[EGreg]

"Based on known terrestrial reserves, and growing consumption in both developed and developing countries, key elements needed for modern industry and food production could be exhausted on Earth within 50–60 years.[2] These include phosphorus, antimony, zinc, tin, lead, indium, silver, gold and copper"

Sounds ominous! Why aren't we more worried? Because Capitalism?

[oilywater]

Mostly that. But realistically there's no education on any of this stuff.

For example 2017 is the year when some of the most used rare earth elements will be depleted and should be retrieved through recycling in the next years (gallium for the LCD displays is disappearing, so either we figure out the displays or massively recycle). This is not a surprise because the demand for rare earth elements has been rising exponentially, with the number of electronic devices produced :D

Although, food production is definitely getting more and more efficient. But biology of living beings on Earth is too inefficient for the current production to be sustainable. Just compare the vast amounts of food (energy) a single duck, chicken or cow needs to maintain body heat, with the weight (energy value) of meat. This coupled with growing consumption in developing countries won't really work.

Without Hot Air is an excellent book written by a problem solving pragmatist and excellent machine learning researcher David MacKay exposing the pure numbers and limits and extrapolating them carefully, to get the same conclusions. http://www.withouthotair.com/Electronic.html

[ridgeguy]

Gallium supply: Wikipedia [1] says USGS estimates gallium reserves as > one megaton. Production in 2012 was an estimated 273 metric tons. I don't see us running out of gallium soon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium

[oilywater]

I'm not pulling these numbers out of my butt.

There's absolutely no way that there's one million gallium reserves economically viable for extraction. If there was, the price wouldn't be that high.

Hafnium and indium too. 2017-2020.

https://scholar.google.hr/scholar?q=indium+hafnium+reserves&...

[mapt]

I'm sure you're not. The issue is, "economically viable" is a useless phrase by itself, and is usually used to imply "economically viable at current prices".

For most non-energy non-renewable resources, humanity can just pour more energy than they do now into securing the scarce resource, and things will be a bit more expensive, but less concentrated ores will be targetted and more expensive extraction methods used and the supply will hold up at a higher price. Substitutes will be sought and some will maybe be found, if they work out better than the now-pricier resource.

Finance abhors an inexpensive depleting natural resource it has no substitutes or emergency supply for: if it is economically viable for one investor to buy all the world's remaining supply of Technetium, he will stockpile it and trickle it out to the resource-starved market at ten times what he paid. To assert that "lack of education" is the problem is ignoring the numbers issue: it only takes a single smart investor to turn the whole market towards appreciating reality-mandated scarcity, and he earns a very large profit for educating the market.

Fossil fuel extraction concerns have a better basis: they have a floor at which it is mathematically impossible to profit from extraction, EROI<1, so long as you are using the energy you extracted to harvest more energy. I was for a period of five years or so an alarmist on this point. Even so, it looks like there exist enough positive EROI deposits to raise global CO2 by an untenable amount (an amount which depopulates >10% of the world's presentday habitation due to high wet bulb temperatures), long before we run out of coal, oil, gas, & kerogen shales.

[EGreg]

I have a question: if squeezing a market results in a guaranteed profit, how come so few companies were able to do it, even on small markets? Goldman Sachs did it with bread and steel I think... but failed. Why would pumping cost less than the dumping makes?

[mapt]

Most markets in the modern world are fairly efficient. This means that they are priced appropriately for supply to meet demand, with all the most predictive facts about future supply & demand, acknowledged fairly well by the market price (which will drive expansion or contraction of that supply and demand next year). If it's possible to squeeze off supply to the market, the market has likely already been squeezed. There are billions of dollars in profits waiting for anyone to pounce on a market that is truly squeezable, and prove the rest of the investors wrong. Most markets are not especially squeezable, because that element of risk to the supplychain has already been factored into their asset prices, and substitutes or alternative supply sources become available for exploration at higher prices, which undercuts anyone attempting to squeeze supply off.

It's pretty safe to assume an equilibrium between these sorts of processes, and a lack of "glaring upcoming shortages that Capitalism Didn't Listen To Our Warnings About".

At least, up to some level - maybe two or three decades - at which uncertainty about future inflation rates and technologies renders it really risky to make long bets of any sort.

[marcosdumay]

The discrepancy is probably due to different definitions of "reserve".

In the end of the day, that probably means that we'll get our gallium, but we'll have to pay more for it.

[gizmo686]

The standard answers are:

1) Known reserves likely represent a fraction of what is available because we have not had reason to search for new reserves.

2) We do not really consume any of those resources in the same way that we consume fossil fuels, so as a worst case scenario, we can simply mine them from our landfills. This arguably falls under new, more expensive, reserves.

[dawnbreez]

Most likely, we're not worried because we didn't know about it. The companies that rely on/mine these materials are probably worried, but are most likely just not mentioning it since doing so would hurt their sales (and in turn lower their budget, which means they'll have less money to solve the problem).