Resource depletion is impossible.
McAfee, 19—cofounder and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT Sloan School of Management, former professor at Harvard Business School and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Andrew, “What Causes Dematerialization? Markets and Marvels,” More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next, Chapter 7, pg 147-148, Kindle, dml)
We still have gold and silver, and we still have large reserves of them. In fact, the reserves of both are actually much bigger than in 1972, despite almost half a century of additional consumption. Known global reserves of gold are almost 400 percent larger today than in 1972, and silver reserves are more than 200 percent larger. And it's probably not too early to say that we're not going to run out of copper, aluminum, and petroleum as quickly as estimated in The Limits to Growth. Known reserves of all are much larger than they were when the book was published. Known aluminum reserves are almost twenty-five times what they were in the early 1970s.
How could these predictions about resource availability, which were taken seriously when they were released, have been so wrong? Because the Limits to Growth team pretty clearly underestimated both dematerialization and the endless search for new reserves. Capitalism and tech progress combine to drive both of these trends—the use of fewer resources and the hunt for more of them—and neither of these two drivers is about to become less powerful. So we’ll continue to innovate our way to greater dematerialization while we keep finding more reserves.
The counterintuitive conclusion from this line of reasoning is that resource scarcity isn't something we need to worry about. The earth is finite, so the total quantity of resources such as gold and petroleum is limited. But the earth is also very, very big—big enough to contain all we need of these and other resources, for as long as we'll need them. The image of a thinly supplied Spaceship Earth hurtling through the cosmos with us aboard is compelling, but deeply misleading. Our planet has amply supplied us for our journey. Especially since we're quickly slimming, swapping, optimizing, and evaporating our way to dematerialization.