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Page added on April 16, 2016
Time to panic, the world is running out of (fill in the blank)
In case you missed it, the world is on the cusp of a pencil crayon shortage. As the story goes, the worldwide adult colouring book craze has spurred a run on pencils, and the companies that make them are struggling to keep up with demand. “A surge in the number of people buying adult colouring books has threatened pencil stocks worldwide,” the U.K.’s Independent newspaper blared recently.
The claim, if it isn’t already obvious, is silly. Families aren’t getting into fisticuffs with each other in the stationery aisle for that last box of Crayolas (though that would be amusing to see). Besides, a representative of Faber-Castell, the top colour-pencil maker, later assured the mindfulness masses that while it has had to boost production to keep up with demand, it is “not seeing a shortage.”
It would be easy to accuse the newspaper, and all the other media outlets that went on to report the deficit of pencils, of hyping a non-story. But the media are only selling what everyone is buying, and the pencil shortage narrative fits all too conveniently into a chronic obsession we have with the idea that the world is running out of stuff.
Call it shortage porn. In the past few years, there have been hysterical reports about the world running out of sugar, single-malt whisky, limes, Lego, oil, bananas, soybeans, coffee, wine, olive oil, avocados, chocolate, cauliflower, bacon, sriracha, water, tungsten, sand, Velveeta, Internet, and in just the last month, hops and vanilla, to name only a few.
What’s behind the insatiable appetite for panicky warnings? More importantly, just how real are these shortages?
Scarcity is a powerful psychological trigger that’s hardwired into our brains. We put far more value on things we perceive to be in short supply than those which seem to be in abundance, something that was shown in a well-known cookie jar experiment in the 1970s. Subjects consistently rated cookies in a nearly empty jar higher than cookies in a fuller jar, even though the cookies were the same.
Put another way, when faced with a potential cookie shortage, people want them even more. Those who don’t have cookies become focussed on the fact they’re missing out, and those who do, hoard them as their value rises.
But how did the world become filled with so many empty cookie jars? One reason might be that companies have perfected the shortage spiel when it suits them. Ahead of Christmas each year, a Lego shortage seems to loom. Likewise, each Super Bowl brings with it a reported crisis of chicken wing and Velveeta shortfalls. All are quintessential #FirstWorldProblems, and excellent for sales.
There’s a broader mindset around shortages that’s been happening, though. At the same time as people’s brains are sending them signals to fear scarcity, the doomsday brigade has bombarded them with warnings that the world’s population is growing too fast for the Earth to sustain it. This isn’t a new worry. Since the English economist Thomas Malthus first — and completely erroneously — warned of imminent food shortages and mass starvation in 1779, the spectre of a Malthusian resource catastrophe has resurfaced among each new generation of pessimists.
It’s with us now in the same way it was in the 1970s, when ecologist Paul Ehrlich’s books The Population Bomb and The End of Affluence captured public fears that modern society was living both beyond its means and on borrowed time. In each era, scarcity fears followed periods of affluence and abundance (the 1950s and early 1960s and then the 1990s and early 2000s) and were accompanied by profound worries about the environment, a rising cost of food as well as spikes in energy prices—which after the oil boom that lasted from 2004 to 2014 remains fresh in everyone’s minds.
So is it really a surprise that stories of global shortages hold such allure? They seem to confirm that there are just too many gluttonous humans gobbling up scarce resources and ruining everything.
Resource shortages do indeed happen when demand outstrips supply. Where we—meaning investors, consumers, politicians and the media—so often go wrong is in our belief that resource shortages will become permanent, heralding a new normal of rising prices and falling supplies.
Take the Great Helium Shortage of 2012. At the time, stories abounded that supplies of the gas were running low, and the coverage quickly devolved into tsk-tsking over wasting precious helium on birthday balloons for snotty toddlers. Yet party balloons only ever accounted for a fraction of the market—its more common usage is in computer manufacturing, MRIs, rocket fuel and nuclear reactors. In reality, the shortage was triggered by the actions of the U.S. government, which since the late 1990s had been selling off its strategic helium reserve, the largest store of helium on the planet. That flooded the market with low-priced helium, which led to increased usage. As the helium reserve dwindled, prices became more volatile and fears of a shortage began to creep up.
