Dennis Meadows: Collapse inevitable 2015-2020

[Benton D Struckcheon]

16. The problem with that argument is...

...for it to be correct, you, once again, would need to see a sustained rise in commodity prices caused by having to use extraordinary means to push production past that sustainable level. Fracking, we know, is way more expensive than conventional drilling, and probably more damaging. But it's not worldwide; it's confined only to the US, and the effect of it on price is confined to the US. The rest of the world is mostly still using conventional means to extract oil and gas.
Once again, this theory posits GLOBAL effects on ALL commodities. The fact that for a couple of commodities in a single country some fraction of those are being extracted by an extraordinary and expensive process does not prove the point.
For it to be correct, you'd have to see extraordinarily expensive processes having to be used and the expense of that causing large numbers to be priced out of being able to use the commodities being extracted by those processes, causing a sharp rise in poverty and more than likely the kind of mass conflict and brutal dictatorship we saw in the first half of the twentieth century.
None of which is happening.