Why The Minerals Won't Run Out
Jun. 3rd, 2010 09:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mishalakOne of the classic responses to growing old is to express opinions that can be summed up as, "After me, the deluge." The person facing his or her own mortality cannot conceive of a world without the central person in their own life in it and so expresses an opinion that the world as a whole must be doomed in one or more ways.
A fine example of this is Robert Silverberg's essay entitled, "Reflections: The Death of Gallium". He has not produced any citations, but by using google I think I found his main source of information, a Wall Street Journal Article from May 2007 cites a New Scientist article from the same year about scarce metals and recycling. What it looks like to me is that he took the doom-saying portion of the WSJ article, added some color with a bit about the great auk (incorrect, btw the great auk was not killed off by Greenlanders in 1760, but by Icelanders sending specimens to European museums with the last ones killed 3 July 1844 and only one sighting subsequent to that date Ref) and science fiction while ignoring the parts that did not fit his gloomy outlook.
Silverberg is wrong, of course, about running out of gallium. Just as a person would have been wrong to get hysterical about a lack of old growth timber for really good masts during the age of sail. Estimates of how much of a mineral resource we have left are based upon current consumption and proven reserves at price levels that we have now. If the element starts getting rare or more in demand this will spur innovation, search for new resources, and conservation. And if things get really bad we might start comprimising on some of our enviromental laws.
In a case that he does not cite, but is in my memory, is how China ended up being the main supplier of so called rare earth metals and is threatening to reduce the supply. The mining has often produced large amounts of toxic effluent and thus while the United States has exploitable deposits (as does Greenland, see June Issue National Geographic) our production has fallen in recent years while China's has grown to meet the larger world demand. Higher environmental standards are a large portion of this and if we got really desperate I'm sure they might slip a bit, to our long term detriment, but it would be a solution.
To sum up I think there are multiple solutions to such problems, probably many we have not even yet considered. Such gloom and doom is mostly interesting for what it reveals about the writer than what it shows about the world. I'm halfway tempted to say something longer about the general gloominess of a genre that has a large proportion of while male writers that are well past middle age.
A fine example of this is Robert Silverberg's essay entitled, "Reflections: The Death of Gallium". He has not produced any citations, but by using google I think I found his main source of information, a Wall Street Journal Article from May 2007 cites a New Scientist article from the same year about scarce metals and recycling. What it looks like to me is that he took the doom-saying portion of the WSJ article, added some color with a bit about the great auk (incorrect, btw the great auk was not killed off by Greenlanders in 1760, but by Icelanders sending specimens to European museums with the last ones killed 3 July 1844 and only one sighting subsequent to that date Ref) and science fiction while ignoring the parts that did not fit his gloomy outlook.
Silverberg is wrong, of course, about running out of gallium. Just as a person would have been wrong to get hysterical about a lack of old growth timber for really good masts during the age of sail. Estimates of how much of a mineral resource we have left are based upon current consumption and proven reserves at price levels that we have now. If the element starts getting rare or more in demand this will spur innovation, search for new resources, and conservation. And if things get really bad we might start comprimising on some of our enviromental laws.
In a case that he does not cite, but is in my memory, is how China ended up being the main supplier of so called rare earth metals and is threatening to reduce the supply. The mining has often produced large amounts of toxic effluent and thus while the United States has exploitable deposits (as does Greenland, see June Issue National Geographic) our production has fallen in recent years while China's has grown to meet the larger world demand. Higher environmental standards are a large portion of this and if we got really desperate I'm sure they might slip a bit, to our long term detriment, but it would be a solution.
To sum up I think there are multiple solutions to such problems, probably many we have not even yet considered. Such gloom and doom is mostly interesting for what it reveals about the writer than what it shows about the world. I'm halfway tempted to say something longer about the general gloominess of a genre that has a large proportion of while male writers that are well past middle age.