Today, talk of a helium shortage has largely died down, partly because the U.S. government voted in 2013 to extend the life of the helium reserve, but also because the rising price for the gas spurred development of new helium projects. Qatar has ramped up production to the point there is now a growing helium glut. (Even so, old habits die hard—organizers of the Surrey Vaisakhi Parade this month in B.C., banned balloons, citing the helium shortage.)
Helium is one thing, but oil is an ever better example of how quickly a seemingly permanent shortage can quickly transform into overabundance. Peak Oil panic reached a fever pitch last decade as soaring demand from a rapidly industrializing China collided with dwindling oil output. Proponents of peak oil theory argued the world had reached its point of maximum oil production and that supplies could only decline. As oil soared to US$140 a barrel in 2008, many warned it was headed for $200 or even $300.
While almost no one saw the eventual oil crash coming, it really shouldn’t have arrived as a shock. As Daniel Yergin, an energy analyst and author, has noted, “Technology responds to need and to price,” and that’s exactly what happened with oil. Soaring prices sparked a fresh wave of investment and innovation in oil and gas that led to new discoveries and drilling techniques to unlock reserves previously thought unviable. But the technological revolution spurred by expensive oil extended well beyond the petroleum sector, to solar, to energy storage, and to a little company called Tesla that, whether it ultimately succeeds or fails, has pulled back the curtain on a world where the internal combustion engine may no longer dominate.
Of course, the prolonged crash in oil prices is once again leading the industry to retrench. Wells are being abandoned, energy companies are shutting down or being consolidated, and predictions abound that OPEC is dead or that this oil glut is now semi-permanent. Oh, and truck sales are booming and Americans are hitting the road in droves. Meaning supply and demand are once again responding to price, as they always have, as they always will.
This is the economic cycle in progress—one decade’s shortage becomes the next decade’s glut and so on. It’s always hard to keep perspective. So whether it’s because we like to revel in seeing others scolded for their greedy ways, or because they appeal to our apocalyptic tendencies in this era of global warming, you can expect stories of shortages to keep on coming. There’s clearly a demand.
19 Comments on "Time to panic, the world is running out of (fill in the blank)"
onlooker on Sat, 16th Apr 2016 11:06 am
what a bunch of crap, pardon the french. This article is a perfect example of the Deniers just refusing to accept that we are fast reaching different crisis. It says it is a cycle and that it is about simply satiating demand for doom and that in reality doom is just a passing fad. Yes rights and planet X is right there over yonder ready to be exploited once we have finished exploiting Earth.
peakyeast on Sat, 16th Apr 2016 11:08 am
Oh – yet another who combines cherrypicking and cyclopian perspective into a piece of einsteinian stupidity.
Dredd on Sat, 16th Apr 2016 11:36 am
Time to panic, the world is running out of (Sanity)
dubya on Sat, 16th Apr 2016 12:42 pm
Theory: 0.001%er who owns newspaper suggests running trivial ‘toilet paper’ and ‘pencil crayon’ shortage articles as often as possible so that anytime I accidentally come across an actual resource deletion article I dismiss it as just another ridiculous over-reaction.
Like the ‘coffee good’ : ‘coffee bad’ articles. Scientists keep changing their mind, what makes me think they have any clue about filling the world with endocrine disrupters. Yum, PBDE.
Apneaman on Sat, 16th Apr 2016 1:07 pm
Shortage porn the one size fits all straw-man. Incorporate/hide/conflate two important resources in a list of a bunch of nice to have, but not essential commodities then start your argument as if they are all equal. (essential, so as not to cause a die back)
Except for oil and water, the rest of his list is stuff that only affluent spoiled westerns get to define as needs. We could lose all of the things on his list except the oil and water and no one would die or suffer. What about the shortage of antibiotics that are effective? People have been dying for a number of years now because of resistance and the numbers are growing.
