The Simon-Ehrlich Wager at Seven Billion People

Good article.
Incidentally, you can’t actually ‘run out’ of any metals, since they are formed in the virtually limitless earth’s crust (as opposed to fossil fuels which are formed organically, and near the top).
We will only run out of Al, for example, when we run out of rocks, as there is Al in virtually every rock, but we only mine those parts of the crust where it is concentrated enough to be economically extractable (from weathering, tectonic forces, volcanoes or whatever).
But the key to understanding metals, is that once you mine the most concentrated stuff, with every drop in grade there is vastly more resources available; a rule of thumb is that with every drop in grade of 10% there is ~3-10 times as much resource available. So there is 3-10 times more copper at 0.9% than 1%, and 3-10 times more at 0.8% than 0.9%, and so on. This exponential increase in resource with every drop in grade ensures we will never ‘run out’ of any metal commodity-at lower grades the size of the resource is virtually limitless, it can only get to a point when the cost of extraction may exceed the cost and effectiveness of competing materials for demand (say replacing Al with plastic, or something else). Also, resources quoted by governments are only what has been defined, and only defined at a certain cut off grade, however metals themselves are effectively limitless in supply, on a world scale.

G.K. Chesterton
“THE answer to anyone who talks about surplus population is to ask him whether he is surplus population; or if he is not, how he knows he is not.” ~GKC: Introduction to ‘A Christmas Carol.’

“We have met the enemy and they is us” …….or our politicians to be more specific.

Hi David
Great article. As a geologist I fully agree with you.
Make please a small correction:
You wrote “More importantly, from a scarcity perspective, the production output of all five metals has been rising over time. Four are rising exponentially”
The trends do not show any exponential trend because they all have arithmetic trends. You should use “more intense trends” or something similar. Exponentially must be used when we have any “J shaped” trend and that does not apply to linear fits. Looking to the values, even if you used a polynomial fit, I could barely see any exponentially.
Cheers

When viewed as a percentage of a whole this is a very effective presentation. In terms of absolute numbers however it is deceiving. There are certainly more impoverished peoples than there were a century ago – there are certainly more people without ready access to clean water than there were a century ago – there are more malnurished people than there were a century ago – there are more people without adequate health care than there were a century ago – there are more murders than there were a century ago – in fact there are many unpleasant human circumstances that in absolute terms have increased significantly over the last century
I can confidently predict that these numbers will increase over the next century. It will get worse in the future.

“prepetually”

Human beings are unique. The more of us there are, the richer we grow. Over-populate a rat colony and you get alls sorts of shortages and pathologies. People collaborate, they share knowledge and work in teams. We compete naturally, not out of necessity, and when those competitive juices are directed towards commercial ends a beautiful thing happens; everybody is competing to serve the customer. Natural resources are of no value unless they are coupled with human ingenuity.

Thanks David Middleton. This is a great article, just confirming what I’m telling for a long time.
As for the bear in the woods, that bear is now in Government and it’s screwing things up.
Big time.

‘…The only thing the world has a genuine shortage of is honest and competent people in gov’t.’
Is that Malthusian?
BTW, thanks for your work David.

Middleton’s final sentence is dangerously wrong.
Commodity prices have gone wild in the last decade or two, but NOT because of population. Prices have gone wild because governments did EXACTLY WHAT MIDDLETON RECOMMENDS. They deregulated speculators.
WE DO NOT NEED MORE DEREGULATION.
What we need now is a return to the government rules that held from 1936 to 1990, a return to FDR’s rules. During that period speculators were a minor part of the system, so real supply and demand determined most prices.

williamholder you said in part on January 25, 2012 at 4:00 am:
There are certainly more impoverished peoples than there were a century ago UNQUOTE and then you went on and on about more and more of the world’s “woes”.
Do you have figures from an unbiased, reliable source to back up these alarming claims?
My impression is just the opposite.
Or are you just saying that there is more and more misery reported in the media when in reality things are getting progressively better than they were 100 years ago?

Most people seem to find that good news stories are hard to take, but we relish rolling in the dirt and in misery, particularly when it affects somebody else.
Sort of touch wood for luck.

Spartacus January 25, 2012 at 3:52 am
“The trends do not show any exponential trend because they all have arithmetic trends. You should use “more intense trends” or something similar. Exponentially must be used when we have any “J shaped” trend and that does not apply to linear fits. Looking to the values, even if you used a polynomial fit, I could barely see any exponentially.”
The left axis is logarithmic, so these “straightish” lines can be described as exponenltial.

polistra says:
January 25, 2012 at 4:28 am
[….]
What we need now is a return to the government rules that held from 1936 to 1990, a return to FDR’s rules. During that period speculators were a minor part of the system, so real supply and demand determined most prices.

