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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.
Incorrect - the "running out" of resources means that we will have completely shifted the Earth's climate and seen immense changes to global temperatures and environments. The environmental damage is only just goin to get started when that happens, and the human infrastructure damage will be immense. Every single port city is going to be underwater and new ports will have to be constructed. Shifts in climate means that the areas which receive rain and the areas which are habitable for humans are going to be very different to what they were in the past - which is going to be a big problem, given that our farms and other infrastructure are located in places where they are most efficient right now, as opposed to the world we're going to be living in once all that carbon is back in the atmosphere. Not to mention the terrible weather events we'll get during the transition - and which are already starting to show up.
I'll believe that nuclear fission is a viable answer to our energy needs when you show me a nuclear plant capable of generating energy at a profit without government subsidies of one kind or another. Good luck! Nuclear fusion has been twenty years in the future for the past eighty years, so you'll have to forgive me for not being too excited for it.
No, they didn't have access to fossil fuels. Technically they were richer in the sense that they could have chosen to use those fossil fuels responsibly, but we already know that in reality they didn't.
How do you figure every port city will be underwater? Total sea level rise since the 19th century is estimated at 15-25 cm. It's a joke.
Heat and CO2 have resulted in greater agricultural productivity for our plants already,and it's only going to get better from here. Gigantic areas of canadian and russian tundra are going to slowly become available for crops and human habitation.
France has had cheap electricity thanks to its nuclear power plants for decades now.
The 19th century english and americans had access to cheap, high quality fossil fuels - why weren't they richer than us?
Apologies for the delay! I've been very busy with Christmas and the like - seeing family ranks a bit more highly on my priority list than the culture war.
There's no real academic or scientific debate on this subject - I'm not saying that we're going to have to start building Noah's Ark tomorrow, but the projected sea level rises over the next few hundred years are going to do this with ease. Complicated systems like the global climate are also vulnerable to sudden shocks - if something causes a large glacier or ice-shelf to drop into the ocean we could be seeing those levels rise faster than predicted. Again, this won't be a problem for us - but it will have our descendants cursing our names in the future.
You're right - Russia is a big winner of climate change. But what you're missing is that the increase in global temperatures is also going to drive a massive increase in adverse weather events. While the equitable climate on the other side of climate change is going to be very nice for a lot of people, the transition period is going to be rather nasty. Existing farming infrastructure will have to be moved and there are going to be a wide variety of extreme storms, floods and other natural disasters.
France had to bail their nuclear power system out because it wasn't economical - and up til now they got their uranium for a 50th of the price thanks to their colonial holdings in Africa. If you scroll back up I've actually had this conversation before, in this very thread even.
Do you think this is an actual argument? "If a doctor earns more money than a janitor, why is this doctor fresh out of medical school with tons of debt poorer than a janitor who is retiring after saving and investing for their entire life? Checkmate, liberals." I am legitimately struggling to understand the argument you're making here. Ultimately, they were richer in the sense that they had potential to do a lot more than we did. Personally I think going to the moon again would have been a better use of those fossil fuels than vastly inflating the American population then rendering a vast majority of that population clinically obese - a society that did NOT make that choice would actually be unironically richer in my opinion.
"There's no real academic debate about what might happen hundreds of years in the future" - Okay .
I know some academics are prone to dramatic predictions of doom, but you know you don't have to take everything they say at face value, right? It honestly reads like you never double-check anything, do the barest of common-sense questioning.
Questions such as:
How can you reconcile 'all ports being underwater soon' with 'actual sea level rise for a century and a half being 0.2 m'. 'all ports Underwater' to me means 'dozens of meters', at least. How do you get from one to the other, when the straight extrapolation falls far short?
Why, if we are on a 'nasty transitory period' is, as always, the productivity of farmland increasing?
Why, if nuclear energy is 'uneconomical', does France have such cheap electricity compared to 'nuclear-exiting' Germany, and why does it export so much of it?
Why, if EROEI is determinant, were past societies with better EROEI so much poorer than we are?
In this particular case, what I'm looking at are the results of paleoclimatology studies which looked at the nature of the Earth's climate and atmosphere in the times when the carbon which we are currently pumping into the atmosphere was already there and hadn't been locked away in the form of fossil fuels. There's no real debate on the topic - when you increase the insulating effect of the atmosphere, global temperatures rise. Do you actually have a reasoned and well thought out rebuttal to that claim? I'd love to see it if you do, but so far nobody has managed to step up to the plate.
It's ironic that you accuse me of not double-checking anything when you claim that I said "all ports being underwater soon" but when I check my actual post I put that event hundreds of years into the future. Soon on a geological timescale to be sure, but the actual answer to this objection is just for you to stop hallucinating.
Because we're pumping massive amounts of fossil fuels into them for one, and because the nasty transition stage is only just beginning. The key points of this nasty transition are going to be an increase in adverse weather events and shifting climate belts that make the optimal distribution of farmland and farming infrastructure very different to where they are now. But on that note, I also said that some people are going to be winners - Russia especially.
Because France purchased their uranium for cents on the dollar due to their colonial holdings in Africa, and because their government has since bailed out their nuclear power system because it wasn't able to financially sustain itself. I've had this argument several times before - if you want to learn more, look up Françafrique. When you factor in the declining EROEI of current uranium deposits, solar and other renewable energy sources outcompete nuclear in every way that matters - outside of specific circumstances where nuclear's unique characteristics make it valuable (nuclear submarines, precarious geopolitical situations, production of valuable isotopes, etc).
If a doctor makes more money than a janitor, why is a doctor fresh out of medical school with lots of student debt poorer than a janitor who has just retired after saving and investing for their entire career?
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