There is a much more “powerful psychological” trigger that’s hard-wired into our brains than his scarcity example. It’s called the optimism bias. It’s the go to balm for all ape fears including existential ones.
How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v14/n11/full/nn.2949.html
Optimism is part of apes reward seeking strategy. Most people, if they weren’t hard wired with an optimism bias, would not take many risks. In fact, folks who are clinically depressed have essentially lost their optimism bias. Probably why some can’t even get out of bed. Some mild and moderately depressed people often have a more realistic perception of their chances at obtaining rewards and goals and are more accurate at risk analysis. Depressive realism they call it. Optimism has been a successful evolutionary strategy……except when combined with that other evolutionary strategy, short termism, it’s suicidal for techno industrial carbon civilization. Good advantage on the individual level. Our brains are basically the same as they have been for the last 70,000 years, but our technological evolution has grown by orders of magnitude. It’s a deadly mismatch.
The optimism bias is so powerful that just sitting there thinking about the possibility of obtaining rewards will cause dopamine to squirt.
“Dopamine is not about pleasure, it’s about the anticipation of pleasure.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axrywDP9Ii0
Outcast_Searcher on Sat, 16th Apr 2016 1:17 pm
Gee, I’m so surprised by the typical response of the doomer crowd.
Heaven forbid anyone point out logic, history, trends, or numbers, which interfere with the “let’s all panic constantly” meme the doomers love to spread.
It’s not that we have no resource problems. It’s not that BAU growth can mindlessly continue forever.
But the “let’s panic EVERY DAY” meme of the doomers gets pretty old and pretty silly after, say, several years or especially decades or even centuries — to all but the doomers. (They’re as deeply wedded to their meme as AGW deniers are to theirs — sad, really).
Bob Owens on Sat, 16th Apr 2016 1:20 pm
Legacy oil fields are declining at 4-6% a year. We have not found more oil than we have withdrawn since the 70s. Even with oil at $100 a barrel we were just able to maintain production. These are the facts. Project the decline rate forward 20 years to get a good idea of where we will be in the future. Yes, people over-react to many shortages but the oil shortage is real and coming to your town soon.
Boat on Sat, 16th Apr 2016 1:31 pm
Bob,
“Legacy oil fields are declining at 4-6% a year. We have not found more oil than we have withdrawn since the 70s. Even with oil at $100 a barrel we were just able to maintain production”
World oil production blew by demand. This is why there is a glut.
Apneaman on Sat, 16th Apr 2016 2:19 pm
Outcast_Searcher more whining from you. You know bitching and moaning is not an argument? Look through your own comment history if you want to see a pattern. You say the same basic whining against doomers comment almost every time. Why not tell someone to fuck off or something? Spice it up a little for christ sakes. Anything but your cookie cutter sissy crying again.
Anonymous on Sat, 16th Apr 2016 2:27 pm
I haven’t seen one of the ‘hysterical reports’ of any of those items ‘running out’. I must of missed, well, pretty much all of them. Interesting to note the bulk of the items, are food related. Now, all of those things are available as that idiotic article points, out, but food, including a lot of those items again, have gone up in price pretty significantly of late. Oil’s price is being manipulated by the uSraelis as part of its endless war v Russia\Iran. ‘Running’ out never entered into that equation either.
The End of Affluence captured public fears that modern society was living both beyond its means and on borrowed time
What has changed then and now-nothing? Except for the doubling of the population, yea we did that. The farticle skates around this entirely by prefacing it with the word ‘modern’. Over half the current bloated population of the planet has no access to the ‘modern’ way of life. The relatively small sliver that does, maintains its high cost lifestyle, by taking the resources from those that dont. And so on. We Do live beyond our means, and time is not our side. Many of the problems predicted in the 60-70s are here now, including some that were not, and they are getting worse-not better.
