If the price of copper is high, people start stealing copper piping and wiring. “Human Ingenuity comes up with a solution by magic there’s no need to discuss that this is a problem and maybe we should do something about it, it’ll get solved by someone without them thinking it’s a problem” Material items almost always have alternatives, recycling and other measures that prevent them from becoming issues. The only gamble is energy resources (because it takes more energy to extract marginal sources). “From my point of view, every time you rely on Human Ingenuity to solve a resource exhaustion problem, you’re gambling, and eventually you’ll lose the gamble.” “I don’t find cornucopianism particularly compelling – it seems to me to ignore civilisations that have, in fact, died out due in part to resource exhaustion”
In terms of reserves + resources, the RCP model uses, by 2100, about 10% of the current coal resources, nearly all of the oil resources and around one-quarter of the gas resources.ĪFAICT the difference is that ‘resources’ is ‘how much coal is there’, and ‘reserves’ is ‘how much coal could we extract using the technology available now and current price of coal’. This is not quite as unreasonable as it seems because resources are constantly converted to reserves through development. In terms of the estimates of reserves of fossil fuels, the RCP8.5 model uses (roughly, by my own calculations using the figures given in Table SPM-3 of the GEA report) twice the current coal reserves, two to three times the oil reserves and half of the gas reserves. RE: discussion in earlier posts about the feasibility of the IPCC’s high-end emissions scenario (RCP8.5, for total forcing in 2100), SkepticalScience recently had a post discussing feasibility/use-of-resources in that scenario, mostly with the framing of some recent research that suggests different carbon-cycle response that might make it more feasible.
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