Doomsday Scenarios

In the 1970's oil price shocks led to sharp price increases for many commodities. At that time many became alarmed at the rate of utilization of natural resources by mankind. It seemed that in just a few years real scarcity would become a major global problem. This was even the impetus for an entire generation of students to enter geology, including myself.

A clear reason for this alarm was the concept that certain natural resources are inherently limited in nature, and that current rates of use, or even the likely future rates of use would surely use them all up in the foreseeable future. The voice of this movement was the "Club of Rome", so named because they felt that western society, like ancient Rome, was doomed.

"Given present resource consumtion rates and the projected increase in these rates, the great majority of the currently important nonrenewable resources will be extremely costly 100 years from now." (Meadows et al., 1971).


Cover of the second edition
They based these predictions not only on linear extrapolations of current useage paters, but also on more sophisticated models taking population growth into account as well. As we all know, population grows exponentially, and so must the demand for raw materials as well.

Figure 1 (right) shows illustrates the exponential growth of world population as estimated in 1958. The actual figure today of 6.08 billion (www.census.gov) is right on the money.


Figure 1: World population with time (Meadows, et al., 1971).

In this way, both linear use estimates (known reserves divided by the rate of use) of exhaustion, and exponential population growth estimates could be produced. Figure 2 below shows such depletion estimes for a number of mineral resources.

Clearly, for some of these resources, doomsday is a long way off. For others however, the predicted doomsday never arrived. What happened?


Figure 2: Club of Rome estimates (ca 1970) of mineral resource depletion given static (i.e. linear) and exponential extrapolation of mineral demand. note: Some bars go far beyond the right side of the figure.

 

In order to understand even the problem, much less the answer, some economic theory is required.  

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