The No Breakfast Fallacy: Why the Club of Rome was wrong about us running out of resources by Tim Worstall
Having decided that I wanted to review something with a broadly libertarian worldview, it struck me almost immediately that the obvious choice would be Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Trilogy, which is monumental (at 2000+ pages), magisterial, and erudite.
Due to the constraints of space, time and competence, however, I chose Tim Worstall’s little book The No Breakfast Fallacy: Why the Club of Rome was wrong about us running out of resources.
Published in 2015 and comprising just 54 pages of text plus two appendices, it might be better thought of as a pamphlet or a monograph. It was originally sold as a paperback but is now only available online (free), courtesy of the Adam Smith Institute where Worstall is a Senior Fellow.
Keeping the Focus Narrow
Conversations about mining and resource extraction invariably include discussions of social cost, pollution, and environmental degradation. They also turn to the ruthless behaviour of avaricious oligopolists which is endlessly debated and criticised, all the while threatening to descend into the depths of a culture war with painful predictability.
The No Breakfast Fallacy doesn’t do any of those things. Tim Worstall in fact makes a particular point of steering away from discussing anything vaguely environmental at all. To give you an idea of what he wants to concern himself with (and the concerns that he admits exist but that he’s going to ignore) I’ll let him introduce his book himself :-
“This book is not trying to solve nor even discuss all environmental problems that exist. It’s not even trying to discuss all that might occur over the use or not of all minerals and or metals. It doesn’t address the possible pollution of areas by mineral processing, it doesn’t address nor even attempt to the possible problems of actual use: say, algal blooms from the over use of pesticides.
It attempts to discuss one thing and one thing only. Are we likely to run out of any of the minerals or metals that we like to use in anything of a timescale that should be of concern to us today?”
That’s fairly clear.
But is it reasonable? I think so – I have no problem with writers focusing on isolated specific issues, particularly when that’s their area of expertise. So, readers with more environmentally based concerns will have to wait for a different book, and a different review. Right here it’s all solely about the running out of the stuff of the earth.
The Fallaciousness of ‘No Breakfast’?
The main purpose of Worstall’s book is to expose an extremely widespread misunderstanding of the way a single word is used - the word reserves, particularly when referring to finite resources such as metals and minerals.
I’m a firm believer that the immortal god of language is usage, and am therefore reluctant to castigate anyone for using words in whichever way they choose. This is true especially when there are hearers (or readers) of the words who understand them in the exact same way they were meant by the speaker (or writer). However, if one group of people - mining engineers, geologists, and commodity traders for instance - use a word (say, the word reserves) in one way, and another group of people – everyone else – uses the same word to mean something completely different, then I’ll agree with Worstall that this will likely cause considerable confusion.
The ‘everyone else’ conception of mineral reserves is that they are roughly equivalent to ‘how much there is left’. Which is unsurprising given that the word reserves in other contexts is used to mean exactly that kind of thing. Confusion arises, though, because the mining engineers and friends use mineral reserves to mean something very different. Utterly and profoundly different! Which is the reason for Worstall’s lack of breakfast. Or at least for his coining of the ‘No Breakfast’ fallacy, to show how almost all of us misunderstand what the mining people mean when they talk about mineral reserves.
Worstall likens mineral reserves to the contents of the worlds fridges, in the sense that they are things we have spent money on, and prepared for imminent use. And the error is to think that once we have consumed our mineral reserves, industrial civilisation will collapse and billions will die because our reserves are ‘all there is’, or ‘all there is left’. His contention is that as mineral reserves are much more like the bacon in our fridge, they can be replenished over and over again, so all talk about ‘running out’ or ‘exhaustion’ is entirely bogus, just as it would be to say you’re going to starve because you’ve eaten all the bacon in your fridge.
