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Comment by myrmidon | Hacker News Reader

Sidenote: Whenever someone tells you that (vital) reserves of some ressource are going to run out soonish (implying drastic consequences), you should be extremely skeptical:

Such predictions have an abysmal historic track record, because we tend to find workarounds both on the supply side (=> previously undiscovered reserves) as well as flexibility on the demand side (using substitutes).

This applies historically for oil, lithium, rare earth metals and basically everything else.

edit: I'm not saying we're never gonna run out of anything-- I'm just saying to not expect sudden, cataclysmic shortages in general, but instead steadily rising prices and a somewhat smoothish transition to alternatives.

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I always add "cheap" to the sentence. It seems they are always talking about the cheap version of anything. Going to run out of water? Or are we running out of the "cheap" version of water that does not have to be processed?

This is a valid point: quickly depleting reserves often indicate that pricing is not sustainable. Which is bad.

But non-sustainable pricing is very different from "cataclysmic collapse", and too many people expect the latter for too many things, which is just not realistic in my view (and historical precendent makes a strong case against that assumption, too).

A society where water prices gradually increases to "reverse-osmosis only" (instead of "pump-from-the-ground-everywhere") levels is very different from a society where water suddenly runs out.

> Such predictions have an abysmal historic track record, because we tend to find workarounds both on the supply side (=> previously undiscovered reserves) as well as flexibility on the demand side (using substitutes).

That's a classic example of the "preparedness paradox" [1]. When no one raises the alarm in time or it is being ignored, resources can go (effectively) exhausted before alternatives can be found, or countries either need to pay extraordinary amounts of money or go to war outright - this has happened in the past with guano [2], which was used for fertilizer and gunpowder production for well over a century until the Haber-Bosch ammonia process was developed at the start of the 20th century.

And we're actually seeing a repeat of that as well happening right now. Economists and scientists have sounded the alarm for decades that oil and gas are finite resources and that geopolitical tensions may impact everyone... no one gave too much of a fuck because one could always "drill baby drill", and now look where we are - Iran has blasted about 20% of Qatar's LNG capacity alone to pieces and blocked off the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices skyrocketing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano

I don't see the Guano industry as a straight counter-example, it even illustrates my point:

If you had made predictions/scenarios in 1850 based on Guano deposits running out within a decade or two, you would have mispredicted completely, because a lot of the industry just transitioned to sodium nitrate (before synthetic fertilisers took over). Nowadays media landscape would've gladly made such doom-and-gloom predictions for global agriculture back then.

I completely agree that quickly depleting reserves often indicate non-sustainable pricing for ressources (which is obviously bad long term), but that is very different from sudden collapse.

I've seen articles from the 1880s claiming oil will run out by 1890. 140 years latter...

Yes we can run out of oil, but nobody really knows if or even when that will happen. Right now I'm guessing we won't run out because wind and solar is so much cheaper for most purposes everyone is shifting anyway - this will take decades to play out.

> Yes we can run out of oil, but nobody really knows if or even when that will happen.

We can run out of cheap and accessible oil very, very fast if the shitshow in MENA continues to escalate. Qatar already lost 20% of their LNG capacity in a single strike.

The US may have enough domestic oil production to sate its domestic demand, but the prices would still skyrocket even for them. Europe meanwhile, we're straight fucked here. Technically the oil hasn't run out, it's still in the oil fields of the journalist-butcher country and other sheikdoms, but that doesn't matter if it cannot be pumped out any more because the wells got blasted to pieces or if it cannot be transported thanks to Iranian mines, Europe is still running out of oil in practice.

What does "Europe running out of oil" mean to you? Gas at the pump for >10€/l, potentially with some rationing scheme? Do you honestly think that's gonna happen?

It is easy to get infected by the media narratives that are notoriously biased towards maximum drama, but I firmly believe that we are not gonna escalate into such a scenario.

There's always options; sorting priorities because of price, radical electrification of transport, or, at the extreme end, picking up coal hydration again (worked well enough to keep the Nazi war machine running for quite a while, with much worse access to crude).

For comparison: Copper prices did increase by 500% since 2000, but people barely even care, and that's how I would expect "shortages" to typically go.

"Reserves" are the name of something that exists only at a set price. Change the price, and the reserves change too.

The people that rush to tell you that reserves are running out tend to omit what price they are talking about. That way of expressing oneself is normally called "a lie".

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