It’s people who think and talk like you do that are at the bottom of much of mankind’s worst ills stemming from idiotic and deranged central planning of economies. FDR was a socialist central planner, and he along with the Democratic Party and not a few misguided Republicans are eresponsible for causing a depression to become a much larger and longer lasting Great Depression. The last thing we need is a return to such insane and cruel inhumanity. If there had been a moderate freemarket instead of a manipulated market, the depression could not have lasted more than about 24 months or so, ending about 1934-35 with a resurgence in replacing the capital infrastructure of the United States. Instead, the FDR-Democratic party policies inflicted a broken central planning market which caused food to be dumped into the Mississippi River to keep prices up while homeless and hungry people ashore tried in vain to recover the food from the polluted and disease laden river. FDR’s policies guaranteed the fixed labor costs and taxatin poicies would keep prices higher than families could afford, which resulted in the collapse of a consumer demand for products, which depressed sales and consumer demand below the level needed to increease or maintain production that provided jobs and consumer income. FDR killed the goose that laid golden aggs, and then plaintively wondered why.

Sorry if i’m a bit heavy on this but this is supposed to be a climate blog so to remind everybody wow o wow
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
have a look at the 600 and 400mb temperature *java
Way coldest on record

“Gerard says:
January 25, 2012 at 4:56 am
What Ehrlich hadn’t thought of is that population growth in underdeveloped countries made for extra masses of people working in inhumane conditions in copper mines. Yes humanity is able to proliferate but are we able to make circumstances better for the majority of people on this planet. I think your are better of(f) when a cake is divided by 8 th(a)n by 16 and that still holds when that cake doesn’t have a fixed size.”
Increased productivity and technological advancements enable the potential for two cakes. Distribution of wealth is exclusively determined by ignorant people in government, i.e.: Russia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Somalia, North Korea, etc., etc., etc.

Doom and gloom. All is lost for Africa. :>(

2011-09-20 – World Bank
African countries are among the fastest growing economies in the world
Despite a slowdown in the global economic recovery and an increasingly difficult global environment, Sub-Saharan African countries are continuing to post solid growth.
Following a 4.6 percent expansion in 2010, the region’s output is expected to grow by 4.8 percent this year (5.8 percent excluding South Africa) and by more than 5 percent in 2012 and 2013.
Indeed, African countries are amongst the fastest growing countries in the world:
http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/node/2036

and

Dec 3rd 2011 – The Economist
Over the past decade six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia.
http://www.economist.com/node/21541015

I don’t know the cause but I’m guessing fewer outright dictators, more free elections and the mobile phone. I could be wrong though.

Sorry, but this article is grossly flawed. It is entirely geological. Our dependancy on resources is not just what’s in the ground, but how fast it can be extracted. The prime example in this article is the claim of oil reserves doubling. That’s irrelevant. What’s important in oil production is the rate of production vs the demand. That was not taken into account in this article.

There’s nothing new under the Sun.
In the mid-19th Century many learned people believed that industrial civilisation was doomed. It was built on coal, and the coal was running out. The great economist W. Stanley Jevons pointed out that coal reserves were estimates, and coal was not the only possible source of energy. If coal did get scarce, the price mechanism would invite substitution.
The ‘Coal Question’ was the Malthusian argument of its day. They never go away, these Malthusians. In the 1970s we had the Club of Rome, the (ludicrous) Forrester-Meadows models, a memorable Newsweek cover announcing “Running Out Of Everything”, and students grooving on Limits to Growth.
In the 2010s we have… same old, same old.
It’s infinitely depressing. Simon was right – real prices have always gone down. Only the massive and rapid industrialisation of half the world has caused the 2000s to be an age of temporary price rises.
PS: afizifist says (January 25, 2012 at 5:14 am) re Aqua ch5.
A couple more weeks of decline and it’ll be off the graph! Are we sure these figures are right and not instrumental error? If they’re right it’s a tad worrying!

Excellent!

Great post. I have often thought that assuming that people are free to pursue their own ends resources would easily be amply available. However there is one resource that is by by definition more limited. And that is land. My Grandfather who was born in 1911 always said “they are always making more people, but they aren’t making any more land” . While technically not true ( I think they did it in the UAE) the sentiment has struck me as accurate. It would be interesting to perform the same analysis on land (not structures) I suspect that the inflation adjusted price would have risen in almost any time frame.

