The Latest Environmental Shrieking - We're Gonna Run Out Of Rock

No, really, real reports are claiming this

I do keep a wary eye on the wilder environmental loons simply because they fascinate me. The ability to believe entire gargling nonsense is strong in the sector - as with this particular claim that we’re going to run out of rock. Therefore we should all be poor right now.

Some environmental claims are not just perfectly valid they’re essential for the continuation of life at any level above E. Coli. None of us would want the Thames to return to the state of 1950 when there was nothing living in it other than a collection of that E. Coli reflecting the interesting genetic and origin mix of the population of London. Sure, the arguments from Feargal and the like that a river running through 8 million people must be clean enough to swim in at all times is a bit extreme the other way around. One recent estimate has it that to perform that task for England would cost £260 billion - a few swimming baths sounds like a more sensible use of resources than getting all the rivers sparkling all the time.

Some are more arguable - violent and immediate climate change would be a bad idea, losing Lowestoft below the waves (possibly Dartford too) in 2500 AD might be something we can all live with. Arguable perhaps.

But some of these claims are wholly and entirely doolally. So much so that it’s difficult to imagine that grown adults take them seriously. But, sadly, they do and they do so on our money too.

An example:

Wow. According to this research 40% of the 1.5C C02 budget could be used just for digital & internet use/infrastructure & 55% of the earths carrying capacity for minerals & metals for the same use.

The internet alone could use 55% of the Earth’s carrying capacity of metals and minerals? Well, to take that seriously is insane. That is not mere hyperbolic insult, that actually is insane. I write as someone who has written an entire book on this very subject (available here, for free, save your money to buy a subscription to this excellent Substack instead). There is no metal or mineral that we’re even going to run short of - in the technical, not economic, sense that is - for tens of millions of years yet. As the average lifetime of a species is perhaps 2 million years that should see us out.

So, clearly, they’re using some odd definition of how many minerals and metals we’ve got that we can use. I thought they’d do the usual Club of Rome thing (no, read the book to find out), confuse mineral reserves with what’s available and thus insist we all died last Tuesday afternoon. Rather to my surprise, no, they didn’t. They went further into raging lunacy.

It’s not wholly obvious as they don’t really quite announce their assumption, it’s necessary to track back a bit - and that’s a problem in itself. A top tip about scientific papers - if they say “As Bloggs said” then what that really means is that many people accept what Bloggs said as being true and also useful. You do not have to reprove Einstein every time you do physics, you can just say “As is known”. You’ve only got to reprove Al if that’s what you’re really trying to do.

Thus, if a definition is a referral back to something else, elsewhere, then you can be sure that the definition is a building block being used by others in their own papers. It’s a generalised insanity, not a specific one.

So, what is that limit?

Here we quantify the environmental impacts of digital content consumption encompassing all the necessary infrastructure linked to the consumption patterns of an average user. By applying the standardised life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology45,46, we evaluate these impacts in relation to the per capita share of the Earth’s carrying capacity using 16 indicators related to climate change, nutrients flows, air pollution, toxicity, and resources use, for which explicit thresholds that should never be exceeded were defined

Now this is in Nature Communications. So it’s science. Even, it’s Science. It’s also lunatic. For, tracking back to try to find what those “resources use” are that will be 55% used up by the internet. It’s possible to think that maybe we’re going to use too much germanium in the glass in the fibreoptic cables say, or erbium in the repeaters, or…..specific elements might be in short supply? As the book wot I wrote above points out, that’s nonsense. So, what is the claim?

Tracking back we get to this:

Resource use, mineral and metals MRD kg Sb eq Abiotic resource depletion (ADP ultimate reserves) 2.19E+08 3.18E-02 JRC calculation based on factor 2 concept Bringezu (2015); Buczko et al. (2016) Resource use

That’s from Table 3.

