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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Perspective who wrote (88417)	11/4/2007 10:52:30 AM
From: arun gera	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

>I agree with the "relative" decline idea, except inasmuch as bringing so much incremental demand online pushes a finite supply of global resources to the limit. Up until recently, energy, air, water, and raw materials have been treated as limitless, priced only based upon how hard it is to get them from where they are to where they need to be.> Why should it present to be much of a problem? The developed world already has a 1-1.5 billion people consuming at high capacities for at least 3 decades. The rest of the world is only 5 times the size of the developed world, and they will be ecstatic to consume half the per capita consumption of the developed world in next 20 years. That means we are looking at the global physical commodities consumption to be just 3 to 4 fold of today's consumption. That translates to an annual growth of only 6-7 percent a year over the next 20 years. Assuming increasing efficiency of 1 percent a year in commodity utilization, the overall rate will be even lower. The population growth is already almost zero in most of the developed world, and similar trends will happen in the rest of the world. How to find and mine the commodities from the ground is a well known process. There is really no unsolved problem there. If there is cheap energy, the mining can easily be increased by 5 percent a year. And environmental controls only add about 5-10 percent extra to the costs of doing that (it only requires political will to push that through) So it comes down to the price of energy. And I am talking not about the market price. I am talking more like - how many gallons of consumable gasoline is needed to get 100 gallons of gasoline to the customer from its raw state in the ground. The transportation cost in itself is tiny. It takes a few cents of energy to transport 1 gallon across the world. 1 barrel of oil = 42 gallons. At the current prices of $100/barrel, 1 gallon of crude oil which costs $2.50 per gallon is going at around $3/gallon of refined gasoline at the pump. Either there is a mis-pricing or the incremental cost of shipping, refining and distributing 1 gallon of refined gasoline is less than 50 cents/gallon. That means the value of energy required for shipping, refining, and distributing is less than 20 percent of the energy contained in 1 gallon of gasoline. Some numbers here: energyandcapital.com Really, energy could be 3 times the current price and still be affordable in most parts of the world. People will just start conserving more. What is being wasted in most part of the world is human mind power. Muscle power is easily substituted by oil or other forms of energy. -Arun

To: Perspective who wrote (88417)	11/4/2007 11:24:52 AM
From: Nikole Wollerstein	Respond to of 110194

You can get full paper on from PNAS - free. Metal stocks and sustainability The relative proportions of metal residing in ore in the lithosphere, in use in products providing services, and in waste deposits measure our progress from exclusive use of virgin ore toward full dependence on sustained use of recycled metal. In the U.S. at present, the copper contents of these three repositories are roughly equivalent, but metal in service continues to increase. Providing today's developed-country level of services for copper worldwide (as well as for zinc and, perhaps, platinum) would appear to require conversion of essentially all of the ore in the lithosphere to stock-in-use plus near-complete recycling of the metals from that point forward. For at least three decades, scientists and economists have debated whether humanity is rapidly depleting the resources on which it depends (1–4). Unlike oil, which is irremediably consumed when used, metals have the potential for almost infinite recovery and reuse. Nonetheless, the rate of extraction of many geochemically scarce metals from the lithosphere has increased in excess of 3% per year through the last half century or longer and continues to do so. Because these are finite resources, it is instructive to ponder how long these extraction rates can be sustained. As goods in use are increased and replenished, metal is transferred from the stock of ore in the lithosphere to a stock of metal-in-use providing services, and some of the metal in the original ore is transferred to wastes during mining, milling, and smelting. Over time, some of the metal-in-use recycles from old to new products, some is dissipated through corrosion and wear, and some enters waste repositories such as landfills in the end-of-life products that are not recycled. The relative sizes of the remaining stock in the lithosphere, the stock-in-use, and the stock transferred to wastes at any given time are measures of how far we have progressed toward the need for total reliance on recycling rather than on virgin ore to provide material for new products. The demand for metal resides in the services that people receive from metal and metal-containing products, e.g., housing, transportation, and electrical power. The amount of metal in use therefore depends on the level of services and the efficiency with which metal is used in providing those services. For example, attaining a specified level of illumination in a home depends on a stock of copper in power station equipment and in transmission lines; this stock can increase if more illumination is wanted and decrease if new techniques permit the same amount of power to be generated and transmitted with less copper. Eventually the equipment and transmission lines reach the end of their service lives and are replaced. This end-of-life copper may be recycled or landfilled; if the latter, dilution with other wastes will make future recovery unlikely unless considerably improved technologies to separate metals from mixed, primarily organic, materials are implemented. Few, if any, metals have unique properties; a substitute material can generally be found for most applications (1). Acceptance of the penalties arising from increased cost or diminished performance of a substitute material depends on the relative scarcity (or price) of the material substituted for. Thus, home illumination might be supplied through the use of aluminum rather than copper, at a cost increment arising from the lower conductivity and hence greater bulk of the aluminum that would be needed. The continuing exploitation and the evolving use of materials require that the issue of nonrenewable resource sustainability be periodically revisited (5). Accordingly, we review here the concept of sustainability based on the stock of metal needed to provide services. Our approach allows the application of engineering data to the technical requirements of services provided in the estimation of future metal requirements and stands in contrast to economic projections such as those that estimate future requirements in terms of the flow of material per unit of the gross domestic product (6). Calculation of Anthropogenic Metal Stocks