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01 / 05
No, We Won’t Run Out of Resources

Blog Post | Mineral Production

No, We Won’t Run Out of Resources

We’ve been adapting to resource scarcity for millennia. The idea that we would stop today, at the pinnacle of our development so far, is a peculiar one.

Summary: This article challenges the pessimistic view that human progress will soon come to a halt due to resource scarcity. It argues that humans are problem solvers who can adapt to changing circumstances and find new ways of using resources more efficiently. It illustrates this point with the example of germanium, a mineral that has been extracted from different sources over time depending on the demand and availability.


Pessimists often claim that human progress is about to come to a screeching halt. They say that the resources that make progress possible are about to run out, dooming us to a reversal in living standards. The Club of Rome, along with nearly every environmentalist, tells us that incessantly, usually pointing to a supposed mineral shortage that will end civilization. The pessimists insist that everything must be recycled and that we must have a completely circular economy. Alas, they fail to understand how the mineral industry actually works. On a deeper level, they fail to understand that humans have agency. We are not merely buffeted by the natural world but can solve problems ourselves.

Another group that fails to appreciate our problem-solving ability is the American Chemical Society (ACS). The Society has a list of “endangered elements,” which they think might run out in the near future. The idea that we could run out of hafnium is enough to make geologists guffaw – I actually tried this once, and that’s what happened: not just giggles but proper belly laughs. Germanium, another on that list of likely shortages, illustrates my point even better. The world doesn’t use much of it, perhaps 150 tons a year. Some of that is recycled. (There’s nothing wrong with recycling, but insisting that we must recycle is wrong.)

We first started using germanium for electronics before we switched to using silicon computer chips. Germanium is still the material of choice for getting a warm and fuzzy sound on a guitar pedal, but today, germanium is mostly used for night sights and long-distance fiber optics. That’s because adding a little germanium to glass allows it to carry light for longer distances. So, we like having germanium around, and we would miss it if we ran out.

Early germanium extraction methods used coal. There’s a little germanium in nearly all coal and more in certain other deposits. If you collect the vapor after burning coal, the germanium concentrates in the ash and can be collected. The chemical company Johnson Matthey used to have a plant in Cheshire, England, to the delight of fuzzy guitar pedal enthusiasts. Later, we realized that certain zinc ores could also provide germanium, and the world supply pivoted to a zinc mine in DR Congo. Then, we got wise to the harmful effects of coal dust floating around the countryside. Coal power plants installed electrostatic precipitators on their chimneys to collect the dust, and coal once again became the primary source of the world’s germanium.

It might seem lucky that today’s germanium supply is just a byproduct of producing electricity. But to think of it as luck is to get things the wrong way around. We are problem solvers, not just the recipients of happenstance. In the absence of that luck, we could build a factory to do it anyway. That’s how the world’s largest germanium producer, in China, works. They mine coal, burn it in a power station, and collect the germanium-infused dust. Rumor has it – and it might just be a rumor because it’s so cute – that the germanium content is so rich that they give the electricity away to the local town for free.

The point of my germanium example is to show that we are not dependent on the current methods of mineral extraction, nor do we need luck to avoid shortages. We are tool-making creatures. If we have a problem, we study the world around us and develop a way to solve it.

Like germanium, every item on the ACS list of “endangered elements” actually has a vast current supply. The current mineral extraction methods might have problems, but the total amount of resources that we can use is imponderable. And if our current methods come up a little short, we’ll find better methods of extraction.

Our adaptive abilities should be obvious, though they clearly are not. We’ve been adapting to resource scarcity for millennia, and the idea that we would stop today, at the pinnacle of our development so far, is a peculiar one.

China Daily | Mineral Production

Rare Earth Deposit Found in Yunnan

“China has discovered a rare earth deposit in Honghe, Yunnan province, composed of about 1.15 million metric tons of potential resources, further consolidating the country’s rare earth resource advantage and industrial chain, the China Geological Survey said Friday.

The deposit includes more than 470,000 tons of critical rare earth elements, including praseodymium, neodymium, dysprosium and terbium, according to the CGS, a division of the Ministry of Natural Resources.

Primarily consisting of medium and heavy rare earths, the deposit is thought to be the largest of its kind in China.”

From China Daily.

Microsoft | Mineral Production

A New Paradigm of Materials Design with Generative AI

“Materials innovation is one of the key drivers of major technological breakthroughs. The discovery of lithium cobalt oxide in the 1980s laid the groundwork for today’s lithium-ion battery technology. It now powers modern mobile phones and electric cars, impacting the daily lives of billions of people. Materials innovation is also required for designing more efficient solar cells, cheaper batteries for grid-level energy storage, and adsorbents to recycle CO2 from atmosphere.  

Finding a new material for a target application is like finding a needle in a haystack. Historically, this task has been done via expensive and time-consuming experimental trial-and-error. More recently, computational screening of large materials databases has allowed researchers to speed up this process. Nonetheless, finding the few materials with the desired properties still requires the screening of millions of candidates. 

