Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

And then there are rare earths like yttrium, scandium, europium, and lanthanum, which you may remember from the periodic table in your chemistry classroom or from the Tom Lehrer song “The Elements.” These metals are a critical component of magnets, fluorescent lights, video screens, catalysts, lasers, capacitors, optical glass, and other high-tech applications. When they started running out, we were warned, there would be critical shortages, a collapse of the technology industry, and perhaps war with China, the source of 95 percent of the world’s supply. That’s what led to the Great Europium Crisis of the late 20th century, when the world ran out of the critical ingredient in the red phosphor dots in the cathode-ray tubes in color televisions and computer monitors and society was divided between the haves, who hoarded the last working color TVs, and the angry have-nots, who were forced to make do with black-and-white. What, you never heard of it? Among the reasons there was no such crisis was that cathode-ray tubes were superseded by liquid crystal displays made of common elements.¹⁴ And the Rare Earths War? In reality, when China squeezed its exports in 2010 (not because of shortages but as a geopolitical and mercantilist weapon), other countries started extracting rare earths from their own mines, recycling them from industrial waste, and re-engineering products so they no longer needed them.¹⁵

When predictions of apocalyptic resource shortages repeatedly fail to come true, one has to conclude either that humanity has miraculously escaped from certain death again and again like a Hollywood action hero or that there is a flaw in the thinking that predicts apocalyptic resource shortages. The flaw has been pointed out many times.¹⁶ Humanity does not suck resources from the earth like a straw in a milkshake until a gurgle tells it that the container is empty. Instead, as the most easily extracted supply of a resource becomes scarcer, its price rises, encouraging people to conserve it, get at the less accessible deposits, or find cheaper and more plentiful substitutes.

Indeed, it’s a fallacy to think that people “need resources” in the first place.¹⁷ They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes, displaying information, and other sources of well-being. They satisfy these needs with ideas: with recipes, formulas, techniques, blueprints, and algorithms for manipulating the physical world to give them what they want. The human mind, with its recursive combinatorial power, can explore an infinite space of ideas, and is not limited by the quantity of any particular kind of stuff in the ground. When one idea no longer works, another can take its place. This doesn’t defy the laws of probability but obeys them. Why should the laws of nature have allowed exactly one physically possible way of satisfying a human desire, no more and no less?¹⁸

Admittedly, this way of thinking does not sit well with the ethic of “sustainability.” In figure 10-2, the cartoonist Randall Munroe illustrates what’s wrong with this vogue word and sacred value. The doctrine of sustainability assumes that the current rate of use of a resource may be extrapolated into the future until it rams into a ceiling. The implication is that we must switch to a renewable resource that can be replenished at the rate we use it, indefinitely. In reality, societies have always abandoned a resource for a better one long before the old one was exhausted. It’s often said that the Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and that has been true of energy as well. “Plenty of wood and hay remained to be exploited when the world shifted to coal,” Ausubel notes. “Coal abounded when oil rose. Oil abounds now as methane [natural gas] rises.”¹⁹ As we will see, gas in turn may be replaced by energy sources still lower in carbon well before the last cubic foot goes up in a blue flame.

Figure 10-2: Sustainability, 1955–2109

Source: Randall Munroe, XKCD, http://xkcd.com/1007/. Credit: Randall Munroe, xkcd.com.