Renewable Versus Finite
My first minor problem with Worstall’s book is that he uses a renewable resource – bacon – as an analogy for finite ones – minerals. And I suppose I bring this up on behalf of my environmentally minded friends - it isn’t a huge problem for me personally because, by and large, I agree with almost all of his contentions, especially his main thesis.
Yes, most people misunderstand what the US Geological survey is saying when it claims that the reserves of a particular mineral or metal are a certain number of tons. And indeed this misunderstanding is categorical and profound. And for sure the amount of extra resources that can be turned into reserves is mind-bogglingly huge. And of course the ensuing confusion causes many people to say many things that are utterly nonsensical.
But most people I know who are concerned with resources ‘running out’ are unimpressed by the argument that there’s a lot more of the stuff lying around that can be turned into more reserves. The response to that argument is invariably “Well, they’ve got to run out eventually, right?”
This strikes me as bound together with our sense of the resources (and their reserves) being finite. And there’s also an implied contrast with other things that are described as renewable. Worstall isn’t concerned about finiteness (or renewability, for that matter). His argument is (without wishing to spoil the plot) that there’s simply way too much of everything, to worry about stuff ‘running out’. An approach which I shall call the “Vastness Gambit”.
But I think it’s at least worth digging down a little into what we generally mean when we use the words ‘renewable’ and ‘finite’. Like many words we use them partially for signalling and also in emotive ways. Renewables = sustainable =good! Finite resources = unsustainable = bad! But the salient features of such things may entirely pass us by.
Living in a rural environment as I do, I see outside the window of my study some chickens, some horse manure, and some coppiced chestnut trees. The salient features of these things being what? That they can be replaced with more of the same? That they are ‘renew-able’? Perhaps. But I’ll offer you three similar items from the renewables basket – trees on Easter island, guano and passenger pigeons.
All three of those things display varying degrees of ‘diminished’, ‘depleted’, and ‘gone completely’. Which brings to the surface something important about renewable resources – when used, they are generally used up. They may be replaced by more of the same – if we show a little wisdom in their use – but they can certainly be depleted into extinction or non-existence.
In contrast, and with regard to the salient features of a finite resource - perhaps even the essence of the quality of finitenes - allow me to use the example of copper atoms. Both a single, humble instance of such, and the totality of copper atoms on earth. Though I have no advanced degrees (or, to be fair, any degrees at all) in chemistry, I’m led to believe that in normal circumstances in the terrestrial environment, a copper atom is indestructible, immutable and ‘for ever’.
Another expression of this is that if there were a hundred units of copper atoms before there was any life on earth, there are the same hundred units now, and that number will persist unchanged after all life on earth has ceased to be. The characteristic implied by calling a resource finite is that it is ‘fixed’ in quantity, and therefore un-depletable and in-exhaustible. Yet, even accepting this, there are intelligent people who argue the case that finite resources can ‘run out’ and I will come back to that in due course.
But for the moment I’m distracted by a large number of people shouting that “Coal is definitely being depleted!” and “How can you deny that oil is running out?!”
Well, yes it is, and no I don’t – fossil fuels being things that perfectly exemplify how edge cases can mess up nice clean categories like renewable resources and finite ones. Take peat for example– a semi edge case that provides at least a theoretical escape from this little conundrum I’ve created for myself. Peat is a slowly renewing renewable resource that is laid down at the rate of about a millimetre a year. Easy to deplete, but renewable nonetheless. It is also halfway to being coal, at least in terms of its calorific values. Which makes it easier to see fossil fuels as having some of the characteristics of those depletable renewables, rather than things that are finite and immutable.
But whether or not you’re happy to include fossil fuels in your category of the things that are at least theoretically renewable, Tim Worstall’s book concerns itself solely with non-energy minerals and metals and the rest of this review will do the same.
The Vastness Gambit
Throughout the No Breakfast Fallacy there are numerous references to how we’re not going to run out of stuff for quite a while – really, for a long long while indeed. Some examples :-
Page 6 “..we’ve been using the metals for decades and will be able to for millennia to come”
Page 7 “..there’s nothing to worry about for tens of thousands of years at a minimum..”
