Re:World’s consumption of materials hits record 100bn tonnes...
by coldtea on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @07:32PM
(#22123630)
>Taking things into account and shaping our policies accordingly means making a prediction about future supply. Predictions of impending supply exhaustion have historically had a very, very poor track record.
"Historically" we have been caring about such things for about one or at best two centuries, most of them with primitive technological means to gauge resources supply, so I'm not so convinced about said "track record".
It's not like we got it wrong for millennia. It's more like some warned ahead of time after we've started looking relatively recently historically, and because they got it wrong, we assume like the people in the boy and the wolf story that no such thing is ever possible (or possible to predict within some accuracy).
"Historically" we have been caring about such things for about one or at best two centuries, most of them with primitive technological means to gauge resources supply, so I'm not so convinced about said "track record".
It's not like we got it wrong for millennia. It's more like some warned ahead of time after we've started looking relatively recently historically, and because they got it wrong, we assume like the people in the boy and the wolf story that no such thing is ever possible (or possible to predict within some accuracy).