If you melted down the asteroid belts and made 40 mile long spinning cylinders out of them for people to live in, the solar system could support about 300 billion people in luxury. I guess we would come back to earth for camping trips. I read that in some article. The article also said there would be a cure for old age in the next 30 years so even if every two people had one child we would need those several hundred thousand habitats for humanity in space within a few centuries. I think this is what you are betting on when you talk about there not being a problem with sustainability. I am skeptical.
What we're betting on is free market capitalism.
Perhaps we should start with the fundamentals before trying to explain why the doom and gloomers weren't right back in the 1970's, and why they aren't right today. You hafta learn to walk before you learn to run, right?
There are two fundamental truths that govern the availability and the cost of every type of goods or resources.
The first is that supply is inversely proportional to demand (when supply goes up, demand goes down; when supply goes down, demand goes up). The second is that the price of any given good or resource is proportional to the demand (when demand goes up, price goes up). The cost of any particular good is proportional it's demand.
The second is that in a free market system, both entrepreneurs and consumers will constantly adjust to changing market conditions. Entrepreneurs will constantly be adapting to the current business climate, be they taxes, cost of materials, consumer demand, competition, or any of another million and one factors. Consumers will vary their buying habits to accomodate any changes in avaiability or porice of their preferred products (if Coke were to suddenly tripple in price, most consumers would switch to Pepsi and go on about their lives. The die-hard Coke fans, for whom there is no substitute, will pay the trippled price because to them it's still worth it)
Now, switchin tacks to the earth and resource depletion...
Most lay people assume that drawing resources out of the earth is like drawing money out of your checking account. They think that humanity can effortlessly draw resources up out of the earth at any rate we wish, just like they can effortlessly withdraw funds from their account at any rate they wish. They further think that one day the earth will run cold out of resources if we keep pulling those resources out, just like one day their bank account will run dry if they keep making withdrawals.
This model of the earth and her resources as a bank account is erroneous.
The earth and her resources behave more like a soggy wet blanket (I'm struggling to come up with a good analogy here, please bear with me). The blanket is the earth, and the water it's soaked with are the resources. When you want to pull some water/resources out of that soggy blanket/earth, you grab a corner and squeeze, out comes a stream of water. When you want some more water, you grab another part of that blanket and squeeze some more. You continue around the blanket until most surfaces have been given a good squeeze. Eventually there comes a point where squeezing more doesn't yield as much water as it once did. You have to squeeze harder to get the same amount of water, or if you don't want to squeeze as hard you must content yourself to having less water. Things start to look bleak for our hypothetical planet earth and her valuable resources. But suddenly you have a brainstorm and realize that if you
twist the blanket instead of
squeeze it, you get that nice heavy flow of water again. Your own innate cleverness and ingenuity has overcome the problem of running out of blanket surfae to squeeze for water. So you go over the entire blanket twisting water out instead of squeezing it out, once more enjoying a steady and reliable stream of water. Once again you reach a point where you aren't yuielding as much water as you'd like. So you sit down and brainstorm some more. Once again you come up with a new idea: fold part of the blanket over on itself and then wring it out. Once again your ingenuity has yielded a steady stream of water from the blanket. Eventually you give up, eithe becuase you're bored, or becuae you realized that there's a lot more water to be had from the faucet, or becuase you don't need any more water. The blanket is still plenty wet, it never came anywhere close to drying out regardless of how much you squeezed and twisted and wringed (wrang? wrung? eh, whatever).
Likewise, when humanity wants some particular resource from the earth, we locate the right corner of the globe and "squeeze" it by mining, farming, drilling, or whatever. When we want some more, we locate another spot and mine/drill/etc some more. When we run out of areas to "squeeze", we come up with smarter, more techologocally advanced methods of resoucre extraction. We start to twist instead of squeeze, and suddenly we're able to revisit areas that were formerly devoid of extracable resources.
The bottom line is that we don't ever
run out of resources. We find that some resources become more scarce and/or more difficult to retrieve. If we still want more resources, we come up with better ways to extract them. If we can't come up with any better methods of extraction, we figure out how to make use of some other resource that we can extract. But any given resource will never, ever be completely gone. The worst that will happen is that it will cease to make economic sense to go after a particular resource.
Now we combine the economic principles discussed earlier with the proper understanding of resource depletion we just covered.
When resources become more scarce (supply decreases) then demand for that will go up. Price will go up alongside demand. When prices for that resource go up, it becomes economical to spend more money retreiving that resource (i.e. it becomes worht your while to squeeze the blanket harder, because you're getting paid more for the smaller amount water you get out). Also, when prices go up consumers willand entrepreneus fill other ways to satisfy their needs using different resources (maybe some water from those mud puddles over there will work just as well for your purpose as the water you squeeze from the blanket - you no longer bother with squeezing the blanket).
Both entrepreneurs and consumers will adapt, either by finding a better way to recover the resource, or by switching to another resoucrce or by finding a better way to recover. Life goes on without a hitch.
Take as an example the availability of Walnut trees for use in making rifle stocks. It used to be that walnut was the de facto standard material for building a proper rifle stock. But over the years, due primarily to two world wars and the need to build bazillions of walnut stocks for 1903s, 1917s, and M1s, we now find ourselves with a dearth of walnut for new gunstocks. Walnut isn't gone, there are still walnut trees out there, there just aren't very many any more, and it's harder/costlier for timber prospecter to find good walnut trees. If you really want a walnut stock for your new rifle you can have it, but it's gonna cost a lot more.
Now, the free market steps in. Someone clever came up with the idea of making stocks out of laminated wood. Someone else clever came up with the idea of making stocks out of synthetic materials. We now have riflestocks that are just as cheap as the old walnut stocks were before we ran low. The newer stocks even have some advantages of the older ones. Rifle shooters continue on without a hitch.
The bottom line is that, even though we've used up most of the walnut out there and won't be able to replace it for a generation or three, the shooting public never missed a beat. Quality, effective rifles are just as available today as they were before the resource depletion, thanks to supply/demand, the ingenuity of the entrepren, and the adaptability of the consumer. And for those purists out there, there are still walnut stocks available if you really want one.
ALL resources behave this way. Crude oil (what happened last year when gas prices topped $3/gal? The public started buying smaller, more efficient cars, they started carpooling, they started driving less. Life when on) iron, copper, timber, tillable farmland, energy, yopu name it. Once supply starts to run low, demand goes up. It becomes more valuable for entrempreneurs find smarter and more effective ways to recover those resources, thus working to drive supply up and demand back down. It becomes more advantageous for consumers to purchase less of that resource, opting to either do without or to use something else in it's place, which tends to drive demand down and supply back up.
The system works in equillibrium, always. The resource never, ever runs out completely, and the end consumer is never, ever left hanging. Life, as always, goes on. The doom and gloomers are proven wrong, just as they have been since the beginning of time.
Now, a key facet of this system is that it only works inthe presence of free market capitalism. The equiullibrium fails if entrepreneurs aren't free to pursue smarter ways to recover resources. The equillibrium fails if entrepreneurs aren't free to adapt their business to changing conditions. The equillibrium fails if consumers aren't afforded free choice over what products to buy and what products to pass on.
THIS is why I oppose environmentalists so fervently. They seek to scare us with predictions of apocalyptic resource shortage, whiche we've shown never happens in a free market system. They're solution to the "problem" of these "shortages" is to tamper with the free market, which we've shown CAN and WILL created shortages. Thus the very environmentalists who scare us with phony fears of shortages will be the ones to cause real resource shortages for everyone.
Ironic, innit? And perhaps a little bit scary, too.
