come automatically or, for that matter, that it is an environmentally-sound idea to create a ski resort in a desert, if it is driven by gas (nuclear fusion would be another matter). But it does mean that we can achieve what we need through creative innovation.

The enthusiastic participants at Roosevelt’s 1908 conference about resources were absolutely correct that we must safeguard our resources. For example, in the early 1930s, the US confronted the “dust bowl phenomenon”, where strong dust storms emerged in the Midwest and parts of Canada during an exceptional drought. These were so intense that visibility could drop to one metre or less. President Franklin Roosevelt (not Theodore) then ordered the planting of more than 200 million trees from Canada to Texas to break the wind and protect the water and soil. Farmers were taught anti-erosion techniques such as contour farming, crop rotation, use of terraces and various other techniques - and thus the problem was eventually solved.

But they were not correct in assuming that the US would experience a shortage of wood. Since the conference was held, the country’s annual production of timber has increased by approximately 15% and, as people now use very little firewood for heating, this has been enough to turn the country into a major net exporter of timber.²⁵⁹ The US didn’t run out of iron or any other metals either – its annual steel production is now seven times is big as it was then.²⁶⁰

Nor did the nation run out of coal, because the annual production from coal mines is approximately five times as great now as then. And even if it had run out of coal, the demand for power could have been fully met with gas and nuclear power. As for overall US energy production, it is now soaring, and the price of natural gas has fallen sharply due to an ever-increasing abundance. Furthermore, the US’s known energy reserves are at an all-time high and still rising.

Let us, once again, take the example of the five commodities Ehrlich and his partners choose for their bet with Julian Simon: chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten. Obviously they believed there would be particularly acute shortage of these, but if we look at the total quantities of them in the Earth’s crust, there is actually enough for approximately 55, 15, 165, 59 and 4.14 million years of consumption.²⁶¹

Yes, million.

However, there are many other explanations to why they lost the bet. Instead of sending signals via copper wires, for example, people started using fibre optics, based on glass, which is primarily based on silicon. Approximately a quarter of the Earth’s crust is made of silicon. In addition, people began to transmit electronic signals via satellite, which again didn’t need copper wires. They also started substituting cutting metal with tungsten and ceramics. Tin prices fell because people had begun to manaufacture aluminium cans instead of tin cans. Aluminium, it should be added, represents 8.3 % of the Earth’s crust, and, if we could extract it all, there would be enough to cover all the continents with a several-kilometres-thick cap of pure aluminium (bad idea, but still).

So the concept on which Paul Ehrlich and his partners really gambled was that people would not find ways of extracting a fraction of a millionth of the Earth’s crust deposits of these metals and/or find substitutes for them because they were creative.

This again illustrates the point that you cannot know how we will move forward, but you can almost certainly assume that it will happen, if the community is creative. At Theodore Roosevelt’s conference no one could possibly have known that, before the end of the century, humanity would invent carbon fibre, genetic engineering , nuclear power, hyper filtration , LEDs and more. Even in 2006, nobody had heard of the concepts of the smartphone and fracking which, by 2010 - just four years later - had drastically changed economic forecasts and many people’s everyday lives. Nor can we now predict all the amazing technologies that mankind will have at its disposal 5, 10, 50 or 100 years from now. But we can assume that some of them will be awesome, because our creative design space is expanding hyper-exponentially.

If history is any guidance, what we should really expect is a world where the reserves and performance of our available resources a 100 years from now will exceed most people’s wildest imagination today, and where the cost of resources will have continued to decline in real terms as they have done in the previous centuries. And we should also expect that energy will become abundant, cheap and very clean.

The resource paradox is very real, and we will never run out, as long as we choose to maintain a dynamic and creative civilization. Since the book Limits to Growth (authored by Donatella H Meadows et al and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation) was published in 1972, the world population has doubled and the world economy has increased five-fold, while our proven reserves and production capabilities for most commodities have risen even faster; and no, we haven’t run out of anything.

So the ultimate resource is really - as Julian Simon put it so well - our creativity. And here is an strange fact: over the long term, the price of human labour is rising faster than inflation, whereas the price of commodities is rising slower than inflation (if at all). To an economist, the conclusion to make is that we have a growing abundance of raw materials and a growing shortage of people. That doesn’t mean that we should hope for many more people, but it does mean that we must not, as is often suggested, bring Western civilization to a halt because it is will soon run out of resources. It is the opposite: if we stifle creativity and instead create a static society, we will actually run dry.