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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

BBC: Global resources stock check (2012)

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20120618-global-resources... (image: http://i.imgur.com/L5qWNN9.jpg)

Rainforests, coral reefs, coal, oil, gas, aluminium, phosphorus, tantalum, titanium, copper, siliver, indium, antimony.

But we're not actually running out of those resources though. They just end up in forms that are much more difficult to utilize (they cost more), but the elements are still there. With enough energy and need it can just be reused. We're just nowhere near the point of that being necessary.

Can you point me to the rainforest and coral reef mines?

More seriously,

> They just end up in forms that are much more difficult to utilize

Right. And as the costs of, say, energy rise, people use less of it. Which means less mobility, less heating or cooling, less plastic, quite possibly less medical care.

Which means a drastic lifestyle change for the nonrich advanced-economy participants, no joining them for most everyone in less advanced economies, and more authoritarianism, war and civil unrest for everyone while the, um, "adjustments" settle in.

But things are fine, sure.

According to that, we should be just about out of antimony by now. Yet somehow the market for drugs and batteries still seems to be humming along. 2/10 fear porn.

Even better is only 80 years for aluminum, the third most common mineral in Earth's crust, constituting 8% of its weight. What an absurd alarmism.

Even if we can't get more. It's not like we're using it in a nuclear reaction that turns aluminium into something else. The aluminium is still there.

Not to mention how incredibly recyclable it is. In the US alone aluminum is made from scrap >30% percent of the time [1].

[1]: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/aluminum-statistics-and-in... (click on an annual PDF).

And after 4 generations, less than 1% of the original material remains.

   percent remaining = 100 * (r^generations))

Where r is expressed as a decimal 0 <= r <=1.

Even at 90% recovery, over 90% of the original material is lost after 22 generations. The highest recycling rate of any material in the US is lead (mostly from auto batteries). The USGS reports that rate as ~70%, though this may be the amount of recycled material in new production.

Good to know that BBC thinks rainforests and coral reefs are non-renewable.

They are. If you kill a reef it’s gone for a really long time. And the rainforest needs time to grow back. What makes something renewable is that we take care to steward it. Forests in the US are renewable because the forest service surveys them and limits their uses so that they will continue to be available. In contrast the slash and burn agriculture that replaces the rain forest just consumes more land without replacement. The cattle farmers extract the resources from the soil and then move on. Nobody replaces the plant life they burned out. So it’s not a renewable resource in human time.

> Forests in the US are renewable because the forest service surveys them and limits their uses so that they will continue to be available.

Not really. More like we already cut them all down and it's easy to have sustainable use of young forests.

Also, the US Forest Service only manages national forests, and doesn't really focus on productivity.

An awful lot of forest land is managed by commercial foresters, with an eye towards maximizing the value extracted over long periods of time.

And then there is the management of small plots, which is also often done by commercial foresters, with an eye towards immediately extracting as much value as possible once they convince the landowner to let them do a cut.

As with cornavirus: if you're killing them off faster than they're reproducing, they're not.

And recovery of degraded habitats may take centuries or longer.

Extinction of species is forever.

That's not what non-renewable means.

That's precisely what it means.

Use at rates greater than formation or in a manner which will result in extinction of a resource is nonrenewable and unsustainable.

http://www.differencebetween.net/science/difference-between-...

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