THat’s all I asked you to do in the first place
…
What happens if the price of energy is constantly rising faster than that of ALL other resources? Will resources now be limited or decrease?
The price of which energy?
All sources taken together including so-called renewable energy sources. Renewable energy is dispersed energy so there comes a point where collecting that energy consumes more energy than we gain from such a collection. What is done fro metalls (mining lower conectrations by using more energy) can’t be done for energy forever.
Research in nuclear technology remains interesting here because energy is so concentrated in instable elements. But to realy get cheap energy we would need to switch to U 238. One of my friends -an engineer - was involved in building the cooling system for the German fastbreeder reactor “Kalkar”. This guy is as much as the opposite of an environmentalist than you can imagine. Nevertheless he was truly happy when the project was abadonned for security reasons. By the way the government did not always “stall” nuclear technology. That reactor was subventioned with 7 Milliard DM (at that time about 3,6 Milliard Euro not adjusted for inflation).
If you lump in the whole universe, then resources become more or less unlimited
I’m not sure if that is true…I suspect if we ever set up an inter-planitary society(like the Federation or Imperium), human population and consumption will grow alongside avaliable resources..
That’s what I was saying, sort of. I’m saying there is an -essentially- infinite frontier. If you want to make a statue of yourself the size of a planet, it’s not the amount of available resources stopping you, it’s the amount of available time stopping you.
Give me a propulsion mechanism that can distort space and I will happily join you hunting for resources in other star systems. I you plan to go there with normal engines than you can go alone.
As I understand the common error of Greens and the “Club of Rome”
Everything about the “Club of Rome” is erronious.
From their very first publication “the limits to growth” until today.
It is physically impossible to own, that is, exercise exclusive control over, an infinite amount of anything, and therefore ownership cannot cause scarcity.
Non-sequiter. Yachts have a decent supply, yet I have no way of accessing one. Yachts are scarce to me. Packs of gum are not.
OK, than you and Liberty Student are just talking past each other due to definitions. LS and I are using the term in the standard economic sense; you are not. Economically speaking, yachts and packs of gum are both scarce, gum less so than yachts. A “decent supply” does not make something not scarce.
THat’s what I have been saying, that we were talking past each other. He acknowledged phsyical scarcity, I said scarcity goes even furhter than that; time, ownership, distance, technology, etc. There are many more factors making things scarce t han the laws of physics.
Untapped resources on a universal spectrum may or may not be limited.
They would be without the market…http://gumwrappings.tripod.com/russian.html
But you’re missing his point, too. You’re redfining terms and expecting others to, 1) know what you’re talking about, and 2) agree. Not gonna happen. Using the standard economic definition of scaricty, which is the only one that could possibly apply to this topic, ownership does not cause scarcity, for the simple fact that scarcity is a prerequisite of ownership. The others you mention, time, distance and technology, fall under the laws of physics.
Say there is an infinite amount of gold in the universe. There is still only a finite amount of gold on Earth. Time, distance and technology, you know, the laws of physics, make gold scarce. Possessing gold does not, because it’s already scarce, due to physics, even if all of it was unowned. Things that are not scarce due to physics, the idea the 1+1=2, for example, cannot be owned – even if I possess this information, that in no way prohibits you from also possessing it.
From the movie “Spaceballs”: “I see your Schwartz is as big as mine, lets see how you handle it.”. The same applies to any natural resource. The resource itself is limited but how free people handle the resource is unlimited. Now government using coersion and force can only restrict how people handle their resources thus making them relatively more scarce.
If I own a replicator I can choose to charge you for its services. Things are infinite to me, and finite to you, scarcity.
Something like that would destroy itself through its own gravity. You’d need some gravity-modifying technology to do something like that.
@OP:
If the cost of operations for mineral extraction increases due to a rise in energy costs, then that will be reflected in the selling price of the mineral resource that is being extracted. The rise in the price will make the mineral resource more scarce for some consumers, who will then have to either save and purchase at a later date (changing time preference) or look for a substitute good to fulfill their demand.
In regards to mineral reserves having low concentrations (inefficient quantities extracted in comparison to cost of operations), that might lead to less efficient companies ceasing their extraction operations; it could also lead to companies investing in technologies and processes to increase efficiency with the goal being to make extraction operations profitable.
Ricarp and Arachno Capitalist are the most closely to the point in the moment. However my question was not well to the point as well. I fact there are two questions:
- Would the supply of resources decrease (resources become ever more scarce) if energy prices rise constantly faster than price of every other resource?
- Is such a situation likely to happen or is there something fishy about energy prices rising faster than those of any other resource?
Someone suggested that you could substitute energy for something else but this is technically not possible. Energy is the only thing which can do work and help conserve information over time.
Ricarb suggested that we can push the limit by increasing the technological (and hence energy) efficiency of extraction of resources. First you have to invest energy itself into the research of such better technology. Now the question is: if you have found the solution (better information how to solve the problem) than can you switch from one technology to another without extra energy cost? Since even the conservation of information costs energy I am not sure if this can work forever.
Every living creature on this planet is constantly faced with this question: will the next action cost me less energy than I gain by it? Make a row of errors in that respect and you are dead. So I assume that scarcity is not artificial and the 174 petawatts mentioned by Arachno Capitalist do not directly help us to solve that problem.
Nadjeschda:
- Would the supply of resources decrease (resources become ever more scarce) if energy prices rise constantly faster than the price of every other resource?
- Is such a situation likely to happen or is there something fishy about energy prices rising faster than those of any other resource?
The demand for certain resources (and their products) would decrease as prices increase. For some resources it would be because energy is a significant input. For other resources it would be because people are devoting more of their money to the now-higher-priced energy-intensive products. Prices for energy can’t rise faster than that of every other resource because energy is an input and therefore a factor in most prices. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible for energy prices to rise very quickly, however. I think what you’re getting at is “will our standard of living decrease if the price of energy rises quickly”, and the answer can most definitely be yes. Our standard of living is, in a simplistic form, production per capita. If it takes a lot more effort to extract energy then there are fewer man hours left over to do other things.
If we reversed time we would see the same effect with agriculture. As we continued to travel backwards progressively more of our current agricultural technology would become unavailable and the amount of effort required to get food would increase. We would eventually land in the conditions of most of human history: almost everyone subsistence farming and very few people available to do anything else.
Is this likely? Not at all. There’s a ridiculous amount of energy available and our technology is advancing, not retreating.
“Prices for energy can’t rise faster than that of every other resource because energy is an input and therefore a factor in most prices.”
This sounds most closely to an answer, I have to think that through.
If you move backwards in agriculture than you will see that beforehand we used not only more labor hours but also much less energy so if energy prices would rise fast than agricultural production can also go down. You will also find that continuing to invest more energy in agriculture today is subject to diminishing marginal returns.