Have Humans Really "Used all the Resources for the Year?"

And this is why more journalists should learn basic economics: Motherboard weighs in with "Humans have used all the earth's resources for the year."

The article is worried because if the whole world consumes at developed rates we'd need "5 earths" to satisfy all that rampant consumerism.

Where to begin.

First, investment incentives. There are near-unlimited amounts of everything. The reason earth "produces" a given amount is because that's how much we want. If we want more, we'll produce more. It's a self-fixing problem. For example, we don't deep-sea oil drill because Indians and Nigerians are too poor to use that much oil. If India and Nigeria were Switzerland tomorrow, drillers would have the incentives to 5x, 10x, 50x production. Multiply this across every resources we use.

Second, technology. Whale blubber was the go-to fuel of the 19th century. How many "earths" of whale blubber do we need today? Answer: zero. We don't need it anymore -- some Eskimos eat it, I suspect Japanese throw it away. So even if hard limits were in sight, tech creates substitutes in direct proportion to how scarce the thing is. The price soars, and it becomes viable to do wacky things like pave the Sahara in solar. Again, multiply this by all the potential techs we could develop yet are not currently incentivized to develop.

To read the article under discussion: http://bit.ly/2aDLsnS
To read more from Peter: http://www.profitsofchaos.com