Externalities: The bad news? Externalities are the "hidden costs" of any economic activity. In a way, it's any damage to anybody or anything that you as an economic agent don't have to pay for, or don't have to pay enough for. Pollution is often cited as an externality. Since most the externalities involved in mineral extraction lie completely outside of the geologic sphere, they will be mentioned only briefly here. They come in three varieties: Extraction externalities are things like pollution that occur directly at the well head or mine as a result of the presence or extraction of the resource. Mine tailings, leachates, oil pipeline spills and so forth are all extraction externalities of mineral resource production. If one country invades another in order to capture a given resource, the human and material costs may be considered an externality. Many have argued that the Persian Gulf War was such an externality of oil production in Kuwait. This isn't an idle exercise, because the point of assessing externalities is to find some means of incorporating these costs into the price of the resource, so that extraction will be a social optimum (in an economic sense).

Pumpjacks in Texas, USA.

Not all externalities are harmful. Global warming for example has resulted in unseasonably warm summers in the northern hemisphere in the past decade, which has been unfortunate for Greece (because of drought and forest fires) but fine for Sweden because of lengthened growing seasons. These are beneficial externalities.

Finally, there is the issue of allocation. The extraction of minerals is now done primarily in third world countries, while the consumption of the products is done in the rich industrialized nations. This situation may even be an economically ideal one, in that it may maximize aggregate welfare. Nonetheless it is a situation that even the most dewy eyed cornucopian must find deplorable. In fact while there is no natural resource scarcity of the economy as a whole, for people born into economically disadvantaged sectors, there is scarcity aplenty.