Doom List – Listing the Worst Prophecies of Environmental Catastrophe, Part Three

At GreenWatch we now have archived an interactive list of the “worst environmental prophecies of catastrophic doom.” It is a list of eleven of the most interesting and pointed cases of environmental activists raising the red alert, and the unintended fall out from it.

Today we discuss the “Resources Depletion” fallacy, despite recent surges in commodity prices, that arguably can be attributed seriously loose monetary and fiscal policy, “the bet” remains good as gold.

In 1972 the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth, which sold 30 million copies in over 30 languages.  It predicted that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability and depletion of natural resources.  The Club’s predictions were based on estimates of known reserves of natural resources divided by their current annual usage. The Club’s assumption: As world population increases so will world resource demand, and hence the expectation of looming resources depletion. But the supply of natural resources is never a fixed amount subject to depletion. Resource economists explain that as demand increases, prices rise. That has two consequences: Either less accessible resource reserves will become economically viable to explore and develop or users will seek out and develop resource substitutes.