@ Greylar says:
January 25, 2012 at 6:29 am
Great post. I have often thought that assuming that people are free to pursue their own ends resources would easily be amply available. However there is one resource that is by by definition more limited. And that is land. My Grandfather who was born in 1911 always said “they are always making more people, but they aren’t making any more land” . While technically not true ( I think they did it in the UAE) the sentiment has struck me as accurate. It would be interesting to perform the same analysis on land (not structures) I suspect that the inflation adjusted price would have risen in almost any time frame.
Your Grandfather was wrong. Land is being made. Primarily due to oceanic volcanic activity, etc. That said, there is a significant percentage of land that is not habitable due to being a desert, altitude, and so forth. But that also changes on geologic time scales. People need to be a little patient, is all.

Here we go again with the linear regressions…. The root of the problem.

To adjust what
williamholder says:
January 25, 2012 at 4:00 am
When viewed as a percentage of a whole this is a very effective presentation. In terms of absolute numbers however it is deceiving. There are certainly “many” more “wealthy” people than there were a century ago – there are certainly “many” more people “with” ready access to clean water than there were a century ago – there are “many” more overweight people than there were a century ago – there are “many” more people “with” adequate health care than there were a century ago – there are more “people living longer” than there were a century ago – in fact there are many “pleasant” human circumstances that in absolute terms have increased significantly over the last century
I can confidently predict that these numbers will increase over the next century. It will get “better” in the future.
Changes in ” “.
Plus compairing todays health care to a century ago is almost meaningless.

On the water resource issue, there’s a major pilot project underway in the Middle East to capture water from the exhaust of power plants. If it flies it will augment the available supplies in those arid regions and provide a strong incentive to use gas instead of flaring it.

I don’t see a graph of square miles per capita (or people per square mile for that matter) in each continent and region over time, and price of land per square mile over time.
I’m reminded of a relative’s letter back in the 1830s, saying someone had offered them $60K for their 10K acres, but couldn’t bring themselves to accept so much; it just wouldn’t be ethical. It’s now a nice refinery, chemical feed-stock plant, shipping docks… And others who paid $0.75 to $1.50 for their annual property taxes on their square mile of land, so property taxes might be a separate indicator.
Closely (but not rigidly) tied to that, and to development of computing, are the massively increasing violations of privacy with idiot-meters (electricity and water), “interactive” cable TV “services” which track viewing, surveillance cameras along streets (some cities have 2 sets — one allegedly for monitoring traffic flow and the other for “crime prevention”), in businesses (yes, you are our valued customer, so we will begin by insulting you), searches at transportation nexuses, transaction kkkards…
What’s the price of that potable water per gallon?
“Speculators” serve as insurance. They even out prices, and reduce risks by taking the costs of them on themselves.
“1) global financial system collapse – possible but is it likely?” Already happened. We’re just waiting for the distortions to wash through and out of the economic system.
CPI is under-representing effects of inflation even when food and energy are included, and the definition changes have diverted it from the implicit claptrap def, er, uh, implicit GDP deflator and the WPI/PPI. These 3 used to be tightly twined until the changes of the early 1990s. Since then, they show extreme parting of ways.
http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoMoney.html
has graphs, links to shadowstats, the Fed, Oregon State and other price indices and money supply.

The later you adjust your economy (and this goes for Europe too) the harder the “shock” that will be needed to do it, and the harder and longer the times you will have to live; and if, as all the posts published here in WUWT forecast, we have entered a cycle where climate conditions will not be precisely “ideal”, in special for the northern hemisphere, then time is due for such adjustments. An alternative way out for this situation would be to open your frontiers, and those of Europe, to immigration, which would mean more working people, more buyers, more production, more market.

Asking if we should lower our consumption is equivalent to asking if our grandparent should have used less wood and coal. I think not.

Don K:
“First problem is that technology has “rerouted” a certain amount of metal consumption into alternate materials. e.g. How much chrome plate do you see on a modern car? If we still used materials in the fashion and amounts that we did three decades ago, the consumption and price of metals would probably be higher”
That’s entirely Simon’s point.

Chris B says:
January 25, 2012 at 7:01 am
—
Multiple studies have shown that size of growth and size of govt are inversely proportional.
The US’s economy was growing much, much faster, decades ago, when govt was much, much smaller.

thingadonta says:
January 25, 2012 at 3:22 am
Incidentally, you can’t actually ‘run out’ of any metals, since they are formed in the virtually limitless earth’s crust (as opposed to fossil fuels which are formed organically, and near the top).

