Potemkin wrote:If any of the necessary factors of production are no longer available, then yes. The economy would collapse and there would likely be a mass die-off. What’s your point?
That is a good question.
I suppose that I have a few things to say on that.
1] Exponential growth will always have to end someday. Exponential growth means there is always a doubling time of use or growth. A bank acc. can grow without limit if it is in a fiat currency, because the Gov. can never run out of zeros to add to accounts.
. . . OTOH, the economy needs real stuff to grow. If it is growing at 3% per year the doubling time is just 24 years, rounding to 25 is OK. So, the world will all at the same time run out of some critical resource, like oil and gas. Doubling the amount in the ground that we can extract only puts that someday off by 24 years. Doubling it again only puts that someday off by another 25 years. Four times more oil and gas to extract only delays that day by 50 years.
2] Economists have ignored the above facts. They have driven us toward the cliff at a speed that grows at about 3%/yr. As a result the world population has reached 8 billion. There is no way that there are enough metal ores in the ground for us to replace oil and gas with electric cars and everything else for just 2 billion people who live like Europeans or 1 billion living like Americans. And, it would take a few to several decades to extract all the ore and refine the metal.
3] The economists and the capitalists & opinion makers who listened to the economists ought to be held responsible for the mess we are in. It is regrettable that our system will not punish them. Maybe karma will do it for us.
4] Some experts think that we passed peak oil in 2018. So, by 2030 oil prices will be increasing rapidly to pay extra to extract the more expensive oil and there will be less of it. There will be a bidding war or real war to decide who gets to burn the oil.
. . . I predict that by 2050 the oil extracted each day will seem like a trickle compared to the demand. So, 90% will get none, and 10% will get much less than an average European does now.
5] So, billions will die. This is the result of not stopping exponential growth 50 years ago. Remember, exponential use of a finite resource must always end. And having 4 times more just delays the end by 2 doubling times or in this case by 50 years.
BTW -- miming of metal ores always creates waste that ends up releasing poison into the environment. Doing this very fast to meet the demand will poison the world.