I have an article from a pure science publication which states that we are using -- (presumably in the new-millenium-era-of-expanding-the-formerly-3rd-world development mode) -- minerals at a ferocious and disturbing rate. The implication being, a-la the GW thingie, that we are running out of useful metal bits at an alarming rate. The New Scientist if your are curious.. World Stripped Bare - Earth Audit D. Cohen.. Ok you can stop laughing.. but it has word 'science' in name of the magazine .. and their prognostication of the world running out of Pt in 15 years could be predictive.. newscientist.com
The creds of the authors of the 'pure sience' pubs notwithstanding, no matter the lofty science and distinterested atttitudes, (we presume) -- major lab-bench thumpers are not trade people. They have not swum in the ocean of unexploited drill offs, new mining economics and methods, closed mines with stuff left in them by the boatload, scores of properties falling in and out of favour with differing price regimes, flavour of the month club jr. mining company swarms, geofizz and other advances, or even changing worlds of exploration theories.. and no amount of statistics on the averages of metal in the crust will ever explain how much we can actually mine from the myriad different geological regimes. The theories are always all wrong. You can't figure mineable copper by testing backyard dirt piles for trace copper and invoking planitesmal eutectic ksp's.
And to paraphrase a few other explorationists, we have not even begun to look in the vast 'pink sea' of the geo maps. (Pink is supposedly unproductive 'granite and other froofera') I mean specifically we have not really perused the so called granite and metamorphic regimes in detail. One might imagine from looking naively at the government maps that if one went back in the bush in Canada in the "wrong" areas, we would see vast undifferentiated areas of orthoclase granite porphyry without a single structural twinge. We wish. If we did see that sort of thing, we would be fabulously wealthy instanster. The world's largest building stone quarry would be beholden before us. Don't get me wrong. Traversing the pink sea is rather depressing. It it rather monotonously unmineralized, unlike those cute volcanic areas, with all that q, c, f and s veining, (which BTW can also be rather depressing to scan and assay in factotum, just ask Rueben Daigle boud dat...) It is also often banded and greyish not pink.. and every now and then reveals strange silicate/sulfide valuable mineral enclaves, and lo! also.. but don't tell many people, strange disconnected and rarish blebs of darkish minerals.. could they be copper? Yes, we have ignored the pure porphyries.. but our rock is soooo hard, and South America is soooo soft.. is this good all the time.. or bad..?
But down to it. Are we running out of minerals? Yes or no..
Well I think the answer is a clear and unequivocal ... "hard to definitively say..." which should vastly more comforting.. for both price and security too..
What I cannot understand, is that if we are nearing peak oil, peak platinum, peak zinc, etc.. why are the prices not very much higher? What the hell are we gonna do when we run out of metals and oil? When the prices really start falling towards absolute dearth I have this vision of people grubbing in the bush for, well grubs, and decaying buildings and collapsed bridges all about... I guess what it means is that this shoot up in metal prices right across the board presages yet another shoot up.. as we are not ready just yet to collapse... and it must be sometime soon, --- but zackly when? .... (and I must emphasize this is the first time in dozens of decades that ALL the metals have been high-high-high-high).. so what does this mean? Well if the nearing-peak people are right at all, then there should be a geometric price increase of ALL metals or quite a few anyway at some point.. That point would be nice to know definitively...
This would explain the sudden and overwhelming price rise in U308.. The vastly longer-lived-than-oil energy source rises in anticipation of supplanting oil as the major energy source, as it must early, because of its really long term delivery time... If we say that 15 years is the delivery time of major U, then peak oil must be about 15 years out.. which makes sense.. and argues that the market in these things is not only efficient but diabolically intelligent.. Tricky even
Could the Kyoto people and the GW people also be diabolically cute about their campaign..? could they be secret lobbyists for the nuklear society? Don't be so quick to dismiss this theory, the ultimate propagandist is the energy salesman.. he could infiltrate the Sierra Club without even using a party mask..
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