Wieder einmal eine Kostprobe Beasly und Widdowson; Thema: knappe Ressourcen

Geschrieben von Andreas am 18. Mai 2003 21:56:24:

Ich find die beiden echt gut. Man möge mir meine Wiederholungen und Namensnennungen verzeihen.
Aus einem Newsletter:


THE COMING DARK AGE
Newsletter
April, 2003

1. INTRODUCTION
Many people who hear I am writing about the coming dark age tell me
that the basic problem is that the world is running out of natural
resources. They say that I must pay attention to that. Therefore this
issue of the coming dark age newsletter looks at natural resources and
the problem of future shortages. I welcome comments, suggestions and contributions. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested.
Marc Widdowson

2. THE EHRLICH-SIMON BET
The ecologist Paul Ehrlich has long been predicting that modern
technological civilisation will culminate in an environmental
catastrophe, and has said that a major part of this will be desperate
shortages of the raw materials on which technology depends. He has
pointed out that oil is finite for example, while the ores of many
minerals are increasingly difficult to work as the richest mines have
been exhausted long ago. However, the late economist Julian Simon argued that Ehrlich was wrong. He said that scarcity of raw materials never has been and never will be an obstacle to human development. Simon and Ehrlich decided to put their disagreement to the test by means a bet. See here for a full account:
http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/People/julian_simon.html. Basically,
Ehrlich was allowed to pick five metals that he thought would be more
expensive in ten years time due to their increasing scarcity. If they
were indeed more expensive, he would win. If their prices had fallen,
as Simon predicted, Simon would win. The upshot was that Simon won convincingly.
The price of the metals fell, indicating that they had become less
scarce not more scarce over the intervening period. How could this be? The answer relates to what Simon called "the ultimate resource"-i.e. human ingenuity. Take copper, which was one of the metals picked out by Ehrlich. Copper is heavily used in telephone wires, and as the world became
increasingly telephonised in the mid-twentieth century, the demand for
copper grew immensely. Analysts like Ehrlich projected the trends
forward, and thereby predicted that the growth in demand would soon
outrun the supply, creating a huge crunch and a world crisis.
Then someone invented the mobile phone:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2963619.stm. This is not to mention
satellite communications, microwave transmission and fibre optic cable.
These technologies are not only far more efficient at carrying
telephone calls, but they also use far less resources-and no wire means
no copper. So the bottom dropped out of the copper market.
Around the end of the nineteenth century, the English economist W S
Jevons predicted that industrial society would break down by the year
2000 because of the exhaustion of coal reserves. In fact, over the last
few decades, England has been closing down its mines because nobody
wants the coal they could produce. Jevons got it wrong for much the
same reasons as Ehrlich got the price of copper wrong.
So today when people predict imminent disaster because of the
exhaustion of the oil wells or other mineral resources, they ought to
think for a moment about Jevons and Ehrlich. They ought to be sure that
they are not overlooking the 'ultimate resource' and the possibility of
future technological developments that will make their calculations
completely irrelevant.

3. HOWEVER.
On the other hand, the ultimate resource is something that itself
becomes scarce in a declining civilisation. Technological development
stagnates. People find that life is comfortable enough and they have no
motivation to change. Vested interests obstruct new discoveries that
might ruin their megabucks industries. Even though it was an American that invented the transistor, for instance, American companies declined to license the patent. That would have meant throwing away their existing product lines, designing new wares and retooling their manufacturing plants. They didn't want to do that. So instead the transistor patent was licensed by the Tokyo
Telecommunications Engineering Company, which was starting from scratch
like the rest of post-war Japan. It produced the first transistor
radio, and in 1958 changed its name to the Sony Corporation. (This is
an example of the Phoenix Principle, by the way.)
It is for these reasons that our society will seem to run out of
resources. Future historians may say that western civilisation
collapsed because the oil was all used up. But the truth is that lack
of oil only became a problem because our society was already sick and
rotten. We didn't create the opportunities that would have meant we
didn't need to rely on oil any more. If we were still a half-decent civilisation, we would by now have invented marvellous new technologies that made the internal combustion engine as crude and outmoded as the horse and cart. We haven't, and somehow I don't think we will. It will have to wait until after the coming dark age


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