“Minerals are inexhaustible and will never be depleted. A stream of investment creates additions to proved reserves, a very large in-ground inventory, constantly renewed as it is extracted… How much was in the ground at the start and how much will be left at the end are unknown and irrelevant… There are plenty of fossil fuels and no limit to potential electrical capacity. It is all a matter of money.”
— M. A. Adelman, 1993
“…the world can, in effect, get along without natural resources… at some finite cost, production can be freed of dependence on exhaustible resources altogether.”
— Nobel winner Robert Solow, 1974
The economic unit of measure is “price” — which is a “transitory effect” — not a “cause.” For example, a dollar’s worth of oil today will not be a dollar’s worth of oil tomorrow
- Jay Hanson
The flow of energy through the economy is not dependent on the flow of money; in fact the exact opposite. Money (an abstract concept) is a reverse flow on energy throughput in an economy and dependent on that energy.
Its therefore not possible to invest our way out of a net energy crisis.