What to Do When the Oil (or the Innovation) Is Gone?

WITH global economic growth near its fastest pace in decades, is there a chance that we’ll finally run out of the resources we need? Oil, copper and even people will someday be noticeably scarcer than they are today, and technology may not always provide a way out.

“Being sensible people, we can say that the amount of oil, coal, shale, gas is finite,” he said. “Do we know how much there is down there? The plain answer is, nobody has any idea.” There are a couple of areas, however, where scarcity is more predictable. “The long-run scarcities are for human labor and land,” said Peter H. Lindert, a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis. He said their value, in terms of goods and services, would continue to rise forever.

nytimes