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With scientists divided on the matter, and the need to make crucial trade- offs affecting industrial development and improvements in the global standard of living, it is necessarily a political matter....I do not know if you are old enough to recall, but about 25 years ago, the Club of Rome was engaging in scare propaganda about resource depletion, especially in petroleum, that have never materialized. Supposedly it was all a matter of science mandating belt tightening. In the case of petroleum, suddenly new reserves were identified in Alaska and the North Sea, and they came on line fairly rapidly. Now, it looks like the reserves in the Middle East were underestimated, and there are new reserves to develop around the Caspian, that may be even larger than in Arabia. Of course, in principle it must come to an end, but we do not really know when, and the scientific alarmism proved fatuous. Similar things occurred in other commodities, such as bauxite. To me, that was a great lesson in skepticism...... |
