| | Mark Plus:
"Paul Ehrlich would win all kinds of resources bets these days. North Atlantic cod populations have crashed, petroleum supplies have started to decline, and industrialized countries like the UK face fuel rationing this winter..."
Firstly, no supporter of the freemarket fails to recognise that a species uses up resources, humans included. The demise of cod populations is therefore perfectly reasonable & predictable. So what? Is anyone starving for lack of cod? Indeed, fish prices are high precisely because they are scarce. Less fish gets consumed. Less fishing takes place.
Oil supplies are in decline? Oh, yes the myth of "peak oil". Not that simple, I'm afraid. There's plenty of oil on this planet for many moons to come. It's just so damn cheap to pull it up out of the middle eastern deserts that we don't bother pulling it up from anywhere else at the moment. Canada & US oil shales have over one trillion barrels locked up. It just costs about 5 times as much to extract it from shale as it does from wells. But, yes, one day, the stocks of oil will become problematically low, but then the price will have become problematically high. Enter alternatives.
The stone age didn't end 'cause we ran out of stones. And you could say the same about coal. The world's lousy with coal. It just got superceded, that's all.
Re the UK having fuel rationing. Is it? Well, rationing won't solve a thing. That's a typically statist response to any shortage. Idiotic. Let the price rise and that'll damp demand. Always has, always will. You won't see any rationing in America or in my New Zealand. We're a bit saner than that, & we all buy our oil on the same global market.
No one is starving. No one is going cold for want of fuel. And the sky's not falling.
Ross
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