There have been smart asses talking about Peak Caol for 250 years. We are going towards going on 70 years of Peak Oil. There were widespread scares in the 70s about all kinds of metals running out because of 'Overpopulation' (another nonsense concept that people repeatly dig out. In the 60s there was a believe that fission materials was incredibly limited. In the 90s and 2000s there was an actual beleive that there were not enough 'rare earth' materials.
And we had for a long time a clear economic explaition why this happens. Its well understood but somehow the same ideas are repeated all the time.
And your example is horrifingly bad, because if we were talking about humans there would be a mountain of evidence that in fact humans are not important.
However in the whole history of the modern world we have never actually run out of a non-renewable resource. Even when supposedly the smartest people predicted it over and over and over and over again.
At some point this is just idiological bable unsupported by even the slightest amount of evidence and should be treated as such.
So what's your argument here? That it's impossible to run out of resources? Or that we don't need to worry because human's always have and always will innovate their way out of every problem?
It seems extremely intellectually dishonest to go "just because something has never happened means it'll never happen and we don't need to worry about it" - do you think it's possible that we need these fears to innovate our ways out of things?
The only reason the ozone layer is getting better is because people were made aware of the problem and did something about it - if we hadn't become aware of the issue it wouldn't have reversed by magic. We need to be aware of these things and work towards a solution - which means acknowledging they could happen.
Human innovation is just one kind of response, to the general trend. The real argument here is about the price, a finite resources that everybody understand to be running out would already raise in price long before any actual real limit is hit. The price system response to both on the supply and the demand side and importantly it doesn't respond in real time rather its actually predictive.
So if somebody says that something that is now available for essentially free, ie used to fill up balloons and children birthday parties you immediately know that it is nonsense.
With all of these arguments going back 200-300 years the people who make them never take a general higher level trend into account to make their argument.
> It seems extremely intellectually dishonest to go "just because something has never happened means it'll never happen and we don't need to worry about it" - do you think it's possible that we need these fears to innovate our ways out of things?
What I'm saying is that we should be intellectually honest and look at the actual trends and data we have historically for such claims and consult our models that we as humanity have developed to understand how these dynamic works.
This is what we do in basically every single situation but somehow when arguing about 'resources running out' we throw this out and are just willing to believe the same old nonsense arguments over and over again.
> The only reason the ozone layer is getting better is because people were made aware of the problem and did something about it - if we hadn't become aware of the issue it wouldn't have reversed by magic. We need to be aware of these things and work towards a solution - which means acknowledging they could happen.
That is a totally different problem. The Ozone was a externalize problem. Focusing on those kind of problems makes actual sense. That's my exact point, instead of inventing nonsense scaremongering problems about Peak-Whatever.
And we had for a long time a clear economic explaition why this happens. Its well understood but somehow the same ideas are repeated all the time.
And your example is horrifingly bad, because if we were talking about humans there would be a mountain of evidence that in fact humans are not important.
However in the whole history of the modern world we have never actually run out of a non-renewable resource. Even when supposedly the smartest people predicted it over and over and over and over again.
At some point this is just idiological bable unsupported by even the slightest amount of evidence and should be treated as such.