Why I've Never Been A Big Believer in "Peak Oil"

I've never been a big believer in the commonly expressed vision of Peak Oil (reasonable background on Peak Oil in the middle piece here).  If you're unfamiliar with the concept it starts with the very reasonable observation that the earth isn't infinite so there's not an unlimited amount of oil to use.  Then it predicts that once some quantity of oil pumped out of the ground is reached, production drops precipitously and dark ages happen.  The timing of this peak somehow always seems to be "real soon now" and has been from the earliest Peak Oil proponents in the 1950s until much more recent predictions.  The thing is, like most predictions of the future, it has been phenomenally wrong.  This graph sums it up well, from the US Energy Information Administration last year.

In 1980, we were forecast to have a 27 year supply of oil.  In 2017, after 37 years, instead of there being no oil for the last decade, the supply expanded to 46 more years.  One guy who has studied the Permian Basin in the Southwest US says it's totally reasonable to consider it a permanent source.  Essentially infinite.  Of course, what happened was that new techniques were developed to get oil out of the ground and that increased the amount that was recoverable.  All because the free market was allowed to function properly.  

All this is an introduction to the article I clipped that graph from, "Why Resources Aren't 'Natural' and Will Never Run Out" over on Watts Up With That, reprinted in turn from The Washington Times under the same title.  The version on WUWT has the cool graphics I clipped. 

The author starts with some backgrounder information; the World Wildlife Fund and a few other, like-minded organizations declared (because reasons, I'm sure) that on August 1st the world will go through "Earth Overshoot Day", when the world will go through more resources than it can produce in one year.  Exactly where the other 5 months worth of resources that we'll use will come from isn't specifically stated; there must be really big warehouses somewhere.  No, wait, if we're using resources faster than they can be mined, where would the resources to stock the warehouses come from?  I know, don't start getting all rational on them...

Anyway, this leads to a quote that is even more spectacularly stupid than that one.

Margaret Beckett, UK Environment Secretary pointed out in 2006, “It is a stark and arresting fact that, since the middle of the 20^th century, humankind has consumed more natural resources than in all previous human history.”

I wonder if it ever occurred to Ms. Beckett that was because there were more people alive on Earth since the middle of the 20th century than lived before that?  Without massive plagues or Meteors of Death, the population is always increasing and it's virtually always true to say that more people are alive at this very moment than were ever alive before.  With more people, we'd be needing to cut the usage per capita massively to be using less resources than even 50 years ago.

Since commodities like metals or oil are freely traded, those prices can be tracked.  It goes without saying that if we're running out of any of those, their prices should be going up, right?  And they aren't.

The 1972 international best-selling book Limits to Growth predicted humanity would run out of aluminum by 2027, copper by 2020, gold by 2001, lead by 2036, mercury by 2013, silver by 2014, and zinc by 2022. But today, none of these metals is in historically short supply.

Global production of industrial metals soared from 1960-2014. Annual production levels were up: aluminum (996 percent), copper (417 percent), iron ore (531 percent), lead (343 percent), nickel (455 percent), tin (66 percent), and zinc (348 percent). At the same time, the World Bank industrial metal real price index of these seven metals was flat, down a little more than one percent by 2015. World reserves of copper, iron ore, lead, and zinc stand near all-time highs. Prices are not rising as predicted by resource-depletion pessimists.

The predictions were spectacularly wrong.  Of the dates predicted in Limits to Growth, we've gone past the dates for gold, mercury, and silver.  The plots below show these metals are still being mined, and the growth of production shows no signs of slowing down (right plot).  Aluminum production is hard to read thanks to the color they chose, but instead of declining, as you'd expect if we were on the precipice of running out, it has gone up tenfold since 1960 and still looks to be increasing.

The article produces a stunning quote to give some perspective on "limited resources".

Most people don’t realize the vast quantity of raw materials available on our planet. Canadian geologist David Brooks estimated that a single average cubic mile of Earth’s crust contains a billion tons of aluminum (from bauxite), over 500 million tons of iron, a million tons of zinc and 600,000 tons of copper.

There are 57 million such square miles of Earth’s land surface and almost triple that area under the surface of the oceans. Of course, only a tiny fraction of metals in Earth’s crust is economically recoverable with today’s technology. Nevertheless, Earth’s supply of raw materials is finite, but vast.  [Bold added: SiG]

Mining and minerals are one of my interests, and we've been to mines that allow tourists.  I've stood in a field of discarded iron ore - the highest grade ore found in the upper peninsula of Michigan.  Tons are lying there and have been for decades.  It's a well known place.  Do you think that would be there if we were short of iron ore?

Last November, I did a piece on the 50th birthday of the book The Population Bomb.  That was the book that claimed that population growth would result in resource depletion and the starvation of hundreds of millions of people.  I recall conversations about "hamburger wars" as people fought to the death for dwindling supplies of food. Millions would starve to death in the 1970s.

It's always the same mistake with these guys.  They take some trends, make a linear extrapolation and predict a doom.  They never consider that history isn't linear.  They never seem to grasp that human ingenuity is the most powerful resource on Earth.  Time after time, humanity has faced environmental problems or shortages and figured out ways around them.

The history of the human race is a history of using that ingenuity to improvise, adapt, and overcome.  It's not a smooth continuum but things get better.  In the long term, that's always true.

To quote the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, “On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”