Willie,
This is relevant to your interests. What about "Peak Steel?" If we run out of steel we can't make any more rails!
My nephew told me about “peak phosphorous”. It’s a serious issue, since the economic sources of phosphorous for fertilizer are mined. The phosphorous persists, of course, in elemental form, but it is dispersed and difficult to recover.
The problems of “peak oil” and “peak lithium” and “peak phosphorus” and “peak” anything else you can think of are solved by the magic of “economics”.
As demand grows, as supplies of something become harder to get, the price goes up. This encourages people to go farther afield to find more, and it encourages people to find alternatives. The higher price is an incentive to inventors and entrepreneurs and its an incentive to folks like us to find another way.
You don’t have to do anything except follow the logic of the situation. No government mandate needed, no government grandee to tell you to do what you would do anyway without him.
Its funny. If an oil company charges $4 a gallon for gasoline because they are having to go farther to get it, thats bad. If government adds a buck tax to $3 gasoline to encourage you to look for alternatives, somehow thats good.
No. If supplies get harder to get, it’ll go to $4 or $6 a gallon, and people will invent and invest and they’ll come up with alternatives without anyone to tell them to.
“Rare earth minerals independence”
In the 50’s I did research at a major university on rare earth extraction processes on both a lab and pilot plant scale. We have the technology, if we were to dust it off and put it to use. Phosphate rock from certain parts of this country were our rare earth sources then. We had processes that could have been turned into an economical source of the various rare earth minerals. But we had not yet developed a demand, and much of that technology is likely dormant today. It could be resusitated.
I think Palladium will be on this list very soon.
While I agree that many of the rare earth applications have a work-around or substitute available, this is not the case with crude oil. There is simply nothing else - wind, solar, etc., — that offers the energy rate of return that oil does. It is a large part of the economic growth we have enjoyed for decades.
Yes, we can do some combination of conservation, drilling at home, alternative sources such as nuclear, and withstand a certain level of oil price increase. At $150 a barrel oil, though, the airline industry contracts dramatically, and major lifestyle changes will be needed. There is a certain irony that the electric cars substitute a depleting energy source (oil) for a rare earth element (lithium).
Putting bacterial antibiotic resistance into reverse
MDS, a blood cancer, strikes nearly 5 times more Americans than previously thought
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
What about Wipped Cream and the perfect peak?
How about “Peak Taxes”?