Four crucial resources that may run out in your lifetime

We’re living in lucky times. Living standards – in the Western world, at least – are the highest in history. It’s an era of relative peace and plenty that would amaze our ancestors. But it’s not going to continue forever; we’re already stretching many of our natural resources to their limits, and the world’s population will jump from 6.5 billion to around 9 billion over the next 50 years. Get ready for a painful correction – here are four interconnected resources that are headed for a catastrophic squeeze within our lifetime.

Oil

The modern world is built on oil. It powers transport, construction, manufacturing, food production – our entire economy. The sky-high living standards and widespread disconnection from manual labor that we enjoy today is all thanks to the Industrial Revolution of the early 1900s, and it’s based on cheap, accessible oil.

The Peak Oil theory, if you haven’t already encountered it, suggests that oil production for a given reserve will follow a bell curve. Production for the reserve will rise to a peak, and then begin declining due to the fact that as levels get lower, it becomes more expensive to retrieve, ending up at a point where you have to put more energy into sucking up and refining the oil than you get out of using it. The theory is said to hold whether you’re talking about an individual oil well, an entire oil field or the entire global oil reserve – and once the peak is passed, the decline in production is said to be as sharp as the rise toward the peak was.

Gizmag