John Holdren on Mineral/Energy Depletion (Part III in a series on Obama’s new science advisor)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- January 2, 2009 5 Comments

Physical scientists are prone to viewing hydrocarbons as a fixed quantity. Being fixed, this volume must deplete with production. Extraction costs and thus selling prices must rise. The crisis is only a matter of when [“What will we do when the pumps run dry?” asked Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich in 1974 (The End of Affluence (p. 49)] . Physicist John Holdren is no exception to this view.

Reality is quite different from the hard science formulation, however. In a business or economic sense, mineral resources are not fixed, known, or depleting. They are created by entrepreneurship (“resourceship”) in a market economy where incentives are present and technology improves. Mineral quantities can and do expand over time as shown by time-series data of estimated world resources.…

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