Yes. I saw a list once that showed them predicting the end of oil like every 20 years since the 1860’s. The inherent flaw of material-technical forecasts (when we say “this is how much we have, and this is how fast we burn it up, thus we have this long before it runs out”) is that they do not take the cyclical replenishment of resources into account. Scarcity causes creation of resources. Like my fridge; it’s replenished because it’s getting empty. If it’s full already I have no reason to buy new food. Why bother? It’s like every week I tell my wife “we’re gonna run out of food by next week”. And then oddly enough we buy more food. But a few days later I again proclaim that our food will run out immanently. So I just repeatedly proclaim we’re going to run out because I extrapolate current consumption without taking the part of the process into accout that replenishes the resource. And technically I would be right. The food in my fridge is at any point in time always “running out”. The problem is that that doesn’t capture the whole process. It extrapolates a part of the the process as if it were the whole process.
Opponents sometimes respond with some reference to resources being finite. You know, the earth is spherical. All the resources we will ever have are alredy there. So we couldn’t create resources. It’s physics! And that is,as I mentioned, simply an equivocation between known reserves an the overall amount of a resource. Reserves are not finite, we create them because we need them. They do not have to ever run out (they may though), and they can not peak.
I have found though that environmentalists aren’t impressed by empirical data. The fact that our theoretical models are repeatedly backed up by reality somehow just makes our theory less pure, while the fact that their theory was shown to be repeatedly wrong elevates it into a higher level of theoretical purity. Facts that make their predictions wrong are never taken as a sign that their theoretical models may be flawed. No, these are just random incdents that happen to come about. In fact these unexpected events explain why their predictions happened to be wrong, vindicating the theory. When someone finds a giant new oil field, that doesn’t mean the theory that predicted oil to run out was wrong. Their theory is inherently pure and true and reality just happened to not conform to it in that instance.