Today, in a paper published in Nature, we share MatterGen, a generative AI tool that tackles materials discovery from a different angle. Instead of screening the candidates, it directly generates novel materials given prompts of the design requirements for an application. It can generate materials with desired chemistry, mechanical, electronic, or magnetic properties, as well as combinations of different constraints. MatterGen enables a new paradigm of generative AI-assisted materials design that allows for efficient exploration of materials, going beyond the limited set of known ones.”

From Microsoft.

Curiosities | Mineral Production

Hang On, Are There Any Lost Minerals?

“A few months ago I promised to write a series of posts documenting the world’s lost materials. I was quite excited about it; over time I was hoping to build up a catalogue of all of those substances humanity once used to mine and extract from the earth’s crust, but have now been exhausted.

All of which is why it’s about time I informed you, dear readers, that I failed. After a single post (Malachite) I’m taking the decision to retire the Lost Materials series. Why? Because in trying to hunt around for minerals we have run out of, I came to an unexpected conclusion. So far, we haven’t really, meaningfully run out of, well, pretty much anything.”

From Material World.

Blog Post | Natural Resource Prices

Update on the Five Metals from the Simon–Ehrlich Bet

Since 1900, the average abundance of these five metals has increased 36.5 percent faster than the population.

Summary: The Simon–Ehrlich wager famously demonstrated that population growth does not lead to resource scarcity but instead drives innovation and abundance. Since 1900, the production of five metals featured in the bet has risen dramatically. This bolsters Julian Simon’s argument that human ingenuity and technological progress enable us to produce more resources at lower costs, ensuring greater abundance even as populations grow.


Hannah Richie at OurWorldinData.org recently published an insightful article on the five metals featured in the Simon–Ehrlich wager. In 1990, Paul Ehrlich lost the 10-year bet and had to write a check to Julian Simon for $576.07. Simon had let Ehrlich pick the five metals in 1980 when the bet started. The payment reflected the inflation-adjusted decline of 36 percent in the average price of the five metals over the decade. This was despite an extraordinary global population increase during the 1980s of 850 million people (19 percent)—the largest growth in human history. Yet, even with this surge, resource prices dropped, reinforcing Simon’s argument that human population growth, coupled with ingenuity and the freedom to innovate, drives resource abundance rather than scarcity.

Libertarian economist Julian Simon made a famous wager with the renowned doomsayer Paul Ehrlich in 1980. Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose five metals that he believed would increase in price over the next decade. After the bet concluded, Ehrlich, humbled by the outcome, handed Simon a check, having lost the wager.

Richie highlights an important trend: The long-term abundance of these metals has increased significantly. Take a look at the staggering growth in their production since the early 1900s:

The five metals in the Simon-Ehrlich wager have actually become more abundant over time. The production of each of these metals has grown dramatically, defying Ehrlich's predictions of scarcity and rising prices.

Between 1900 and 2000, the global population grew by 400 percent, from 1.6 billion to 8 billion. During the same period, the production of the five metals soared: Chromium increased by an astounding 78,082 percent, copper by 4,062 percent, nickel by 26,918 percent, tin by 226 percent, and tungsten by 4,829 percent. On average, production of these metals rose by 22,823 percent.

The relationship between population growth and resource production is captured by the production elasticity of the population. It is the ratio of the percentage change in production divided by the percentage change in population. On average, every 1 percent increase in population corresponded to a 57.06 percent increase in the production of these five metals.

In our book Superabundance, we compared the time prices of these five metals for blue-collar workers from 1900 to 2018 and have since updated the data to 2022.

The prices of the five metals have also decreased over time, meaning fewer labor hours are required for a worker to afford them. This reflects both rising wages and falling commodity prices, which are indicators of growing progress and abundance.

The charts below detail the growth in abundance for each resource since 1900. Please note that vertical scales differ across the charts. The charts generally show the effects of 9/11, the financial crisis of 2008, and COVID-19 lockdown policies.

Since 1900, the metals have become much more abundant, even as the global population has grown. This demonstrates that humanity is not a burden on the earth's material resources; rather, through innovation and production, people have been able to expand resource availability.

This table summarizes our findings.

Between 1900 and 2022, the production, time price, and abundance of each of the metals have all increased. The chart also highlights the production elasticity of population, showing how the growth in population has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in metal production.

From 1900 to 2022, the global population increased by 400 percent. Over the same period, the abundance of these five metals increased by an average of 546 percent, demonstrating that abundance has grown 36.5 percent faster than the population.

Some have suggested that Simon was just lucky. This is why looking at a much longer time period reveals underlying trends behind temporary fluctuations.

These data reinforce Simon’s prediction: The more people, the more we produce, and the lower the prices.

Tip of the hat: Max More

This article was published at Gale Winds on 1/14/2025.