How excellent, proof that we're not going to run out of metals

People have been telling us for at least 50 years now - the Club of Rome and all that - that we’ll run out of metals within 30 years. The mistake here being that people look at mineral reserves and say they will run out. Which they will, given that the best colloquial translation of the technical phrase “mineral reserves” is the minerals we’ve prepared for use in the next 30 years. That is not, though, the end of the story. For those who understand the phrasing, or even the industry, know that reserves are things that are made, created, by human effort.

Near no environmentalists wanting to understand this point. Except, now, when we talk about fossil fuel reserves, they are making exactly this point:

Oil, gas and coal will need to be burned for some years to come. But it has been known since at least 2015 that a significant proportion of existing reserves must remain in the ground if global heating is to remain below 2C, the main Paris target. Financing for new reserves is therefore the “exact opposite” of what is required to tackle the climate crisis, the report’s authors said.

There we have it. Mineral reserves - and in this there is no difference between fossil fuels and metals - are things that are created through human effort and the expenditure of resources on their creation.

Therefore the debate over what we can use in the future is not bound or limited by what reserves are but by what we can turn into reserves by making that effort. As we’ve pointed out at book length before now those limits are some tens of millions to billions of years in the future. Or, as we might put it, recycling’s a fine thing but we don’t have to do it because we’re about to run out.