Which takes us one stage further back. This paper here is talking about Planetary Boundaries and as with the building block idea. PBs - I assume - make the assumption that Bringzeu, and Biczlo et al have given us a useful guide to what those PBs are. Which is why they just use their method, not invent a new one. But that, in turn, also means that other people working on PBs are likely to be using that same definition.

So, back that next level:

3.3. Aspects of a Safe-Operating-Space of Minerals Use

A sustainable use of minerals has been primarily discussed under economic considerations of “scarcity”. Barbier [43] and Daly [44] proposed management rules which meant—amongst others—that non-renewable resources should only be used to the extent that a man-made substitute can be found, in order to save natural capital. In case, natural resources would be regarded as non-substitutable by man-made capital this would logically require to minimize the use of natural resources [45]. Such goal formulations, however, were too abstract for supporting practice. Triggered by price spikes of metals in the 2000s, the “criticality” of mineral resources caught attention in the sense of short- to midterm shortages of supply and possible economic constraints resulting from the shortage [46,47]. Monitoring critical minerals should inform industry for which elements substitutes would be particularly rewarding.

Our crucial bit here:

However, the basic dependence on natural deposits will remain, the interests of conflicting land use might expand, and certification of only parts of the mineral markets might not be sufficient to control the overall magnitude of human induced mineral flows and the associated environmental-social conflict potential. Against this background, the question arises at which level it would be sensible to limit the use of mineral resources.

In order to reduce the expected burden and to mitigate uncertainties and risks, Schmidt-Bleek [56,57], already in the 1990s, proposed to follow the precautionary principle and reduce the global resource extraction (minerals and biomass) by half until 2050 and grant every person the same right to share it (by adequate final consumption of products). For industrial countries, he estimated this would imply a long-term reduction of their resource consumption by 90% (or a factor 10). The appeal was taken up by renowned scientists in the “Factor 10 Club” (F10C) [58], who state that “very large flows of resources occur naturally, either from volcanoes or land erosion or other biosphere processes. Together these flows amount to some 50 billion tons per year, although more research is required to establish a precise number”. They argued that “human induced flows of resources into the economy” should not exceed natural flows by a factor of 2 and therefore should be reduced by a factor of 2. “Assuming seven billion people on planet Earth (...) that would result in an allowance of about 6 to 8 tons per capita per year”. When devising reduction strategies fossil fuels inducing climate change should be given priority, as well as water flows in regions of critical scarcity. Since then, the number of 6 to 8 tonnes per person has appeared in various publications and appeals, still without any specification of a measurable indicator, although their definition would have drastic implications on the required reductions. Schmidt-Bleek [57] himself has been convinced that all materials moved by technology from their natural setting should be accounted for—as is the basis for the TMR indicator in the MIPS concept [59]—to represent the associated pressure of primary resource use to the environment, thus including both used and unused extraction, excavation, etc. The formulation of the F10C, “resource flows into the economy”, however, could be interpreted as if only the used extraction should be considered as a basis for the 6 to 8 tonnes per person limit, because unused extraction per definition remains outside the economy, while being somehow linked to it. In addition, the reference to 50 Gt yearly resource extraction could be interpreted in that sense, as globally used mineral and biomass extraction amounted 51 Gt in 2000. This confusion is perpetuated by publications not specifying the indicator while addressing a target value (e.g., [60]). Depending on whether only used extraction or all primary extraction is taken as a basis, the same target value would imply that the required change could more than double.

