Prof. Steve Horwitz: Are We Running Out of Resources?

Prof. Steve Horwitz addresses the common belief that the world is running out of natural resources. Instead, there are economic reasons why we will never run out of many resources. In a free market system, prices signal scarcity. So as a resource becomes more scarce, it becomes more expensive, which incentivizes people to use less of it and develop new alternatives, or to find new reserves of that resource that were previously unknown or unprofitable. We have seen throughout history that the human mind's ability to innovate, coupled with a free market economic system, is an unlimited resource that can overcome the limitations we perceive with natural resources.

[brandonb]

"For example, copper..."
:holds up a zinc penny:

[jeffrobinson]

Its a fallacy to claim that oil reserves will continue to grow when the trend of growing oil reserves comes from technological advances of exploration.  This can in no way be logically construed that the supply of oil (or copper) are limitless.

[MLarkin]

He isn't just saying that will always find more or be more efficient, but that as we run out or it gets more expensive we will look for alternatives. Which has been shown to be true

[AsianBM]

This is really based on the assumption that we will always find a way to replace or refill a certain resource but there's always going to be a point when it stops and at the population we have, the technology, and the consumption rate, it's a much more plausible threat than it was 100 years ago.
Not to mention environmental threats that accompany digging up scarce resources.
And even then you can't guarantee that we'll come up with an affordable replacement.

[theq]

Eventually those resources will run out. You can't deny this fact.

[concernedcitizen]

The only resource we are lacking is other people's money.

[LearnLiberty]

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[psyssi]

Did he not just make a point against himself with the copper argument? People feared we would run out of copper, but the switch to fibre optic, a more plentiful product, meant that we could continue wiring without fear. Surely this should be the same concept for how we look at energy. Crude Oil will eventually run out, it is a finite resource, no matter how many new deposits we crack into. And so, is it not wise to invest in something more renewable/efficient like nuclear?

[RoyerAdames]

How to fix pollution
Step
1) Make it profitable

[vmichetti]

His argument is basic economics, never does he assert a finite resource will be magically "infinite" but that as prices go up more exploration becomes profitable, and more reserves are found. Once it is so expensive to explore that searching for new reserves becomes economically unfeasible, the market moves on, new technology is developed, the old is abandoned...ie. copper vs fiber-optic telephone wires.

[ErikBlekeberg]

In the video he mentions this with our move from copper to fiber optics. As price goes up, we look for more options (drilling previously too expensive sites OR new technologies). This is why we have seen a larger push for electric cars and hybrids in recent years from varying car brands.

[dewert]

0:23 ...In fact we are not running out of resources as they DO begin to DEPLETE
nice contradiction

[JaCkmArc]

You are right, we are not running out of resources. We are just handing these resources over to the private sector and make people pay money for them.

So we are running out of people with money, not resources.

[HeartlessGorre]

Basically every aspect of this video is wrong.
Using non renewable resources more efficiently does not cut down on the amount that is used per year. Rather, paradoxically, it makes people use the resource even more than they would have.

Equating copper to oil is a really really bad idea. The fiber optic cable is superior in many ways to copper, however, if you take every single source of alternative energy and put it against oil, or coal, these two individually fuel more machines than geothermal, wind, solar, nuclear, etc combined, and each alternative source is either intermittent (wind, solar) requires mining of other non renewable resources (nuclear, solar), or it can only fuel us if we used 200%of the farmland we use today for it (ethanol)

The biggest mistake in the video, though, is the premise. We are running out of both oil and coal. We have used more of them in the past ten years than in all years they have been in use combined. This is because as the global population exponentially increases, there is more need to use highly productive machines to support them, machines which are powered by non renewable resources.

The only thing you need to realize is that we currently use more oil every year than we discover. Don't take my word for it. With the current use of oil, we will need to discover a Saudi Arabia every 3 years to sustain our civilization. Recent 'big finds' of billions of gallons of oil in places like the gulf of Mexico and Alaska only have enough fuel for around 48 days of US oil demand.

Part of the reason that we haven't already run out of oil is that the price of oil is artificially jacked up by OPEC. In effect, by price gauging us for oil, they make the average person use less of it, but this only delays the inevitable.

By the way, the Keystone pipeline would not lower gas prices anywhere in the world for this reason, nor would it make the US oil independant. OPEC controls the price and distribution of oil, and the oil from the pipeline could give us oil to last the world a few weeks at current use. But remember, the population of the world is growing, 255 people a minute, so use is always going up.

Basically, the only answer to these problems is to cut back. So who's first?

[TwistyTrav]

This guy must have forgotten that there have been more efficient forms of energy production for quite a while now. Like the electric car, hydrogen power, or even much more efficient combustion technologies, due to much more strict European efficiency standards. The main difference between oil and copper, is that the copper industry is not nearly as devious and greedy as the oil industry is. He spoke about how we have found oil in places we didn't know existed due to oil companies being able to afford to look in more expensive areas. Maybe that should be a lesson in understanding how badly we are being ripped off, and how much of a monopoly the oil industry actually is.

[rdormer]

The thrust of his argument is that peak oil is wrong because we'll either:

1) keep finding new sources of oil, forever, or
2) easily find replacements for it

Both of these scenarios are highly unlikely.

[BobFrichtel]

You lost me at 1:45 when you said "oil reserves grow."

[zero_one]

This doesn't really do much to reassure me - all it really does is make a good argument that it will take a while for us to run out of resources, not that we won't ever do so, and that's my concern - we need to be living sustainably so that resource exhaustion isn't an issue for us.

[ash-shakirwhitaker]

I Am glad that I stumbled onto this video.

[FurryMurry]

He didn't say to wait until resources are "scare" to start searching for new sources of energy. He was talking about PRICES.

When our current system of obtaining energy gets too expensive, only then will companies have a profit incentive to look for energy in places where it was previously TOO EXPENSIVE to look for energy. New reservoirs of energy will be opened up, and our supply of energy will be replenished.

If they did it TOO EARLY, they would lose all their money.