I wouldn't worry about resources being finite. There's a nice negative feedback loop. The less we have of them left, the higher the price and more incentive to develop alternative solutions.
I have no idea about environmental impact of mining these.
I have no idea about environmental impact of mining these.
That Jevon's Paradox wikipedia article I linked to in the first comment is one example of such a complication.
> Simon didn't see the growing population as a catastrophic problem. He explained that we are not like any other species. We have an economy and markets. So, according to Simon, if the world demands more oil, the price of oil will go up, and there will be an incentive to find more, or find an alternative.
> Simon proposed that they bet on what would happen to the price of five metals — copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten — over a decade.
> And the logic was that these metals were essential for all kinds of stuff — electronics, cars, buildings. So, if Ehrlich was right, more people on the planet would mean we would start running out of stuff, and the price of these things should go up.
> Those next 10 years, from 1980 to 1990, crept by. The world population grew by 800 million people. Then it was 1990. And they tallied it up. Simon, the economist, decisively won. Prices for the five metals went down by an average of 50 percent.
> One of the reasons the prices dropped was just what Simon said. The catastrophe Ehrlich was predicting just did not happen. People invented substitutes, like companies switching from aluminum to plastic for packaging.
Markets are more complicated and people are often irrational, but that doesn't mean the feedback loop isn't there. It is fallacious to assume that substitutes will be found and that technology will continually advance directionally. Conceptually, prices could simply rise to the point where only the very rich get to use personal computers until, 200 years later, genetic engineering brings organic AI.
In reality it's some mix of all the above and much more precisely because the world is irreducibly complex. But I think the point of creating and relying upon transparent markets is precisely so that pricing signals can reach people quickly; and if this induces the wrong behavior according to our normative objectives then it's easier to identify this and we can react accordingly without having to rely on conjecture and our imaginations.
Does not work like this for oil. The price the most people can pay for gas is very limited. The people who say we will never run out of oil are correct. We will indeed never run out of oil. Most of the oil that is still left in the ground will likely stay there.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Oil-Is-Unlikely-T...
> If we think about it, the prices of basic commodities, such as food and fuel, cannot rise too high relative to the wages of ordinary (also called “non-elite”) workers, or the system will grind to a halt.
I don't see it. If fuel is too expensive we start driving electric vehicles. This one is easy because we already have solution that we know it's viable but in many such cases we don't even know the alternative solution yet because there was no incentive to develop it.
Food market is also evolving and becoming more efficient (optimization functions leave something to be desired but that's another story).
I have not enough knowledge to have a strong opinion on peak oil, but if it stays cheap then so be it. Just don't make other people life miserable. So if it enforces some cost on other people, they should cover it (or ideally it should be opt-in), which would make the price, which now includes that cost, higher.
Shared resources like clean air and ocean are a complex problem and the dynamic I described above doesn't apply because prisoners dilema etc.
I'd love to learn btw, if there is at least any theoretical utopia system (even if it's not feasible to implement it) in which market could reasonably manage those shared resources. Just going to war with country which won't limit pollution to the limit we agreed on seems suboptimal. Trade war seems like an improvement but just moves the problem (there's now prisoners dilemma regarding trading with given country)