The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.
Published 40 years ago, the Club of Rome’s cataclysmic environmental bestseller The Limits to Growth heralded the imminent end of human progress. Written by five Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists, the book asserted – with relentlessly Malthusian logic – that the world was heading toward global economic collapse. For many people, the assertion made sense. For many people, it still does. An ever-rising world population must inexorably deplete the world’s finite resources. Doesn’t it?
In a retrospective analysis, U.S. economist Charles Kenny, senior fellow with the Washington-based Center for Global Development, says the world isn’t coasting on empty. Quite the contrary, he says. “The biggest concern isn’t that the planet is running out of resources – it’s having too many for the planet’s own good.”
According to The Limits of Growth, the world was already – in 1972 – approaching Peak Gold, “the date when global [gold] production was to reach its supposed maximum, afterward and evermore to decline as dwindling reserves were tapped out.” Peak Gold would arrive in 2001, Limits said. In fact, hundreds of gold mines, operating on every continent except Antarctica, routinely produce more than 2,000 tons of new gold a year. And that, according to the World Gold Council, is without going offshore, where more gold awaits – reserves conservatively measured in the tens of thousands of tons.
The book’s most alarming prediction, of course, dealt with oil – which, it said, would be irretrievably depleted by 2022 – a mere decade from now – at the latest. Yet, “the World Energy Council reports that global proven recoverable reserves of natural gas liquids and crude oil amounted to 1.2 trillion barrels in 2010,” Mr. Kenny says. “That’s enough to last another 38 years at current usage. Add in shale oil, and that’s an additional 4.8 trillion barrels, or a century and a half’s worth of supply at present usage rates. Tar sands, including some huge Canadian deposits, add perhaps six trillion barrels more.”
The world is awash in oil, Mr. Kenny notes – and in much else as well. Take copper: “The U.S. Geological Survey estimates global land-based copper resources to be three billion tons or more – the equivalent of 185,000 years at current production. That’s almost double the estimate of reserves from 11 years ago.” Take phosphate, an essential component of fertilizer production: “Estimated global phosphate reserves climbed from 11 million tons in 1995 to 65 million tons in 2010 – equal to 369 years of current production.” Take beryllium: We have reserves to last 890 years. Take chromium, lithium and strontium: We have reserves to last more than 1,000 years.
For the rest of this article, please go to the Globe and Mail website: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/neil-reynolds/our-worlds-not-coasting-on-empty-after-all/article2416024/