Page 16 “We’re not even going to have tight supply of anything for thousands of years..”
Page 34 “..there’s not anything that we’re going to run out of anytime soon.”
Page 34 “..there’s not any likely shortage looming”
Page 58 “..there’s no shortage of any metal or mineral that’s likely to impact upon us or our
descendants over any reasonable period of time”
Go on Tim – tell us what you really think!
As it happens, I’m not in disagreement with him. But I don’t think these assertions advance his cause as much as he’d like. If we, as a species, were as rational as some of us think we might be able to become, with a little bit of effort... this kind of approach to persuasion might work a treat. But we’re not, and I think that for anyone whose motivating interest in resources is the worry that they’re going to run out, it makes precisely no difference to argue that the point at which running out occurs is further away than they originally thought. The worried mind hears “Yes, we’re going to run out..” and not the “But it won’t be for ages and ages..”
Having said that, I was slightly misrepresenting Worstall by truncating one of the quotations. Back to Page 7 -
“_there’s nothing to worry about for tens of thousands of years at a minimum,_ _**more likely millions to billions**__”_
[my bold]
This of course makes his vastness gambit somewhat stronger (if true..) but I remain unconvinced that many resource worriers will find that reassuring. The spectral catastrophe will still lurk somewhere in the dark, and every so often the sentiment will be expressed by the saying “We’re still going to run out!”
The Vastness Measured
One section of the book I really liked is the first appendix, called ‘Mineral Estimates’. He discusses (not for the first time) appropriate ways to think about both mineral reserves and resources – what those terms mean to the people who use them professionally. Which I think are worth quoting at length :-
“Mineral reserves are, as discussed earlier, the minerals that we know where they are, we have mapped and tested them, we know that we can extract them at current prices, with current technologies and make a profit by doing so. A rough and ready, if not quite exactly accurate, description is that these are the stock in trade, or deposits, at mines that are already being worked.”
Or, to use Worstall’s own analogy – which he admits is rather tortured – minerals reserves are similar to the contents of the worlds fridges. Another comparison I’ve heard is that they’re like the cars in a showroom, and mineral reserves no more represent ‘all that there is left’ than showroom cars represent the only cars that will ever be available.
He goes on to say that -
“Mineral resources are the minerals that we know roughly where they are, have good reason to think we can mine at current prices, with current technology, and make a profit by doing so. But we’ve not gone through the expensive process of actually proving this.”
It’s worth mentioning here (Worstall’s second appendix delves into the legal definitions surrounding this) that reserves are divided into probable and proven, and that resources are divided into inferred, indicated, and measured. And also that there is a fluidity between these divisions, strict as they are. Over time some part of a mountain can move from being an inferred resource to a measured one and then later to a probable or proven reserve.
However, in order to change, say, a measured resource into either a probable or a proven reserve you will need to spend heaps of money. You will need not just mining engineers and surveyors, but also lawyers and accountants by the truckload. The proving of a mine’s worth of copper, for instance, might cost you tens of millions of dollars. Which is the explanation for why there are only a few decades worth of each mineral in the fridge category of proven reserves.
The interesting part of the Mineral Estimates appendix is a table with a list of minerals and metals (from Aluminium to Zirconium) with quantities gleaned from the US Geological survey. It lists reserves, resources, annual production rates and how long those reserves and resources will last. More interestingly – because it really has sunk in that mineral reserves are, you know, just the working stock of already functioning mines? - are two other quantities for each of the 50 listed minerals: an estimate of the total amount in the earths crust and one thousandth of that.