In order to assess the validity of Schmidt-Bleek’s and the F10C’s proposals, one may shortly revisit some of their basic assumptions. The transformation of the bio-geo-sphere by mankind has reached a new dimension in earth history, indeed, and therefore, the ongoing era has been addressed as the “anthropocene” [61,62]. Today, man-made resource extraction exceeds natural translocations on the earth’s crust. The sediment load of large rivers transporting eroded material to the oceans was about 15 Gt/a before human activity [63]. The greatest known eruption of a single volcano, the Tamborra in 1815, excavated 140 Gt magma (equivalent to 50 km3 solid rock); 71,000 people were killed and the summer in South-East Asia failed due to the lasting dust in the atmosphere [64]. The global average of magma production through volcanism in terrestrial systems is 27–31 Gt/a [65,66,67]. It would not seem plausible to add up magma production and erosion, as the former represents an input to formation and uprise of the continents, whereas the latter represents rather their decline and output to the oceans. Therefore, the estimate of the F10C for the natural flows seems too high, although admittedly the data basis for those estimated should be improved. As a consequence, the difference between anthropogenic and natural flows might be even higher than assumed by Schmidt-Bleek and the F10C. In 2010, only the used mineral extraction by the global economy was 52 Gt (incl. biomass 67 Gt) [68]. Including the unused extraction of mining and quarrying as well as excavation for infrastructure the total mineral extraction may be estimated to range between 135 and 150 Gt in 2010 (see below).

Note what they’re doing. Humans should not take out of that environment more than nature puts back into it each year. That’s some pretty dumb thinking there, as we don’t, when we use a metal or mineral - except in very rare circumstances - take it off planet. We move it around a bit, no more. But the claim really is that we should abstract, for use, no more than is naturally added back each year.

So, the correct limitation on our minerals use is how much magma volcanoes add each year.

No, really, humanity can use no more earth than gets thrown out of a volcano each year. That’s it. To use more would mean that we are depleting the stock and that’s not sustainable, see?

No, really, the other paper:

From an environmental perspective, the year 1970 can be taken as the baseline (Wiedenhofer, Rovenskaya, Haas, Krausmann, Irene, & Fischer-Kowalski, 2013). At that time, the average TMC at the global level was at about 45 billion tonnes, encompassing used as well as estimated unused extraction.3

In 2010, global annual extraction of used resources has already reached about 78 billion tons (SERI & WU, 2016). When adding the estimated amount of 40 billion tons of unused extraction, the result is a TMC of 118 billion tons. As an example, in 2000, an estimated 40 to 50 billion tons of soil and earth were excavated worldwide for the construction of infrastructure. An additional 25 to 50 billion tons result of eroded soils by agricultural activity, added up to a total of 145-180 billion tons of primary material that is taken from the environment (Bringezu, 2014).

Following the precautionary principle, a global TMC of 45 billion tonnes, or five tonnes per capita, completed by socioeconomic indicators would allow for avoiding the exceeding of the planetary boundaries – taking into consideration the need for further differentiation into sub-categories or along regional circumstances. Generally speaking, this would mean a reduction in material consumption by a factor 2 at the global level and by a factor 10 for the industrialized countries (Stricks, Hinterberger, & Moussa, 2015).

These people are insane. The limit on the amount of the Earth that humans may use is the amount that volcanoes add back in each year. This isn’t just insane it’s fruitloop doolally.

Just to remind. That lithosphere, the top bit of the Earth above the magma, is “The lithosphere consists of sediments and crystalline rocks with a total mass of 23,000–24,000 × 1015 metric tons.” They’re worrying about us using - note, using, not consuming, we only move it about a bit other than that bit Elon sends up into space - 100 billion tonnes. 100x 109 metric tonnes. So, that’s 240 106 years (it is possible that I’ve lost or gained zeroes there) that we can do this for. Without whatever it is that volcanoes add to the system.

That’s, umm 240 million years. To avoid us using up our precious natural resources at that hideously fast rate we must instead recycle absolutely everything and make ourselves grossly poorer by doing so.

Sigh. Worstall’s Acuity says that if someone’s talking bullshit to us on one subject we know about then they’ll also be talking bullshit on the things we don’t know about. Therefore I’m consigning the entire idea of Planetary Boundaries over to the insane, fruitloop doolally, column.

For they’re insisting that we must mend our wasteful ways because we might run out of rock in a quarter of a billion years.

This is modern science is it? How did we get to anyone listening to morons like this? Rather more, how do we stop them?