The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [98]
This same story of quantity and quality applies to all other mineral resources, as well as any other primary sources of wealth that come from the earth. Our economy as we know it is an industrial economy that really began when we started harnessing the energy of coal to do work. The industrial economy began about 150 years ago, during which time the world has transformed considerably. Where abundant mineral resources were once lying around for the taking, now every last major deposit has been mapped and lesser and lesser grades of ores are being pursued at higher and higher costs, both energetic and monetary.
One hundred and fifty years, it should be noted, is a relative blink of an eye. Consider that Cleopatra was born and ruled closer in time to the launching of the space shuttle than to the building of the Great Pyramid of Cheops,1 and somehow 150 years doesn’t seem like all that much time. It’s not, really, and that’s the point.
One of my favorite images from the past shows two dapper gentlemen reclining on what appears, in the grainy black-and-white 1800s-era photo, to be a large rock in a streambed. In fact, that “rock” happens to be a copper nugget, an enormously concentrated form of mineral wealth that was just lying around waiting to be found and used. Before long, all of the large copper nuggets were swept up and used, so smaller and smaller nuggets were pursued, until finally all of those were commercially depleted, too. Then we moved onto the highest-grade copper ores, which were soon exhausted, and today we find ourselves consigned to and chasing after lesser and lesser ore grades.
In the United States, one of the largest copper mines is the Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah. It’s 2.5 miles across, three-quarters of a mile deep, and used to be a rather sizeable hill that has since been hauled away, crushed, smelted, and transformed into a very large hole. The ore grade at Bingham Canyon is quite low, only 0.2 percent when all the waste rock is factored in. Now think of a hole in the ground that’s nearly 4,000 feet deep, and imagine trying to get the ore and waste rock up and out of that hole without using gigantic diesel trucks. Think of the energy involved in hoisting rocks and earth thousands of feet into the air just so that we can get at the remaining dregs of copper in the earth’s crust.
Where our financial markets might tell us that this is a reasonable thing to do, perhaps because copper is at $3.00/lb., while diesel fuel is only at $2.85/gal., it doesn’t make a lot of sense on an energetic basis. Once we convert that highly concentrated diesel fuel into waste heat, humans will never be able to use that energy again to do anything else. Perhaps bringing rocks up from 4,000 feet down so that we can extract a relatively tiny proportion of copper from them really is the best use for that energy, or perhaps there are more pressing priorities. This is one way that financial markets can lead to perfectly rational economic decisions that also happen to be perfectly irrational energetic decisions.
The other point that I want to be sure to communicate here is the stunning sense of pace in this story. From giant nuggets lying in streambeds to 0.2 percent ore bodies in only 150 years. That’s an astonishingly short amount of time. What will we do for an encore over the next 150 years? When put in this context, it’s sobering to consider just how fast the mineral wealth of the earth has been exploited and how relatively few years remain until all of the known deposits are completely exhausted.
Actually, that’s an overstatement. The deposits will never be completely exhausted, as that would likely require far more energy than we actually have. As we recall