The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [101]
Our economy is based on a high-throughput, a somewhat disposable approach to natural resources that acts as if there were no limits to either extraction or excretion. The transition to an economy that can function on static or even diminishing supplies of certain essential raw materials is a fundamentally different economy from the one we currently have.
However well-implemented, a strategy of reduce/reuse/recycle won’t be able to mitigate any of the following:
The impact of the loss of materials for which no substitutes exist. There are a variety of extremely critical rare elements for which no substitutes are known to exist for certain applications. Their loss will necessitate finding acceptable workarounds that may be less advantageous than the original—an example of technology going backward.
Materials that are combined or used in ways that prevent their easy extraction and reuse. One of the many uses for cobalt is as an alloy material to make stainless steel. Once it is mixed in dilute amounts with steel, it would take an enormous amount of energy to recover that cobalt to use it in a different way. In fact, economically and energetically speaking, that’s really not an option; the cobalt in the steel is far too dilute, so in every practical sense, the cobalt is effectively locked into the steel. When mined potash is spread upon a field in Iowa as fertilizer, and then washes down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico, it’s far too dilute to be recovered (although it’s plenty concentrated to support algal blooms).
Materials lost through dispersion. When steel rusts, it’s essentially lost forever, because it’s in too dilute a form to be economically recoverable. Over time, our activities have the effect of taking relatively concentrated ores, using a lot of energy to concentrate and purify them to exceptional levels, and then carefully spreading them evenly over the surface of the earth, rendering them forever unrecoverable.
Gone with the Wind
The bottom line is that our activities tend to disperse our mineral wealth in ways that often prevent their reclamation and reuse. In many cases this is a one-way trip that isn’t amenable to recycling or reuse.
After (just) 150 years of industrialization, we can already see the end of several key mineral resources just a few years or decades out. And even these projections blithely assume that the energy is there to complete the task of depleting the known reserves, an assumption that I’m not willing to make.
With the depletion of certain key minerals, things will change, possibly dramatically. Am I saying that I expect the economy to come to a crashing halt if a key mineral is exhausted? No, absolutely not. But I am saying that it will no longer work the same way that it did before, and that’s what this book is about—alerting you to some seemingly quite obvious and predictable changes that are clearly headed our way.
1 Please refer to the Appendix for a list of the minerals that the United States must fully or partially import.
CHAPTER 20
Soil
Thin, Thinner, Gone
In January of 2009, an architect who’d arranged for me to speak in his community was driving me from San Francisco to an event in his hometown of Sonora, CA. As we passed through some of the most fertile farmland I had ever seen, I remarked on the bounty I could sense just outside the glass as we drove by at 65 miles per hour. Row after row, field after field, dark soil beckoning now and again from freshly turned operations spoke of the immense agricultural treasure of the place as we zoomed our way east.
Then, all of a sudden, the flat fields turned into row after row of neat, tidy houses, all squished together as if the prior 40 miles of flat expanse were irrelevant and space was suddenly hard to come by.