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96 Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), discussed in Chapter 1, and a number of other books. The late Julian Simon rebuts Ehrlich in The Ultimate Resource (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) and others, arguing that the only limit to human growth is human ingenuity.

97 This expansion of Malthus’ ideas beyond issues of food production began in the 1800s, including by British economist David Ricardo, who discussed mineral deposits, and W. Stanley Jevons, who, in 1865, predicted that limits to coal reserves would ultimately halt the country’s economic growth. Within a century Jevon’s predictions of “peak coal” proved correct.

98 Data sources for the World Reserves table are the BP Statistical Review of World Energy June 2008, 45 pp., www.bp.com/statisticalreview (accessed February 12, 2009) (oil, gas, coal through 2007); and World Metals & Minerals Review 2005 (London: British Geological Survey and Metal Bulletin, 2005), 312 pp. (through 2003). Natural gas is converted to LNG (1 metric ton liquefied natural gas = 48,700 cubic feet). “Titanium” is TiO2. Platinum group includes platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium, and ruthenium. Assumed human population is 6,830,000,000 (2010 estimate, United Nations).

99 A single cubic kilometer of average crustal rock contains 200,000,000 metric tons of aluminum, 100,000,000 metric tons of iron, 800,000 metric tons of zinc, and 200,000 metric tons of copper, so mineral exhaustion in the molecular sense is meaningless. D. W. Brooks, P. W. Andrews, “Mineral Resources, Economic Growth, and World Population,” Science 185 (1974): 13-10.

100 For more on this discussion of mineral exhaustion and the perils of a fixed-stock approach to resource assessment, see John E. Tilton, On Borrowed Time? Assessing the Threat of Mineral Depletion (Washington, D.C.: RFF Press, 2002), 160 pp.

101 Matthew R. Simmons, Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 428 pp.

102 A very detailed analysis comes from the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan. The authors use the Goldman Sachs BRICs and G6 economic projections discussed in Chapter 2 to project future demand for twenty-two metals. K. Halada, M. Shimada, K. Ijima, “Forecasting of the Consumption of Metals up to 2050,” Materials Transactions 49, no. 3 (2008): 402-410.

103 J. B. Legarth, “Sustainable Metal Resource Management—the Need for Industrial Development: Efficiency Improvement Demands on Metal Resource Management to Enable a Sustainable Supply until 2050,” Journal of Cleaner Production 4, no. 2 (1996): 97-104; see also C. M. Backman, “Global Supply and Demand of Metals in the Future,” Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A, 71 (2008): 1244-1254.

104 Unconventional oil is much more difficult to extract and includes materials that are often excavated, like oil shales and tar sands, and high-viscosity oils.

105 Based on their analysis of eight hundred oil fields, including all fifty-four “supergiants” containing five billion or more barrels, the International Energy Agency estimates the world average production-weighted decline rate is currently about 6.7% for fields that have passed their production peak, rising to 8.6% decline by 2030. World Energy Outlook 2008, OECD/IEA, 578 pp.

106 U.S. Crude Oil Field Production data, U.S. Energy Information Administration, http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrfpus1&f=a (accessed March 31, 2010).

107 This paragraph drawn from remarks by James Schlesinger, p. 31, summary of the National Academies Summit on America’s Energy Future, Washington, D.C., 2008.

108 This is not to suggest that these areas aren’t or won’t be developed. Turkmenistan, one of the last and most recent countries in the Caspian Sea region to be opened to foreign hydrocarbon development, had no fewer than fifteen petroleum companies seeking to launch activities in