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Comment by Matticus_Rex | Hacker News Reader

More precisely, the peak [insert resource] arguments boil down to "at the current price and level of technology, there is X amount of this resource left." Of course, as the supply diminishes, the price goes up, and it becomes cost-effective to harvest that resource from more expensive places and with more expensive means, AND the incentive to improve the technology for extraction/identification or invent new technology for new types of extraction is increased.

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But it is inarguable that there is a finite and ever decreasing amount of {helium,petroleum} in the earth. While we may not now be at peak [insert resource], and may not be in your lifetime or mine, such a point must exist and I would bet that the children of today’s newborns will be alive to grapple with the consequences of it.

The Earth is finite, as is the time until the Sun will swallow it, so "it's finite" it true about literally every resource.

It seems more a way to fuel depressions than a useful way to analyze anything.

No, that is not what peak oil arguments boil down to. Peak oil arguments boil down to the observation that the humans are extracting (and burning) oil faster than it is being made, about five orders of magnitude faster in fact, and therefore at some point extraction will have to fall—presumably permanently, but at least for a few million years.

There are other resource concerns that are sometimes expressed in a form mimicking the peak-oil reasoning, but (with the exception of other fossil fuels and helium) the parallel is specious. Not, however, for the reason you cite (which applies equally well to oil), but because used platinum, phosphorus, lithium, and so on, are not destroyed; they can be mined from landfills or, in the case of phosphorus, the ocean. So intellectually sloppy advocates of conservation of these other resources imitate the well-founded peak-oil argument in a sad attempt to give their shabby arguments a veneer of respectability.

However, while Hubbert’s original reasoning for why an oil-extraction peak must exist is valid, his methods for estimating when it would happen have not held up.

But then things are more expensive.

For those who cannot afford, expensive things might as well not exist.

So although more precise, it deflects from the fact that the important aspect is economics.

Well, maybe, maybe not -- due to increases in efficiency, increases in GDP per capita, and technological progress, most resources have generally gotten cheaper over time with respect to incomes.

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