I will grant you that on the grand scheme of things, humanity worrying about running out of metals is akin to a single colony of ants worrying about running out of rocks and dirt from the top of mount Everest. However… yes you can actually exhaust the metal supply of a planet. Mind you, it would take a race of far greater technological capability than our own, but it can be done. Metals are not formed in earths crust, they’re formed in supernovas, and ONLY there. They manifest in our crust because of internal heat and pressure inside the Earth.
/sorry, its the internet, so someone somewhere hates your generalizations.

williamholder says:
January 25, 2012 at 4:00 am
When viewed as a percentage of a whole this is a very effective presentation. In terms of absolute numbers however it is deceiving. There are certainly more impoverished peoples than there were a century ago – there are certainly more people without ready access to clean water than there were a century ago – there are more malnurished people than there were a century ago – there are more people without adequate health care than there were a century ago – there are more murders than there were a century ago – in fact there are many unpleasant human circumstances that in absolute terms have increased significantly over the last century
I can confidently predict that these numbers will increase over the next century. It will get worse in the future.

The percentage improvements will do just fine, and the absolute numbers will improve radically, when the population peaks and starts to decline. David, you shouldn’t cede the assumptions of the “medium” band of the UN Population Survey. It also has high and low bands — and the low band is always right. In fact, the lower bound of the low band is the best estimator, historically. The center of the low band now says peak 8 bn by 2045:
UN spreadsheet; click the “Low” tab

Mr Kedroski way of calculating a race sounds like somebody who loses every race but claims he would’ve won if he had but a faster car and been closer to the finish line at start of the race.
Oh no sir, Mr policeman I didn’t speed, check my statistics covering my whole driving career…oh, sorry wait, we have to start at 1982, since then the average would be spot on the current here speed limit. :p

Rob Crawford says:
January 25, 2012 at 8:59 am
Don K:
“ First problem . . . “
That’s entirely Simon’s point.
—————————————–
Ahh! Now we have a third useful statement:
The Stone Age did not end for a lack of stones.
The horse-powered society did not end for a lack of horses.
The chrome plate auto did not end for a lack of chrome.
LOL! http://www.freecarkits.com/chromemercedes.htm

I think the author over-estimates the population growth of Asia. China, Japan, the Koreas, Thailand, and even Indonesia (the world’s most populous Muslim nation) all have birth rates below replacement levels; Japan and China have maintained TFRs (Total Fertility Rates) at or below 1.6 children per female for over 2 decades. Japan is now losing population. China is only half a generation behind. Even India is seeing its birthrates plunge, and could have TFRs below replacement levels during the next generation. Russia and Europe, as everyone knows, are demographically in crisis. And even th more traditionally high birthrate nations of North Africa have seen birthrates plunge to or below replacement levels this past decade.
Yes, Africa will be the only continent that actually adds significantly to its population. But much of East Asia and the Middle East (save Yemen and Afghanistan) are following in Europe’s path. In South America and Central America birthrates generall have declined from 5.9-6.0 in 1970 (Mexico and Brazil) to around 2.4 (Mexico) to 1.8 (Brazil) in 2010. At current trends these nations will go below replacement levels during the next 10-15 years (if they haven’t already gone there).
Statistically speaking, it is much more difficult to recover lost populations (discounting immigration) when a nation drops below 2.0 children per female over extended periods of time, as the pool of fertile women also shrinks. In the case of Japan, China, Greece, Germany, Italy, and Russia, it is almost impossible; the current younger generations of women would have to begin having between 6-10 children, and thier children would have to maintain that birthrate for another generation – a highly unlikely scenario. From a purely economic perspective, the consequences are obvious. Almost all of the wealthiest nations on earth will see thier populations level out or shrink the next 30-50 years. Mainy people only look at the loss of producers; but the loss of consumers is also very important. How many investors are willing to risk thier capital with markets that will be shrinking? Only throught consolidation and mergers will corporations be able to maintain economies of scale. And despite the demand for food and resoucrce coming out of Africa, there will be net decreases in demand for energy, food, and consumer goods over-all. This will not be a radical change, but a long uneven and steady change in our global populations. Aging populations consume and produce less than younger ones;
In many ways, the Alarmists will be happy.In 30 years there will be less consumption of energy and food. But there will also be a leveling off and reduction in standards of living.