Macleans is a moron 1%er mass-market propaganda rag. The paper its printed on(that ends up in the trash), is worth more than 99.9% of its articles.
onlooker on Sat, 16th Apr 2016 4:18 pm
Yep, it is about a relatively minority percentage %20 or so of the world population doing incommensurate damage to the Earth. So, we can live our “modern” lifestyles. I, for one recognize it. To recognize it is to be halfway along the road to not be a hypocrite. I wish I could have gone the other half and live in some idyllic house on the prairie setting off grid. I have not. My bad. But I do not pretend to assail or scold the masses of the third world for doing something as automatic as breathing when they reproduce. Especially given that the means to prevent pregnancy is not so simple, affordable or accessible for them.
makati1 on Sat, 16th Apr 2016 6:08 pm
Onlooker, again, I agree with your thoughts. We are running out of everything, and calling moonshine “oil” is just another lie we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night. By “we” I mean the deniers, not myself. Reality is a mean bitch best confronted now so you can cope and prepare.
For Americans, it is ALWAYS someone else who is causing the problem, consuming the goods, starting the fight, never themselves and their insane government leaders. I blame the sheeple only because they have the ability to change it but won’t even try. That spells their end, one way or another.
I do not blame the 3rd world, because, as you said, most do not have control over pregnancy. They still live in a world where having a lot of kids is an insurance policy that some of them will live to support the parents in their old age. Westerners do not realize that the 3rd world does not have all the social safety nets that the West has. But, those safety nets are shredding as we type and the Westerners are soon going to be living a 3rd world life style. Then we shall see who blames whom.
But, I’m preaching to the choir. Keep up the good work and trying to educate the narrow minded here. I’ve written of some and they are ignored. I wish I could send you some heat for your cool Spring. It has been in the upper 90s here for the last two weeks.
Go Speed Racer on Sat, 16th Apr 2016 8:03 pm
Sick article. Written by retards, for retards. Far too stupid to understand the rarity of Helium gas, it’s immense value, and the impossibility of manufacturing it. Fat stupid lazy pig Christian Americans who want to fill up their party balloons with Helium and eat shitty Costco birthday cake and fart and pray to Donald Trump. Just how does Donald Trump make America great again? Put all the fat Americans on a diet? Send them to remedial math? Stop them from reading articles as stupid as this one?
peakyeast on Sun, 17th Apr 2016 3:14 am
Its funny to note that Outcast_searcher thinks its better to criticize the other commenters that to comment on the article – year after year. 🙂
… and a little sad…
dooma on Sun, 17th Apr 2016 4:25 am
Go Speed Racer Go, tell em’ what you really think lol
Thanks for the Sunday laugh. I always enjoy the wit in your posts….
Kenz300 on Sun, 17th Apr 2016 8:09 am
Too many people……….create too much pollution and demand too many resources….
China made great progress in moving its people out of poverty…….one reason was slowing population growth…..
If you can not provide for yourself you can not provide for a child.
CLIMATE CHANGE, declining fish stocks, droughts, floods, air water and land pollution, poverty, water and food shortages all stem from the worlds worst environmental problem……. OVER POPULATION.
Yet the world adds 80 million more mouths to feed, clothe, house and provide energy and water for every year… this is unsustainable… and is a big part of the Climate Change problem
Birth Control Permanent Methods: Learn About Effectiveness
http://www.emedicinehealth.com/birth_control_permanent_methods/article_em.htm
joe on Sun, 17th Apr 2016 8:14 am
How is it that these articles seem to say fracking is the answer. Fraking tight oil is supposed to be in the fuller peak oil model at the top where easy oil supply drops and tight oil is economic to extract. Its all well and good to say oil is abundant, as it is, but its use is dropping. At 40dollars a barrel we have islamic extremists states joining their sworn enemies to make new oil cartels.
That tells me all I need to know about the future of low prices for oil.
bug on Sun, 17th Apr 2016 9:48 am
Go speed describes the vast majority of
the American populous to perfection.
Go Speed Racer on Sun, 17th Apr 2016 4:52 pm
Hi dooma and bug, thanks your approvals. I was on a roll. Pun intended. I just here to make some noise. Once in awhile I am scientifically serious. Most of the time just humor-sarcasm. I like everybody else’s posts too. And this chat board has a lot of leads to good info.