Are We Running Out of Resources?
Running out of resources has been one of the most influential claims of the early environmental movements, and a claim that provided the background for many of the environmental movements such as; recycling, the argument that small-is-beautiful and the excuse for the need to restructure society away from its obsession of consumption and production. The idea of the world losing its resources at an accelerated rate because of humans, has been very influential over the past 30 years. This movement is also one of the environmental claims that have been confirmed clearly to be incorrect. However, the scarce of resource reduction gets its run through the media on frequent basis. Many environmentalists today deny their previous claims of the earth’s resource depletion.
Are we running out of resources? It is a temporary economic myth. This fear that we will use the Earth’s natural resources has been with us since the industrial revolution. Since the beginning of industrialization, people have feared that as firms use up the Earth’s resources, we would eventually run out of them. This fear continues today, however this is largely a myth, in fact we are not running out of resources, what we are doing over time is learning to use resources more efficiently and finding substitutes for resources as they do begin to deplete. For example, copper, in the early 1960’s telephone use in the United States was expanding enormously, at the time the only way to carry the data over telephones was over copper wire, so as telephone use began to expand to new parts of the United States, the demand for copper began to rise, as the demand of copper began to rise so did the price. The outcome of this scenario is that people begin to worry we would not have enough copper to wire the entire country for telephone use. However, as we know we managed to get around this problem, how did we get around it? Well two things happened; first as the price of copper began to rise, copper producers
Are we running out of resources? It is a temporary economic myth. This fear that we will use the Earth’s natural resources has been with us since the industrial revolution. Since the beginning of industrialization, people have feared that as firms use up the Earth’s resources, we would eventually run out of them. This fear continues today, however this is largely a myth, in fact we are not running out of resources, what we are doing over time is learning to use resources more efficiently and finding substitutes for resources as they do begin to deplete. For example, copper, in the early 1960’s telephone use in the United States was expanding enormously, at the time the only way to carry the data over telephones was over copper wire, so as telephone use began to expand to new parts of the United States, the demand for copper began to rise, as the demand of copper began to rise so did the price. The outcome of this scenario is that people begin to worry we would not have enough copper to wire the entire country for telephone use. However, as we know we managed to get around this problem, how did we get around it? Well two things happened; first as the price of copper began to rise, copper producers
Cited: Cobin, J., Ph.D. (2004, September 22). Are we running out of natural resources? [Fact sheet]. Retrieved from The Times Examiner website: http://www.policyofliberty.net/e-books/ Crowley, B. L. (2011, April 15). Are we running out of natural resources? [Fact sheet]. Retrieved from The Macdonald-Laurier Institute website: http://www.macdonaldlaurier.ca/files/pdf/