Interesting information David.
I’m sorry you didn’t include one very important graphic; maybe you have the data available to you.
Years ago during the plasticine age, Scientific American published a special issue on energy I think it was, and a very interesting paper plotted FOOD OUTPUT versus ENERGY INPUT for all kinds of global societies.
“Eskimos” for example increased their food production (seals etc) using the energy of powder in the bullets they shot the seals with, instead of harpooning them, and also the gasoline for their snow mobiles that replaced sled dogs or human sled pulling.
The overall result was that regardless of technology, world food production increased linearly with energy input .
In other words if the USA doesn’t get energy, the world doesn’t get food.
Only France and New Zealand were significantly off the world line in the direction of being more efficient at converting energy into food. In both cases it was attributed to unique weather conditions for those two places, and neither one was of great significance in terms of total global food supply.
Is this something you could extract current data for and show us, it would be most illuminating, in this era of energy abhorence.

BrianH:
A great meteorite story is at the end of Peary’s “Northward Over the Great Ice” vol.2. He describes the 3 meteorites that he found at Cape York in the arctic and managed to remove in the late 1890’s. The largest, the “Ahnighito”, was 90-100 tons, and if I’m reading the assay correctly, was 92% iron, 7% nickel and the rest traces of “other”. I assume there may be others buried here or there, although these 3 were exposed and had been used for centuries by the Eskimos to make their tools.

David Middleton says:
January 25, 2012 at 11:35 am
Brian H says:
January 25, 2012 at 10:50 am
…
. The center of the low band now says peak 8 bn by 2045:
UN spreadsheet; click the “Low” tab
You’re absolutely correct. I should have thought of that. The true most likely scenario almost always tracks at or below the alarmists’ lowest case scenario.

David, the implications are immense. I’ve never seen a proper, or even a half-vast, assessment of the consequences at the level of detail of this posting. Care to consider a re-do??
😉

Mooloo says:
January 25, 2012 at 11:45 am
@ William Holder
there are more murders than there were a century ago
Some other people have addressed your other mistakes, but I picked this one because it is the most egregious..
Did you think to check before you made this statement? You know, use facts, rather than make them up? The murder rate in 1911 was higher in the US than it is now. Nationally it was 5.5 per 100,000, compared to 4.8 now.

Yabbut, to give the ijit devil his due, his point was that there were so many fewer of us then, that 0.055 x few << 0.048 x many. He doesn't accept relative improvement, he demands ABSOLUTE improvement! As I noted above, that will happen after (or immediately leading up to) the significant decline in population beginning in the '30s or '40s.

Don K said @ January 25, 2012 at 7:17 am

Overall, an excellent article. But there are some problems…
Third. Water. It’s heavy and expensive to move. It may well be true that only 5% of water resources are currently utilized. But vast amounts of water in the North American lake belt or the Amazon basin, aren’t much help to the guy trying to raise tomatoes in Bakersfield or Cairo. A lot of agriculture is currently dependent on mining diminishing amounts of fossil water in arid or semi-arid regions. That’s almost certainly not sustainable.

There’s another problem here and it’s what got me interested in what we call sustainable agriculture (we don’t know of any agriculture yet that is sustainable indefinitely).
Irrigation of crops in an arid climate leads to accumulation of salts in the topsoil. Once those salts reach a certain level, the land can no longer grow crops. In ancient Mesopotamia irrigation agriculture and civilisation had their beginning some 7,000 years ago. That civilisation that irrigation had enabled collapsed when the crops began to fail due to salt accumulation. Crop irrigation only works indefinitely when there’s sufficient rainfall to prevent the accumulation of salts in the soil.
Before someone says: but we can always go to hydroponics, bear in mind the cost of production. Go dehydrate a pound of hydroponically grown tomatoes, weigh them, and then ask yourself if you are prepared to pay the same amount of money for that weight of wheat, rice, or other staple.
FWIW, I believe the best thing we can do to mitigate this problem is double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. That would lead to a calculated decrease in crop water needs of ~25%. But then I’m a heretic.

Everyone is ignoring the basic problem with resource extraction. The rate of extraction. These are indeed growth curves, and that is the problem. All growth curves have a doubling period. At 3% growth that’s a doubling period of about 25 years. That means in the next 25 years we will consume more resources than ALL OF HISTORY COMBINED. That’s what exponential growth means.
So here are the problems going forward.
Demand not only increases with population increase, but as poor countries modernize they consume more per person than a country with a growing population but has no modernization. Thus the doubling period of that consumption is shorter.
Second, mining operations can only extract their resourse so fast. So as ore grades drop, not only does the production rate fall, but the energy required to extract that same amount of metal increase.
Going forward the rate of demand will grow faster than the capable rate of extraction for crucial resources like oil, copper, chromium.
We are like a bacterium in a test-tube that has a resource consumption double period of one week. At the 50% mark all the bacterium are claiming we’ve been here for months and have half our resources left, so there is no foreseeable problem.