This latter quantity is something Tim Worstall calls the ‘real resource’ and he admits to it being something quite fantastical. However, it’s for illustrative purposes only and I think in those terms it does a particularly splendid job. It’s saying “What if?” What if a mineral or a metal became so important to us that we mined one thousandth of the total amount in the earths crust? Just the richest deposits, the most concentrated ores, nearest the surface and furthest from environmentally sensitive areas? How long would that one thousandth part of the natural endowment of a resource last at current rates of production?
I think he hopes – as I would if I was on a mission to assuage people’s resource worries with the force of very big numbers – that the quantities and times will surprise his readers. I’ll mention three – aluminium, copper and lithium. I chose them not because the quantities and duration until exhaustion are exceptional compared with any of the other minerals, but because of their centrality to 21st century civilisation.
One thousandth of the total copper resources will keep us going for 600,000 years. The same proportion of lithium will be good for 70 million, and trusty aluminium will continue to be available for 270 million years.
Perhaps that’s one up to Worstall and the vastness gambit, but I’m not so sure. I will, I promise, come back to an alternative framing of the whole process, because he’s still seeing this as ‘running out’…. just not for a very, very long time.
A Triumvirate of Doubters
As the subtitle of The No Breakfast Fallacy implies, Worstall takes on the prognostications of the Club of Rome, specifically their 1972 book The Limits to Growth. He devotes a chapter to pointing out their misunderstanding of what people who know what they’re talking about mean when they estimate mineral reserves. He has a chapter each for two others who also promulgate what might be called resource doomsterism. One is the financier Jeremy Grantham with his fears that industrial fertilizers will run out in a just a few centuries; the other is the contention in a 2007 issue of the New Scientist that humanity is about to encounter serious problems because -
“...zinc could be used up by 2037, both indium and hafnium -which is increasingly important in computer chips - could be gone by 2017, and terbium – used to make the green phosphors in flourescent light bulbs – could run out before 2012”
As you might imagine, Worstall thinks this is absurd, and I find it hard to disagree with him. Especially because when he was writing, Terbium was supposed to have run out three years ago. It’s also an opportunity to give another flavour of his writing, which is direct, and uncompromising. A few examples :-
“There is no excuse or explanation for the concatenation of piffle that the New Scientist served up..”
“Only someone possessed of the most absurd ignorance could possibly make such a howlingly incorrect prediction.”
“..the idea.. could only be advanced by people wallowing in their own purblind ignorance”
“..the claim..is the scientific equivalent of taking the short bus to school”
Some of this I quite enjoy, probably because I share a few of his biases, and his sanguine view of resource availability [Yes, I might be repeating myself]. But there’s something quite particular about the nature of these (and in general, all of his) criticisms of other people and their statements and beliefs. He exclusively criticises people for being wrong or incorrect on some issue – usually an economic one. He can be very extremely rude about people for their idiocy, misunderstandings and errors, and will freely call them cretins, morons and twats (at least on his blog). But he rarely, if ever, hints that he thinks people he disagrees with are evil or bad in any way – just possessed of too much stupidity and wrongness.
Maybe this is a distinction without a difference, but after I first noticed it, I realised it was significant for me. Perhaps it has something to do with a cultural and tribal contrast that was quite prominent in England a decade or two ago (and may not apply to current US red tribe/blue tribe conflicts). Those on the left would describe their opponents as the embodiment of evil, and those on the right would describe leftists as hopelessly wrong. My progressive friends still pepper their conversation with “I hate Tories”, whereas the conservative ones will say of Jeremy Corbyn that he’s completely delusional.
It’s probably not conducive to pleasant dialogue to call people twats and cretins, but somehow it rubs me up the wrong way a lot less than the ‘repugnant lying scum’ style of ad hominem so prevalent on the internet of today – amongst people of all political persuasions.
If there is some Englishness in Worstall’s style of political criticism, there is plenty more in his sense of humour. And something unreconstructed that many people will find more problematic than I do -
“Geologists are a hardy breed and the German sense of humour is notably robust. Getting a chuckle out of a group of German geologists usually requires a fart joke, or dropping your pants. And the men are worse of course.”
