alt Hacker NewsSidenote: 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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> 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.
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?