Tag: peak resources
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Invisible Fuel (and “Limits to Growth” Thinking)
Economist: Inivisble Fuel THE CHEAPEST AND cleanest energy choice of all is not to waste it. Progress on this has been striking yet the potential is still vast. Improvements in energy efficiency since the 1970s in 11 IEA member countries that keep the right kind of statistics (America, Australia, Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy,…
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Thoughts on the “The Limits to Panic”
Forty-one years after the publication of the infamous Limits to Growth, Bjorn Lomborg offers this excellent piece, The Limits to Panic: … But the report's fundamental legacy remains: we have inherited a tendency to obsess over misguided remedies for largely trivial problems, while often ignoring big problems and sensible remedies. In the early 1970's, the…
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We are not running out of commodities
I've been writing about the common misperception of the economy as a zero-sum game and the fear that we will soon (or ever) run out of nonrenewable resources. This is counterintuitive to so many people that I need to address it in detail. I wrote a draft of this section for my book, but I…
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Are There Too Many People on the Planet?
Conservation Magazine: Are There Too Many People on the Planet? … Here’s what I bet goes on when this question is posed—and I want to say up front that I think this way myself. I do not like long lines and traffic jams. I do not like that I have to drive 60 minutes to…
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Why Will Never Run Out Oil: Markets
Carpe Diem: Julian Simon, Power of Market Prices, Why We'll Never Run Out of Oil, Why Peak Oil is Peak Idiocy As resource economist Julian Simon taught us years ago, we never have, and never will, run out of scarce resources like oil because as a resource becomes more scarce, its price will rise, which…
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Prices are Falling
One of the persistent claims by those with a neo-Malthusian sustainable growth perspective is that we are exhausting the world's resources. Commodity prices factor in not only present supply and demand but supply and demand for the foreseeable future. Therefore if supply is declining relative to demand, we will see rising prices. Here is a…
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Living Simply in Abundance (14)
“Material abundance is (A) rapidly depleting our resources and (B) destroying our environment.” This has become the refrain of a new generation of neo-Malthusian environmentalists in our day. It’s widespread in Mainline (National Council of Churches denominations) and is the dominant viewpoint among influential emerging church notables (Brian McLaren’s “Everything Must Change” is a prime…