Alex Tabarrok calls our attention to the myriad predictions that a shortage of Lithium would cripple battery production and thus limit the switch to electric cars etc.; meanwhile Lithium production keeps rising and the price of batteries keeps falling.
This has been a theme over my whole life. I grew up with predictions that the world was about to run out of oil; in high school we played a primitive computer game in which you tried to keep civilization alive without running out of energy, and it was very hard to win. I remember in particular that the game said the US would run out of natural gas in six years, and hear we are 44 years later with natural gas production still rising.
I also grew up with predictions that the world would run out of food, with news stories from every African famine shown as glimpses of the world's future. But you only have to look toward the borders of Ukraine, where Polish and Romanian farmers are trying to block Ukrainian grain exports, to see that we are suffering as much from an oversupply of food as a shortage. Instead of starvation, we have seen the slow, painful disappearance of the family farm in the face of falling prices.
I no longer take any of these predictions seriously. So far as I can see, we have reached a level of technology and wealth that the makes the danger of real, physical shortages very slight.
Energy? Solar power gets cheaper every year, new types of nuclear reactors promise oceans of safe power, geothermal power may soon be practical on a massive scale, and many engineers say fusion power is 15 to 25 years away.
Fresh water? We are on the edge of making solar-powered desalination affordable on a massive scale.
Rare minerals like Lithium and Cobalt? The rising demand for these items has spawned, on the one hand, major efforts to mine them, and on the other drives to use them more efficiently and recycle them when they are used up.
I could go on. I do not mean to say that our consumption of these things is cost-free; we are digging up and paving over huge areas to do all of this, causing strange kinds of pollution with unforseeable impacts, and so on. But in our world almost all "shortages" are really about politics. Shortages of housing are created by limitations on building; famine is now the child of war.
The one shortage we cannot seem to solve is the shortage of good will; the one desire we cannot sate is the lust for power over each other.
The nature of these predictions is that they are correct for the given moment - that is, when such a prediction is made, we will run out in X amount of time if nothing changes.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the entire point of the prediction is to inspire people to make changes. These predictors WANT to be proven wrong - the entire point of saying "We're going to run out of natural gas in six years" is to spur people to increase natural gas production, or find new reserves, or develop new methods of accessing known but previously unavailable reserves, etc.
The point of warnings is to inspire people to take them seriously so that they DON'T come true. If your neighborhood was flooding, and you were warned that in twelve hours your house would be underwater if nothing was done to divert the water, you wouldn't sit back and say "Eh, I don't take such predictions seriously anymore." You'd be on the phone with the emergency services, etc, seeing what can be / is being done to divert the water before your house floods.
Now, maybe you trust the emergency services to take care of the problem before your house floods, and so in that regard, you aren't worried. And maybe you likewise trust private companies and the government to expand natural gas production before we actually run out. But in both cases, the prediction of a shortage itself ISN'T wrong - and it HAS to be taken seriously, at least by someone, if you want to avoid catastrophe.