A few days ago, I sent a comment to a blog where the author had cited the "abiotic oil" hypothesis by Thomas Gold. He had read Gold's book "The Deep, Hot Biosphere" and, not being an expert in the matter, had believed that Gold's ideas were correct and that the author had been unjustly ignored by the scientific community and by the oil industry.
In my comment, I briefly discussed the matter and cited an article that I had written together with other authors where we discussed Gold's ideas, showing that they are incompatible with what we know about the geosphere and the processes of formation of fossil hydrocarbons.
Some of the commenters seemed to be completely clueless about the matter, and that was already worrisome. But the surprising thing was that one of the answers I received was that I should avoid discussing political issues such as "peak oil" in a scientific discussion.
So, after 20 years of scientific studies on the concept of oil depletion -- in itself a necessary consequence of the fact that oil resources are finite -- the idea of "peak oil" has been transmogrified into a political slogan that has no place in a serious discussion.
And that's not just the case of peak oil. Try to mention "mineral depletion" in any discussion about the current economic situation, and you'll be treated like a slightly feebleminded person who is completely out of touch with reality. Our problems, right now, are completely different as everyone sane in his/her mind knows.
It seems that we humans can't balance several problems at once. We tend to focus on one, at most two, but then the other problems are forgotten or ignored. An often-cited example is the crash of the United Airlines Flight 173 in 1978, when the crew focused so much on a problem with the landing gear that nobody remembered to check the fuel level. It happens more often in politics, where it is typical that slogans and media campaigns lead the public to concentrate on a single problem and forget all others. A good example is when the Bush administration became focused on invading Iraq, in 2003.
We could call this phenomenon the "tunnel vision problem." Maybe we can find the best description in a novel by Kurt Vonnegut, "Slaughterhouse Five" (1969) where one of the Tralfamadorian aliens describes how Earthlings perceive the world:
The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.And so it goes (another citation from Slaughterhouse Five). We are condemned to look at the world through a narrow pipe while we are hurled onward on a flatcar on rails and we don't know where we are going.
"This was only the beginning of Billy's miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, and there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the little dot at the end of the pipe. He didn't know he was on a flatcar, didn't even know there was anything peculiar about his situation.
Dear Madam, Sir,
Hereby I send you, as a senior scientist in the field of the sustainable use of raw materials, a recent publication with my main findings on the scarcity of raw materials. The article was published in Resources, Conservation & Recycling in February 2021 and is entitled “Scarce mineral resources: extraction, consumption and limits of sustainability”.
The main conclusions are:
- That immediate implementation of the most stringent resource-saving measures could extend the estimated exhaustion periods of raw materials by a factor four, even while simultaneously increasing the global service level of these resources by a factor four as well.
- That, without sufficient resource saving measures, it will be difficult or impossible for a substantial part of the future world population to attain the servicelevel of mineral resources prevailing in developed countries at this moment.
- That the period of time that future citizens of rich countries can continue enjoying the current servicelevel of some of the scarcest mineral resources in their countries, will be severely limited, if no stringent saving measures will be taken.
I am also the author of a book entitled “Governance of the world’s mineral resources. Beyond the foreseeable future”. This book will be published later in 2021 by Elsevier (ISBN 9780128238868). In the book, detailed attention will be paid to the following 13 relatively scarce resources: antimony, bismuth, boron, chromium, copper, gold, indium, molybdenum, nickel, silver, tin, tungsten, zinc.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please let me know
Yours sincerely,
Dr. M.L.C.M. Henckens (Theo)
Senior Research Fellow at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development of Utrecht University, The Netherlands