If you find yourself with a spare half an hour today, do yourself a favour and listen to the below half-hour interview with investment great Jeremy Grantham. In this interview with the BBC, entitled Managing progress in a world of finite resources, Grantham discusses the limits of exponential growth in a finite world, looming energy shortages and what it means for commodity markets, problems with measuring economic progress using gross domestic product (GDP), declining productivity, and a wide range of other interesting topics.
Click for audio
Source: BBC
unconventionaleconomist@hotmail.com
A download link for listening on an iPhone/iPod or media player would be nice.
Here it is:
Download/listen
There you go then.
Comments not working?
What the?
Oh well…
If you want to scare the crap out of yourself:
Open Wikipedia’s article on coal.
Open Excel
Copy the known global reserves in.
Copy the last X years production in.
Calculate the average % growth in production.
Calculate next years reserves by deducting next years projected production.
Drag the cells across until there is no coal left.
Now place a year above this year, and drag that across until you see when we’re truly screwed.
Why?
Steel is the foundation of every major piece of infrastructure and plant that we make. Steel requires coal to produce.
No coal = no steel = no civilisation as we know it.
Last I checked, it was 2052.
If you were running a mining company would you spend shareholders’ money exploring to find reserves that you did not intend to mine till 2052?
“In our own back yard, in the Latrobe Valley, the demonstrated brown coal reserve is about 40 billion tonnes, representing about 5% of the global reserve. But the inferred resource is estimated at a staggering 100 billion tonnes, some or all of which could conceivably become economic at some future time.
That is a truly phenomenal amount of coal. At the current production rates of around 70 million tonnes per year there is enough coal in the Latrobe for 1500 years.”
Who knows, one day it may even be economically viable.
http://theconversation.edu.au/if-you-think-king-coal-is-dead-think-again-8100
May even be technologically viable too!
“Of course, mining it all would turn the entire valley into a 100m deep pit, some 15kms wide and extending over 70kms from Moe in the west, eastwards to beyond Sale.”
Now that’s a Super Pit.