Collapse: What’s Happening to our Chances?

[Benton D Struckcheon]

13. Progress is the only thing that works.

It's the reason we still have forests. If we were all still dependent on wood for energy, well, there'd be no wood left.
Same story with any resource you care to name.
Commodity prices are famously volatile, and the reason is that commodities can be substituted: to take another example, these days pvc pipes can substitute for copper.
Like it or not, we're all on this treadmill called progress. The only way out is to continue, via cheap renewables in energy, recycling to eliminate toxic pollution by our garbage, and so on. What these kinds of articles do is to allow for lazy complacency, and a pseudo-intellectual gloss over a discredited Malthusian theory.
If Malthus had ever been right, commodity prices would have gone through the roof as we used them all up. But they haven't. The only one with a real return after inflation is oil, and that's because oil has a ton of uses other than just being burned for energy. Someone said it's so valuable that burning it for energy shouldn't even be allowed, and I tend to agree.