Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Claims of being ‚at peak X right now‘ decompose into two elements, one is a completely unsupported and constantly falsified prediction of decline, the other the correct statement ‚we now produce more X than ever‘, which is hardly supportive to the doomer‘s central thesis. Despite the abundance of resources (as in, there are many types of useful resources), you never see these global peaks in hindsight, they‘re always hiding right around the corner.
IDK man, copper is pretty convincingly in decline. We basically haven't found any new large scale copper discoveries in the last 15 years. Grades are continually declining. We're currently mining ores that are 0.6% copper!!! And this is only going to continue to get worse. Unless we find an extremely large easy to exploit source of copper approximately ~now, copper production is guranteed to fall in the next 10 years.
Source
A line-go-roughly-up price graph, a list of things copper is useful for, and price forecasts by banks and mining companies, that‘s your evidence? Not worth the paper they‘re - not -printed on.
Of course the grades have been getting worse. The grades of everything (coal (less anthracite more brown) , oil (less sweet more sour) , copper, uranium etc) have been getting worse since humans thought of something to do with them. The total amount of copper on Earth is around 1014 tons in the top kilometer of Earth's crust, which is about 5 million years' worth at the current rate of extraction. The only reason they don‘t find more deposits is because they aren‘t motivated at current prices.
Every time I have to ask the same question: What makes this moment special? People could have, and HAVE made, the exact same argument for the last 200 years at least. They were all wrong. You have your theory/intimate conviction that says ‚at some point we‘ll run out‘ on one side, and on the other you have empiric proof of your ideological forefathers being wrong every single time. We're observing a physical phenomenon, and you have a theory that sounds convincing but always fails , while I can predict exactly what happens - shouldn't you give up at some point?
Let me try and lay it out how I see it. The extraction of every nonrenewable resource is defined by a tailed Gaussian curve, where the easy to harvest resources are mined/harvested first. The really easy sources of fossil fuels and minerals were harvested a long time ago because they didn't require large expenditures of energy. High grade ore and high-pressure oil deposits are no longer readily discovered as those have been exploited and exhausted by lower tech civilizations (the Romans for example exhausted much of the easy to access mineral resources of Europe). With better technology lower grade sources of these resources can be accessed, but these usually require more of an input of energy. To go from PA or Texas gushers to fracking for example requires a higher input of energy because you need to pump water into rock at high pressure to get the oil out, refine it more, etc. Same with copper and other minerals: more energy is required to get copper out of lower grade ores than higher grade ores.
This would not be a problem if we had unlimited energy. We literally could filter seawater to get the copper we need. The problem is that we are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels for pretty much all our energy, and they have been getting more expensive to extract since about 1970 due to declines in easy to access oil/coalfields. You can see this in the behavior of oil prices: steady if declining real price until 1970, and then consistent if ragged increase in price since then. This increase in the cost of energy is one reason why mining companies don't want to invest in exploration: the energy cost of extraction is continuing to rise, meaning any new mine with low ore grades may not be worth the investment because of associated high-energy costs.
To answer your last question: I don't think now is special. I think we've been in a slow decline since the 1970s. Real assets (houses, cars, most real foods) have had a real increase in price over the last 50 years, reflecting a real chipping away at living standards here in the west. I think this reflects increasing costs of energy, the fundamental basis for human society. Of course there are other explanations for this phenomena on the forum, many of which may contribute as well. But I think energy is primary. The "peak" I think will merely be the point where it gets difficult to deny this.
Of course if we successfully invent fusion power, I will be wrong about this. Then we can access effectively unlimited materials here on earth. In that case pollution will be a more limiting factor, which we can theoretically solve with unlimited energy as well.
I don't know man, I think my way of looking at the world has pretty good predictive value. My copper futures outperformed the S&P500 this year. I also would predict real global increases in the cost of material goods: which also has happened over the last 50 years, with notable exceptions in electronics. In addition, the increased energy expenditure required to get these resources is having terrible effects on the biosphere: global warming, ocean acidification, and loss of wild animal biomass. All of these graphs are going in the direction that my view of the world would predict.
Of course if we invent fusion this all could be moot, but even then, given the history of how human society has dealt with increased energy availability, its doesn't seem likely to me that we would actually solve our ecological problems.
This is just throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks. The (also false) ecological destruction argument is entirely separate. If we run out of energy and resources, the ‚destruction‘ will cease.
Fusion? What about fission? We already have hundreds of years of proven uranium reserves, and it‘s a small part of nuclear energy generation cost.
According to your EROEI math, the romans, and then the 19th century english, were richer than we are, since they had access to high-grade resources they could mine for less energy.
I don’t have the energy to debate the earlier parts because I’m frankly getting a little tired of the snark and lack of real argument. Give me a couple actual claims that we can debate rather than just telling me my argument suck.
However, one the last part I will disagree. My theory does not state this because neither the Romans tbr 19th century English had access to oil reserves with crazy EROIs of 1:100. It’s only in the 20th century that we got that and only really after world war 2. I will go to bat for a higher standard of living between ~1950-1970 in America than now in America.
Paging @FirmWeird on nuclear.
I don‘t think I was snarky, but in any case I don‘t mean to be. In fact, I have a dear friend who believes similar things to you, and it makes him miserable, and I really want to convince him. I‘m trying to do the right thing here. Aside from spreading cheer to my friends and fellow mottizens, I‘m interested in the psychology of this particular discussion: they say it‘s hard to get a man to change his opinion when his self-interest depends on not changing it. But for the green/degrowth people (and also communists , feminists, various doomers and conspirationists etc) , it would be far more advantageous for them to adopt a more optimistic, practical ideology!
Yet they don't. Which to me indicates that those cynical explanations are weak; people generally really believe what they say they believe because they think it's true, without ulterior motives.
Anyway, your argument is very theoretical , syllogism-like (1. resources are finite. 2.etc) , so I had to respond in kind – we‘re not disagreeing on actual figures of copper production.
Okay, this is a concrete claim I disagree with. As evidence, I have (per capita) :
I don’t know, I don’t think it makes me a very cynical person. I enjoy my life a fair bit as you can maybe see from other posts on here. I think it just makes me a bit less naive about tying my future plans to economic growth. I’m still invested in the stock market, but have been trying to avoid the AI boom for example. I’m still going to finish my PhD, but maybe not work in academia when the whole system is going to fall part because of demographics and lack of surplus to pay for basic research. I’m thinking about how to continue to live my life without buying a car so I don’t have to worry rising fuel and associated costs. The future is going to be what it’s going to be: one of us will be right, and there’s very little either of us can do about it as individuals, which I think is what depresses many doomers. They see the doom and gloom as taking away things, I see it as freedom. Guess what can’t happen in a declining energy environment: woke police states, AI takeover (either through what we’re seeing now or AGI), or continued global homogenization. All the atomization, hyper stimulation and specialization that modernity has brought will have to be scaled back and I think that’s a good thing. By trying to build my life around those things, even if you are right about energy/material abundance, I think will end up happy.
Anyway, happy to debate this more another time. I will make a top level post on a culture war thread in a few weeks with my thoughts better laid out with more data and we can debate there.
I do believe you‘re a religious ascetic-mystic of some sort.
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