typo: “about when the sun goes red giant…”
Addendum: water desal, in virtually unlimited quantities, also follows from cheap power. Actually, the huge discontinuity, the step surge, in unconventional NG is relevant there, too, as it is a fine (interim, current technology) power generator fuel. See Israel for some fascinating developments (it is about to become a surplus gas producer and exporter) in its already booming desal cutting-edge tech industry.

jrwakefield says:
January 25, 2012 at 12:35 pm
. . .
So here are the problems going forward.”
It is said that predictions are difficult – especially about the future.
Consider the growing of corn. Early last century if one were to have made forward-looking estimates of labor and energy inputs for a bushel of corn they would have been wrong. Read the story of “check-rowing” at the link below and wonder about the things you don’t know and that you don’t know that you don’t know them.
http://www.farmcollector.com/implements/check-row-planting-by-the-book.aspx

Then, to power that and everything else till about the sun goes red giant, there’s this:
LPPhysics.com (at a capital cost and output price <<10% of best current retail market.)
Dreams and potential doesn’t mean anything. I’ll believe all this when it actually happens on a large scale. I hope it does happen, I really do, but I’m still waiting for my flying car I was promised in the 1960’s would be main stream today.

Don K:
you are absolutely correct about auto bumpers not being chromed anymore. that is not because of a shortage of chrome but because of the gawd awful costs of running a chrome shop and the hazmat regulations…….
chrome and nickel are the alloying elements in the various “super alloys” that allow things to withstand extremely high working temperatures. things like power turbine blades in gas turbines, the piping and valves and pressure vessels in “serious” electric generation systems ….
the dip in price in the middle 80’s is interesting as during a certain period in those years the air force needed quite a bit of tungsten, chrome and nickel and had the state department talking nice with the russians as they had most of the commercial sources of it.
some of these prices are artificial. you can have a need for a large amount of these metals (tip off, when stuff is sold per pound and listed on the new york time semi precious metals market, there isn’t much of it around), say 6000# of tin and have to go through us govt. procuring procedures that single “buy” can push the price up by ~250% in a week. quite simply because the “buyer” has a “babbling problem”.
c

The amount of ‘carbon based’ fuel available in the earth’s crust can be reasonably estimated from how much oxygen there is currently unattached to carbon: primarily that attached to iron in iron ore or free in the atmosphere (iron ore contain 10^4 more oxygen as it happens).
As nearly all the earth’s oxygen came from the splitting of original CO2 in the early atmosphere into carbon and oxygen via photosynthetic bacteria over 2-3 billion years, then it’s not difficult to show that there must be of the order of 10^18 tonne of carbon available to burn – around ten million times current estimated reserves of ‘fossil fuel’. See me out anyway!

What a wonderful up-date. Thank you

While the inflation adjusted price of these metals is a good measure of affordability, it is not a complete measure. The price is only relevant if it is measured against the financial resources available. Relative to world real per capita GDP all five metals have become more affordable since 1969…
An important point. There probably isn’t a “complete” measure of affordability.

ROM said @ January 25, 2012 at 3:18 pm

Mankind needs four basic items to survive;
Water
Food
Shelter
Energy
With cheap and readily available energy he can create and supply all his basic needs as above. The deliberate use of and control of energy is the defining difference between mankind and the animal world.
Even the use of the lowest form of energy, a cow pat fire, defines a human being from an animal.
George E. Smith; says:
January 25, 2012 at 11:34 am
“The overall result was that regardless of technology, world food production increased linearly with energy input .”
Back in the 1980′s a couple of universities, one here in Australia and another in the USA did the energy sums on food production from the mining the ores for the farm machinery and the oil and gas for the farm chemicals right through the industrial and farming processes and systems until the farm grown food product finally rolled out through the farm gate.
They found that energy available in a food product ie; grain etc, was about equal to the total amount of energy required to grow that food.
The unbelievable stupidity of greens and their climate alarmists running dogs in trying to force the price of energy up and to limit energy production is beyond stupidity to the point of future criminality if the world runs short of cheap, readily available energy as that will also imply that the world will also run short of food at prices that a large part of humanity can afford to pay.
.
The British Industrial Revolution, the basis upon which our entire modern technologically based civilisation has been created which has done so much to feed and clothe mankind’s ever increasing numbers, was founded entirely on cheap energy from British coal.
And our whole industrial and technological society is still based entirely on the supply of absolutely reliable, stable and cheap energy.
For world population data; Source; CIA World Fact Book;
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?v=24&c=xx&l=en
As world population growth ceases around 2060 or so and the global population stabilises around the 8.5 to 9.5 billions and then starts a slow, long term falling trend, the real problem will be the type of economy existing.
Our current global economic system is based on growth and more growth. The system relies on an ever increasing number of people to buy and consume of every type of product both hardware, software and intellectual software.
As the global population stabilises and with an aging population sometime past 2060, global economic growth will no longer come from an increasing population but will only come from increasing the living standards of the stable population and even those increases in living standards start to slow down once energy consumption reaches about 6000 kgs oil equivalent energy per annum per person.
A situation that will likely be reached sometime in the 22 nd century.
After all, an individual will only acquire a certain amount of the goods and intellectual products during their lives before becoming sated and as an individual ages those demands become less and less.
As the global population stabilises an entire new economic system much different to our present economic system will have to be created otherwise mankind and his civilisation will just fall into a long term period of economic decline and stagnation with all that entails for the future advancement of the race.

