There is a long and storied line of "We're running out of X! Oh my God!"
We have yet to run out of X.
Part of the problem is that when you extrapolate any sort of growth, you naturally run out of what's considered available resources. That's because nobody is looking for any more resources right now. Once the price goes up, folks start looking harder. As one wag put it: nothing you dig out of the ground has ever gone up in price consistently. Just the opposite.
I'm not saying we're never going to run out of $PRECIOUSTHING, just that "We're losing all the helium" is just another entry on a very long list of things. None of which worked out that way.
Fundamentally there is no chemical on Earth we could ever truly run out of, we could always endothermically synthesize anything in the worst case scenario.
Problem is that is insanely expensive. The more expensive resources are, the lower their utility to the market. We use helium and oil now to enable a lot of essential and hard to replace technologies, but if the price starts spiraling out of control due to diminishing availability (and it has / will in both cases) the increasing price limits your ability to use the resource for useful purposes.
Its not really about conservationism at all. Its long term strategic economic thinking. Doing stuff with non-renewable resources that is barely useful (fuel inefficient cars or party balloons) means when we want to do more useful things with these resources later, diminished availability might make it much more expensive later on.
I imagine to most people having plastics, MRI machines, and modern agriculture is more important than having to recharge an electric car or put an alternative heavier gas in their party balloons. If the price of these resources starts spiraling as the cheap supply runs out, the costs of the former skyrocket, and we do not have easy alternatives for them yet like we do a lot of modern oil and helium habits.
I was referring specifically to elements found naturally on the Earth, but my wording was unclear. By pointing out a bunch of other things that I was not referring to, you have helped clarify the issue.
Don't really want to do a rebuttal. I did learn some things about cryolite this morning. Here's a good article for those looking to dig deeper. (apologies for the pun)
To date, relatively few actual _mineral_ resources have been exhaustd. Cryolite was also a bit of a surprise for me, though I think I've run across mention of it before.
The more general trend, that it's been ecosystem resources, especially animal and plant extinctions, sometimes localized, which are more comonly encountered, suggests the risks we're facing are more likely systemic than strictly one of stocks.
I disagree with the general suggestion of your Slate reference that resource consumption is no longer a concern. Though economists specifically are rather divorced from reality.
Yes, in the sense that prior to the use of coal, forests were being used unsustainably and, frequently, exhausted.
At the time of the American Revolution, England relied on its American colonies for lumber, fuelwood, turpentine (derived from pine pitch), and other forestry products. It wasn't able to provision its own ships let alone fuel supplies, absent these.
Forests have recovered in Europe over the past 100-150 years, but that's almost entirely due to offloading fuel supplies to coal, oil, and gas.
Among the problems prompted by Greece's credit crisis is a renewal of woodburning, creating both air quality problems and deforestation:
We have yet to run out of X.
Part of the problem is that when you extrapolate any sort of growth, you naturally run out of what's considered available resources. That's because nobody is looking for any more resources right now. Once the price goes up, folks start looking harder. As one wag put it: nothing you dig out of the ground has ever gone up in price consistently. Just the opposite.
I'm not saying we're never going to run out of $PRECIOUSTHING, just that "We're losing all the helium" is just another entry on a very long list of things. None of which worked out that way.