Have We Reached Peak Oil?

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Even if we do manage to dodge the oil-and-gas depletion bullet, then comes a coal-depletion bullet, and a bullet for depletion of fertile land (well under way), and more bullets for depletion of silver, platinum, nickel, crystals, marble, limestone, etc etc. For all the precious metals – silver, gold, platinum, palladium, rhodium etc – the "mother lodes" are long gone. Nowadays we are searching and digging for 5 ounces of metal per ton of dirt! It hardly deserves to be called "ore" anymore.

Of everything we use, much cannot be recycled because we've spread it around so thinly. If we can't recycle such tiny quantities now, we certainly won't do it when energy supplies become limited and very expensive. For example, the miniscule quantities of precious metals in computers may never be recoverable.

Imagine a future in which we have a limited quantity of some metal, and we work hard to recycle. Suppose we lose just 10% of this metal each year (today it's much worse). Then, every year we must produce 10% fewer goods, for lack of the metal. After 30 years of this, there's only enough metal left to make 1/20th the number of devices we started with. "Who gets the new TV this year?"

In other words, from the moment we can't dig up more metal, our challenge will be to recycle all of it, and I mean all of it; or we will reverse the entire Industrial Revolution within one generation. The clock starts ticking for all minerals at once, when we "can't dig up more" because there's insufficient energy for the digging. That becomes a real threat as soon as oil shortages begin.