All assuming no new sources of energy. And no, I’m not referring to the stupidities of PV, wind etc.

A point too often missed that I don’t think was ever brought up on the thread:
“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”
Dr Milton Freidman
The highest average annual inflation adjusted price of crude oil occurred in 1980. We all understand supply and demand, but we forget the effects on price levels of the supply and demand of money. This effect is usually amplified with commodity prices as people seek out alternative hard assets to counter the declining value of the paper currency in their wallet.

RE: “How many investors are willing to risk thier capital with markets that will be shrinking? Only throught consolidation and mergers will corporations be able to maintain economies of scale. And despite the demand for food and resoucrce coming out of Africa, there will be net decreases in demand for energy, food, and consumer goods over-all. ”
I think many markets (especially in the real of quant and program trading) are already pricing this in. The destruction of wealth is already underway.

RE: “As the global population stabilises an entire new economic system much different to our present economic system will have to be created otherwise mankind and his civilisation will just fall into a long term period of economic decline and stagnation with all that entails for the future advancement of the race.”
I have a dark view. I suspect such decline and stagnation will be our destiny. We will never reach the stars, let alone colonize our own star system. We will perish, a fallen, barbaric shadow of what we once were, in a slowly dying world.

If anyone is interested in trends in the affordability of food (from 1900 onward) and various metals (from 1800 onward) in terms of prices-to-GDP-per-capita or prices-to-wages, check out this post of mine at MasterResource from Earth Day, 2010 at http://www.masterresource.org/2010/04/population-consumption-carbon-emissions-and-human-well-being-in-the-age-of-industrialization-part-i-revisiting-the-julian-simon-paul-ehrlich-bet/ . It also addresses the Simon-Ehrlich bet.

The only way our civilization can decline and stagnate
is because of ubiquitously stifling Big Government that so afflicts us now.
On its own, consitutional capitalism will progress without limit.
Just read von Mises.
Statists, interventionists, rent-seekers, regulationists, the Left in general:
there is 100% of the Cause of our Decline.

SteveSadlov says:
January 25, 2012 at 7:10 pm
[….]
I have a dark view. I suspect such decline and stagnation will be our destiny. We will never reach the stars, let alone colonize our own star system. We will perish, a fallen, barbaric shadow of what we once were, in a slowly dying world.

The first tentative steps towards the colonization of our solar System have already been accomplished in the form of the temporary scientific stations inhabited for years at a time in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The next few early steps are well within current capabilities, with the establishment of special purpose habitats on the Moon and in the asteroids. Once human habitation of the asteroids reaches a critical mass and self-sufficiency, the human habitation of the asteroids would rapidly overtake the human population of the Earth and go on to surpass it many times over, regardless of events on the Earth.
Once humans have mastered the permanent habitation of asteroids, slow travel to the stars could at the very least be accomplished over millenial time periods by asteroidal habitats used as transports. At best, interstellar transportaion may be accomplished by utilizing concepts of physics yet to be discovered. In any event, unaddressed is the vst potential for human colonization of the dark planets and planetoids between the stars.
The future of the human race is largely a matter of human choice/s and will to survive beyond the cradle of human origins on the Earth. As always, some humans will choose to adapt, survive, and prosper on the frontiers of human experience; while other humans will choose to shun such challenges and sacrifices to squabble over and despoil whatever others have struggled and sacrificed to create. The choices for human prosperity versus human extinction begin with adopting or rejecting the opposing visions for the future.

