Extraction is on the decline and unsustainability is wrong.

Diehard degrowth advocates might now point out that such a technology-led plan to tackle climate change will require large material inputs to get every thing electrified and get new renewable power plants built. And because “you can’t produce stuff out of thin air,” as their slogan goes, that is the end of innovation; we are simply kicking the can down the road because, on a finite planet, we are bound to run out of raw materials.

On this point, as President Obama liked to say, “let me be as clear as I can be.” Innovation, and therefore economic growth, will not run out of materials, because the very definition of a production material depends on what is available. This is something we have observed throughout human history. Societies solve problems using what they have on hand. Think of a widespread basic technology like writing, developed by many societies independently to meet exigencies of commerce first, and then knowledge accumulation more broadly. Depending on location and existing technology, several writing materials have been used throughout history—stone tablets, clay tablets, bamboo slats, papyrus, wax tablets, vellum, parchment, paper, and copperplate—all depending on local availability. The same could be said of basic navigation, which has been with humanity since prehistoric time: early vessels were built using techniques and materials from bamboo and logs to reeds and leather, based on material availability and local needs.

In 1968, biologist Paul Ehrlich caused a sensation by predicting, in The Population Bomb, that humanity would run out of resources and people would be starving to death before the next decade was out. The only escape in his view was strict population control, of the type implemented by China with its “one-child policy” ten years later. It was the Malthusian story redux, and just as in Malthus’s time, the power of innovation was underestimated. At the time, economist Julian Simon made a famous scientific wager. He challenged Ehrlich to pick any five commodities, saying that regardless of the choices he would bet on their prices being lower ten years later. Ehrlich picked ones that looked likely to run out: copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. By the end of the decade, all were priced lower. It is important to understand that it is not that Simon got lucky. Rather, he understood the dynamics of capitalist markets: as the price of a commodity goes up, it activates a rationing mechanism whereby buyers shift away from that material—and this prods the innovation machine to find alternatives, or devise more efficient ways to use what is available.37 The reason that the price of tin, for example, went down is that aluminum became a cheaper and better substitute for it.

Aluminum has a neat story of its own. It is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust. And yet, up until the 1880s, when a method for melting and electrolyzing its ore was invented, it was prohibitively expensive, meaning it was not a production material, but treated more as a precious metal. Dartnell reports the curious episode of an imperial banquet organized by Napoleon III in the first half of the nineteenth century. In this setting, aluminum cutlery was displayed as an ostentatious show of power, reserved for the most distinguished dinner guests, while less favored guests used knives and forks of simple gold. The very definition of what is a commodity, and useful in production, varies across centuries, and depends on availability.

The concern that some input material will come to an end, and that this crisis will deal a fatal blow to civilization, is a recurrent theme in history. In Britain, the fear was expressed in the age of sail that when the country was depleted of oak, the fundamental wood used in shipbuilding and masts at the time, the country would become defenseless at sea. Clearly, this did not happen; eventually iron replaced the need for wood, and in the meantime, sufficient supplies came through trade with Scandinavia, the Baltics, and North America. For goods that cannot be replaced, prices generate strong incentives to become better at extracting and recycling them.38 Think of copper, which has good properties as an electrical conductor. As electrification was in full swing in the early twentieth century in the United States, geologist and copper-mining expert Ira Joralemon warned that “the age of electricity and of copper will be short. At the intense rate of production that must come, the copper supply of the world will last hardly a score of years. . . . Our civilization based on electrical power will dwindle and die.” One century later, we can see that this prediction did not age well.

It is not even a necessity that the bulk of our technological solutions must be based on geological materials. Think, for example, of recent research on fertilizers, based on the discovery that certain bacteria can capture atmospheric nitrogen, without the high pressures and temperatures of the polluting Haber-Bosch process described above. Likewise, the research frontier is shifting toward new materials, opening up the possibility of producing consumer goods with algae-based bioplastic. It would seem that if the twentieth century was characterized by the triumph of inorganic chemistry, the twenty-first might well be the century of organic materials, repurposed to meet human needs. This age is being ushered in by the advent of biotechnology which, also thanks to recent advances like Crispr / Cas9, will provide powerful tools to address current challenges, from reducing the use of pesticides and herbicides in agriculture to fostering natural carbon sequestration.

Innovation not only yields new technologies and products, but also allows more value to be extracted from what is already available. Under the heading of more efficient material use falls, for example, the idea of the circular economy, in which society is organized to reuse or recycle extensively, and rely less on new material extraction. The digital revolution has also caused the economy to be more and more “dematerialized” in production and consumption, as it becomes more based on intangible goods.39 This is what economist Danny Quah refers to as the “weightless economy.” Another push toward more efficient use of reduced material inputs is known as the “sharing economy,” as seen recently in urban settings with cars, mopeds, home rentals, and coworking spaces. Under this model, people shift from individual ownership of an asset to an arrangement, usually employing digital technology, by which it can be shared by multiple users, collectively extracting more utility out of the same amount of material.

Andrew McAfee shows in More from Less the extent to which the American economy has dematerialized since the 1970s, including by slashing its consumption of virtually all the seventy-two material resources tracked by the US Geological Survey, including minerals, timber, and cement, whether domestically sourced or imported. In its agricultural sector, the United States managed to increase crop production by 35 percent between 1982 and 2015, while reducing the use of fertilizers and returning to nature an amount of land equivalent to the state of Washington (45 million acres). The same combination of productivity enhancements and dematerialization has allowed many advanced economies to see reforestation and economic growth progressing together over the past three decades.40

To sum up this discussion, an old quip might suffice: The Stone Age did not come to an end because we ran out of stones. Likewise, the age of oil and gas will not end because we will run out of those, and innovation will not come to an end because we run out of material inputs. While in theory, and strictly speaking of physical inputs, it is conceivable that a finite planet could be depleted of all materials at once, as a practical reality this is not a concern. Assuming that point were ever reached, it would be in a future so distant that, by then, our material sources would probably not be confined to this planet.