| 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. |