I’m going to have to confess that when I first read this, I did in fact laugh a little. So perhaps I’m more of a bad person than I realised and that I should self-cancel or something?… I don’t know, but it’s fairly representative of Worstall’s writing style and I’ll leave any further judgement of it to you.
I wondered for a while why the Jeremy Grantham chapter (that there are only 3 centuries of phosphate and potassium reserves – we are therefore categorically doomed) was included in the book. Cynically, you might think it was there just to pad out something that was always going to end up as a pretty titchy little book. I mean, it’s barely any longer than this review! But it also could have been because Worstall likes to point out the economic misunderstandings of the rich and famous. Indeed, it might be his overarching purpose in life.
More fairly, I think it’s a useful platform from which Worstall can explain just why mineral reserves are the size they are – why they can’t be much larger so everyone can relax a little more. Worstall claims (without providing much evidence) that Grantham fails to understand that money has a time-value; money invested in something that won’t start making a profit for a hundred years will be better spent on something else which will provide a return much sooner. It strikes me as more likely that the billionaire financier understands the time-value of money well enough, but that he’s like ‘everyone else’ and assumes that mineral reserves are something adjacent to ‘all there is left’.
The Club of Rome’s book ‘The Limits to Growth’ is only two or three times the size of Worstall’s pamphlety argument but has sold roughly a million times as many copies (and has therefore depleted the worlds supply of ink by a similar ratio?) It has also been criticised in hundreds of ways by many hundreds of people, as well as having a large number of supporters.
Worstall, however, is quite admirable in his restraint, because I can imagine that every page of the environmentalists tome has something to infuriate him, politically, philosophically or economically. He manages to keep his criticism focused very narrowly on the single misunderstanding of what constitutes a mineral reserve. And he assumes that this is sufficient to make their entire argument collapse into a heap of exhausted rhetoric.
Once he’s pointed out this misunderstanding, he’s – as usual – relatively direct about the consequences for their book.
“The Club of Rome was wrong because they assumed at the start that there’s a relationship between mineral reserves and the mineral resources available to us. There isn’t, it’s a false assumption so they’re wrong.
So perhaps we should stop paying attention to them”
Surely You’re Joking Mr Worstall
If the thesis of The No Breakfast Fallacy is that humanity is most assuredly not going to run out of, or exhaust, any of the minerals we use for our modern society, what is going on with statements like these? :-
Page 6 “The one thing that everyone does get right is that this generation is likely to run out of, consume all of, the minerals we currently have classified as mineral reserves”
Page 43 “..mineral reserves running out in a generation or two? So what?
I think there’s a strategic conceit going on here, a sort of pseudo-concession. He’s going to go on to say that reserves can be replenished – more times than you can shake a stick at. Therefore he’s happy to talk about our generation’s minerals being exhausted, depleted and consumed. But this gives an impression at odds with the reality of the published numbers and quantities of reserves. His characterisation would better fit the using up of the fuel in a vehicle’s fuel tank – it starts off full, over a period of time becomes depleted, and then at a particular juncture gets filled up again.
Perhaps I’m being overly critical here – he’s merely making a rhetorical choice, after all. But a look at the US Geological Survey’s published estimates of mineral reserves do not show the quantities going down. Not over a decade, a generation or a century. There is no period of emptying followed by an instant of replenishment – the process is more like a steady topping up. To add yet one more analogy to the mix, it is as if you’re in a supermarket buying baked beans (Heinz please – why compromise?) and moments after you’ve added a tin to your basket, a friendly shop assistant adds another one to the shelf, keeping the size of the reserves as they were.
Abundance and Scarcity
I agree with Tim Worstall that resource worries are pretty much always based on a misunderstanding of what the word reserves means (to those who makes the calculations about the quantities involved). And he makes a convincing case that supplies of all the finite minerals and metals will be adequate for our needs for a longer time than it makes sense to even think about. But – and I did hint that there would be a ‘but’ - as radically different as his and the resource-worried positions appear to be, I think they both misconceive the nature of the process that is occurring as we mine those metals and minerals.
