[oppositelock]

This is different than fish, as tungsten is recyclable and doesn't rot.

Read up on the Simon/Ehrlich wager. Nobody knows the future, but your professor was demonstrating a solid economic principle.

[nerdponx]

I know that oil and tungsten are materially different from fish. Marginal costs of digging things out of the ground does in fact tend to increase gradually with scarcity, as do incentives to devote resources to basic research into recycling, consumption reduction, and alternatives.

But teaching undergrads about tungsten and not fish is just propaganda.

Edit: To be clear, the point is not that my professor was idiotically wrong about oil and tungsten specifically. The "idiotic" part is to assume and furthermore imply to young students (who don't know any better) that the general principle holds equally well in all domains. Maybe "arrogant" would be a better word than "idiotic".

[narrator]

Oil and gas are different than metals though because some deposits spurt out of the ground, while others require heroic drilling, pumping and refining efforts that take more energy to realize. This is the concept of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI). When it takes more energy to get the oil out of the ground than is in the oil, it might be better to use the energy for something else and leave the oil in the ground.