jrwakefield says:
January 25, 2012 at 12:35 pm
Everyone is ignoring the basic problem with resource extraction. The rate of extraction….
….Going forward the rate of demand will grow faster than the capable rate of extraction for crucial resources like oil, copper, chromium.
We are like a bacterium in a test-tube that has a resource consumption double period of one week….
A-ha, truisms as true as they were in the days of the Horse and Buggy, and well back before the invention of the Wheel. Behold ye, even the holy GCM’s themselves forecast the fact that unless we immediately retreat to the Equality of the Watermelon’s Bacterium’s Stone Age Utopia, thus ~”restoring American Values”, we’re doooomed, I tell you, doooomed…by the ineluctable Rules of the hallowed Petri Dish to Ecological Overshoot’s dire consequences! Repent and “Unite”, ye B. Septics, before it’s too late! “B. Obama wants you!”

if you are using US CPI as the inflation measure for this study, then this whole exercise is futile. the BLS changed the CPI calculation in 1992. readings across that data are not comparable. the new, post-boskin report CPI reads several % points lower than the old one. what shows as 3% today would have read more like 7-8% pre 1992.
many (myself included) feel this massively understates inflation. it was a deliberate manipulation to get social security COLA costs down. it’s data tampering that would make even the GISS blush.
regardless this change in the CPI data is the reason the winner of the bet changed, not an actual change in the behavior of the metals.
that makes this whole analysis meaningless.

David Middleton says:
January 25, 2012 at 8:24 am
Chris B says:
January 25, 2012 at 7:01 am
“Almost all of our problems are due to political interference with market forces.”
Not that i’m in favour of more government, but hasn’t the increase in government closely followed, or led (causal/correlation issues notwithstanding), the growth in GDP, kcals per capita, volume of metals and oil extracted, etc.?
The author hasn’t shown his political statement to be true. Moreover, he contradicts himself with this statement: “Africa just lacks the economic and political infrastructure to realize its own potential.”
The increase in “rule of law” governance helps to enable growth. Western capitalist democracies are all “rule of law” governments (even the Obama administration is somewhat restrained by “rule of law”).
Most undeveloped and developing nations tend to have governments that are less restrained by “rule of law.”
_____________________________________
So, I hear you saying that anti-trust laws, for example, are not a good thing, because they are “political interference with market forces” even though they are a part of the “Rule of Law”.
And African nations following “Sharia Law” with no “political interference with market forces” are destined to prosper.
Sorry, but I think the explanation for western prosperity lies more in the theories of Max Weber than the effect of “Rule of Law”.

Malthusians are like the bears in the middle of a bull market. They are (of course) correct, and it will all end in tears. But at the time they are roundly ridiculed for not understanding why “this time it is different”. The timing is of course the key. Is it 7 billion, or maybe 8? It really doesn’t matter, but there is a number which is too much. And we will reach it. And it won’t be pretty.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and the population will stop growing before we reach the crunch. I hope so.

Here is a compelling (72 min) presentation by Dr. Chris Martenson, “a former American biochemical scientist and Vice President of Pfizer.[1] Currently he is an author and trend forecaster interested in macro trends regarding the economy, energy composition and environment.” (Wikipedia) made at the Gold and Silver conference at Madrid, Spain last year under the auspices of the Gold Money Foundation. His basic proposition is that exponential growth has been required for the world of which we have become accustomed, and that is now reaching a natural limit that will force a new paradigm in the future. It appears he is warning, by implication, that traditional investments can not be expected to return their expected rewards.
When questioned about the errors of Malthus, about 50 minutes into the talk, he says “He didn’t have Google…”
Chris Martenson al Gold & Silver di Madrid 16.11.2011.mp4

Chris B;
slavery and child labor laws are workable and are followed ONLY because they capture a long-term market payoff larger than the short-term benefits of breaking them.
The Invisible Hand has brass knucks and will eventually get around to destroying anyone who tries to legally enforce truly anti-market legislation.
[Moderator’s Query: Is that what you meant? -REP]

Just for reference:
Here is an official link to a ‘TCMDO’ chart from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis showing the US “Total Credit Market Debt Owed” from about 1952 to 2011 plotted with $10,000 billion dollar grid-lines. This is the near perfect exponential curve that suddenly goes ‘flat-line’ after 2008 as outlined by Dr. Martenson above.
Of course, the cause of this growth halt is subject to multiple interpretations and given the super-accelerating nature of the exponential function, it was more or less inevitable.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?s%5B1%5D%5Bid%5D=TCMDO
The suggestion is that this ‘peak-debt’ indicates that we have entered a new stage of history.

I’d be very interest to read more on the extinction debate. Any place to go for more information? Thanks

Brian H says:
January 28, 2012 at 11:31 am
legally enforce truly anti-market legislation.
[Moderator’s Query: Is that what you meant? -REP]

REP: yep.
Mercy buckets!