I’ll start with the most difficult to argue against position, because after that everything will be easy peasy and a walk in the park. The contention I want to dispute – and offered by some of the wisest people I know – is that “There are theoretical reasons why resources have to run out eventually.” I respectfully beg to differ, but to begin with I’ll do that Worstellian thing and appear to concede the whole argument. I’ll admit that it’s undeniably true that there’s a point in time where resources – any of them/all of them – are not available. There’s none to be had at any price. There are no reserves at all and nothing is being produced whatsoever.
My difference of opinion is about the when of this point in time – resource depletionists think it is at some point in the future. I’m convinced it is in the past.
Let’s take aluminium as an example and use some measures of resource abundance to see whether it makes sense to say that it is heading towards scarcity…. or away from it. Are we running out, or running in?
We could use four measures of the abundance or scarcity of a resource like aluminium. Firstly the familiar estimates of proven reserves – the greater the reserves, the greater the abundance. Secondly the amount being produced (per capita to control for population growth). Thirdly, and only a slight variation on the second – the amount in use or circulation. And lastly the price of the resource – the less you have to pay for something the more abundant it is.
By these measures the abundance of aluminium in 1824 was zero – it effectively did not exist. No reserves, no production, none in circulation and no amount of money would have bought you even an ounce of it. The metal as we know it was innovated into existence in that year. And by all four measures it has been getting ever more abundant since then. More reserves, more production, more in use and cheaper over time. All the while, the number of atoms of aluminium on earth has remained unaltered (“No aluminium has been harmed in the making of this film tin can”) The only change has been the amount being put to use by human beings.
Coming from a position of absolute scarcity it is inevitable that the changes in abundance will have been dramatic. Even since the mid 19th century (when aluminium was more expensive than gold) it has become four orders of magnitude cheaper and reserves have increased by similar numbers. By 1893 it was sufficiently abundant that it could be used to make the staggeringly beautiful statue that graces the corner of Piccadilly Circus in London, facing Shaftesbury Avenue, and often mistaken to be of the god Eros.
If aluminium is perhaps a recent and freakish exception to the rule, what about the other end of the spectrum – the metal that we’ve used for the longest period of time – copper? We’ve been utilizing it for the best part of 10,000 years, and as it happens, the same trends have occurred as have with aluminium. We have progressed from ultimate scarcity to increasing availability, without any change of the amount of copper on earth at all. Ten millennia of increasing abundance.
If you’re familiar with the story of ‘Otzi the iceman’, the mummified remains of whom were uncovered in 1991, you’ll know that this character is assumed by archeaologists to be wealthy and powerful primarily on account of his possession of a copper axe. So, 5,000 years ago when Otzi was shuffling around in his deerskin snowshoes, copper was still extremely scarce.
For comparison, in my rural woodland world, axes for chopping firewood come in two sizes – 88 ounces and 130 ounces (though thanks to Bonaparte they’ve all been kilo-ed and gramme-ed). Otzi’s axe, which marked him out as such a wealthy individual, weighed precisely 6 ounces. It was less of an axe and more of a small chisel strapped to a stick, but scarcity keeps prices high! The same amount of copper today would signal neither wealth nor power, and would cost you less than the price of a Big Mac (no soda, no fries). By all four measures of abundance, and just like aluminium, copper appears to be not running out, but running in.
More Abundance and Less Scarcity
If I were Tim Worstall and wanted to pad out my pamphlet sized argument about the non-running out of mineral resources, I would use an example from Wikipedia’s page on peak copper. Environmental analyst (and resources expert..) Lester Brown is quoted as suggesting in 2008 that copper..
“might run out within 25 years based on what he considered a reasonable extrapolation of 2% growth per year”
I’ve been tempted to edit that entry in Wikipedia a number of times but a) it would get reverted immediately on the grounds that Lester Brown is very famous and he really did say that, and b) it’s cringeworthy, especially from someone who spent their whole working life as a resource analyst, but it is also a truly wonderful testament to the ubiquity of resource misunderstanding.
About ten seconds and some fairly basic Google-fu will find you on a US geological survey page detailing that the production of Copper increased by a factor of 40 over the 20th century (with the cost falling) But it is equally easy to find the data showing that copper reserves increased by a factor of (wait for it..) 40 as well! Which is no surprise to anyone who is familiar with some of the analogies about what sort of thing is a mineral reserve. Another analogy is that they are the portal through which we bring the resources into use, and the size of the portal (the reserves) grows as we change the rate at which we bring the resources into circulation.
But what about the amount that’s left in the ground? Doesn’t that become diminished? Well, one response is the vastness argument, which says that the percentage of any mineral resource that remains in the ground will always be 100 (to the nearest whole number). And that argument may well be sufficient for many (including Tim Worstall). But the reason I don’t think the reserves of anything can even theoretically run out is because we can never get to one percent of resources in circulation. And this has nothing to do with supplies or availability. Imagine what would have to be the case if one percent of the mineral resources of the earth were in use.
Just to be clear, we firstly need to know what proportion of the earths crust is resources. Take a cubic hectare from under a random piece of the earth’s surface. Lets choose... for the sake of an example… Lords cricket ground in London (why not – if it’s good enough for Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect?). We’ll have a couple of million tons of rock to play with. If we processed it and sold all the resources on the global market, what proportion would be left?
Zero percent, of course (to a whole number again, for the nitpickers among us, myself included). And that’s true for every cubic hectare of the earth. It’s resources all the way down! And the reason we don’t immediately rush to Lords and start digging, is because there’s more money to be made digging in other places where the concentrations of particular resources are higher. As well as where there are fewer cricket matches.
So, if we did in fact bring one percent of the earths resources into use, how would the surface of the planet look? Well, the earths crust is about ten miles thick, so one percent of that will be….about….. 500 feet. That’s 500 feet of solid resources (I guess the gases will be in canisters) in amongst us and above our heads. Right round the earth, no gaps. How could this be? How would sunlight get in? How would we move about?
This isn’t exactly a vastness argument, it’s more of an inconceivability one. To me that is an inconceivable vision. It is also something which I’ll take as a rebuttal to the theory – that we must run out of stuff eventually - most days of the week.
Perhaps another way of sifting through this confusion is to notice that the language appropriate to one kind of thing can create widespread confusion if misapplied to another. It is fair to say that the bacon in your fridge can be used up. It can be consumed (and not just economically so). With a sufficient lack of care we can run out of it in our fridges, on earth and in the universe at large.
But to say that a copper atom can be used up is to misunderstand its finiteness. All we can do is move it from one place to another, and make more or less use of it over time. This is an open-ended process; there is no fundamental limit to the increasing efficiency with which we use copper atoms or any of the other materials available to us. Tim Worstall is right that we’re not going to be running out of minerals and metals anytime soon. Or even anytime not very soon. But the situation is better than even he imagines - the running in of physical resources is unbounded, and in human terms, forever.
Abundant Addenda
1. For technical reasons there are no links in this review. Typing the words ‘No Breakfast Fallacy’ into Google will take you almost directly to a pdf copy of Tim Worstall’s book if that interests you. It really is very short.
2. ‘The Limits to Growth’ can be read for free through the same process.
3. If I were to recommend one article on the subject of resource (specifically copper) depletion, it would be the blog post ‘A Rosy View from the Patisserie’ by Geoff Batt on his old blog Rocky Subjects. It is informed, intelligent and beautifully written. It is also a lot less shouty and much more nuanced than the writing of either Mr Worstall or myself.