Resource depletion

DEFINITION: Consumption of a resource faster than new supplies of that resource can be found or faster than it can naturally be replenished

With the global population approaching 7 billion people during the early twenty-first century, the demand for higher living standards worldwide has accelerated resource depletion. In addition, modern technology has become dependent on a large number of scarce metal resources with rapidly dwindling known reserves.

Throughout history, humans have exploited resources until the resources have been used up. The discovery of the Americas by Europeans at the end of the fifteenth century began an unprecedented and unsustainable harvesting of natural resources that persisted for five centuries. During this period, vast stands of virgin timber were cut and large numbers of animals were slaughtered for pelts, trophies, and food. For centuries, human beings found new sources of various commodities when they had depleted known existing sources. European countries depended on obtaining supplies of scarce resources from African and Asian colonies during the Industrial Revolution, for example; this access to cheap raw materials waned rapidly after World War II, however.

Worldwide population growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries spurred waves of immigrants to the Western Hemisphere and accelerated resource consumption around the world. Demand for higher standards of living worldwide, along with technological advances and the availability of cheap energy, accelerated resource exploitation.

By the twenty-first century, the developed countries, with their increasing reliance on high technology, had become vulnerable to exploitative limits on specific metals needed to maintain and expand their current standards of living. Certain commodities, such as clean drinking water, had come to be viewed as basic rights of citizens, with needs to be met by governments. (In many emerging countries, clean drinking water had yet to be achieved.) Access to readily available sources of cheap natural gas, fuel oil, gasoline, and electricity were also viewed as necessities, and costs of energy were subsidized by governments in both developed and developing countries.

When the cost of a commodity drops below its production price, exploitation of that resource ceases, unless a government or organization subsidizes continued production costs. Resource exploitation has always been labor-intensive. The advent of mechanization in the nineteenth century began reducing labor costs, and the availability of cheap energy from fossil fuels allowed greater exploitation of ever-dwindling resources to be profitable.

At times in history, resource exploitation has responded to paradigm shifts. When the cost of production, in nonmonetary value, exceeds what a society deems acceptable, a resource may no longer be exploited, or limits may be set on how much of the resource may be taken over a specified time period. The nonmonetary values of certain resources became increasingly important during the twentieth century, after developed countries had achieved relatively high standards of living. World exploitation of carbon-based fossil fuels may be significantly reduced over the course of the twenty-first century, as global consensus builds that emissions pose a significant to future generations.

After World War II speculation began regarding how long diminishing supplies of essential minerals, metals, petroleum, and other nonrenewable sources of energy would last. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, many poor nations had begun to use their reserves of useful minerals to improve their standards of living by encouraging infrastructure investment rather than exporting raw materials to developed countries. Some of these useful minerals are limited in supply and are also needed by developed nations to maintain certain technologies equated with high standards of living. Future gains in living standards may be limited by real scarcity, or by nations deliberately denying access to raw materials.

Plant and Animal Resources

Although plants and animals are usually considered renewable resources, individual species of plants and animals can be consumed or otherwise destroyed faster than they can be naturally replaced. Lumbering practices of the past, such as clear-cutting, have permanently destroyed natural environments worldwide. When all the trees in an area of forest are cut down, the wildlife is also destroyed, and soil follows rapidly. When rivers become laden with sediment from eroded soil, riverine ecosystems are destroyed, and fishing industries are eliminated. The depletion of forest resources is accompanied by the depletion of the resources of adjacent ecosystems.

The growth in the numbers of bird and animal species considered to be endangered, along with the increasing numbers of species extinctions, shows that animal populations are often depleted. Attempts to place limits on fish catches have generally proved ineffective worldwide. It has been estimated that 75 percent of Earth’s fish stocks are either fully exploited or overexploited. Overfishing for cod off the North American coast near Newfoundland depleted this resource; in 1992, no cod appeared at the start of the season.

Public concerns about endangered animal species often focus on “iconic” animals, such as elephants. In 1930, there were about 10 million African elephants. Then they were slaughtered for their ivory tusks prior to the international ban on the ivory trade signed by more than one hundred nations in 1990. By 2016, only about 111,000 remained. This number had risen to 415,000 by 2024, but poaching continued in spite of the ban.

Fossil Fuels

The high standard of living in developed countries has been achieved in large part because of the cheap cost of energy in the twentieth century. During the late twentieth century, periods of artificial scarcity of caused global political concerns. Coal, natural gas, and oil were readily available worldwide, however, and production costs remained small for these fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has estimated that petroleum production will peak in 2020. Some estimates suggest that proven oil reserves may last until 2060; the exploitation of as-yet unproven and prospective reserves and unconventional sources could extend supplies considerably. New techniques for drilling and oil recovery continue to increase oil production from older oil fields.(Large oil fields may produce more than 50 billion barrels of oil over their exploitable lifetimes. Estimated reserves increase after a field has been in production for a while.)

Known reserves are expected to last into the twenty-second century, but supplies of petroleum and natural gas will be exhausted sooner if rates of consumption do not decrease. Because the burning of cheap fossil fuels has led to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, limits to carbon consumption may be set by governments and by international agreements at some future time. (Developing countries argued at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in late 2009 that they should not be required to limit their “carbon footprint.”)

Eventually, biofuels may replace petroleum. Ethanol, which is most often derived from corn, has been determined to be a costly alternative to gasoline in the United States, but biodiesel continues to be investigated. “Sidestream products” from production have considerable value.

Some developed countries have opted to construct nuclear reactors to supply the energy they need. The member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) produce about 300 gigawatts of energy from nuclear reactors, enough to meet about 25 percent of these nations’ demand for electricity. France and Sweden are among the nations that obtain more than half their electricity from nuclear power plants.

Elements Essential to High Technology

Most modern electronic devices, including computers and cell phones, use an array of scarce metals, including lithium, tantalum, indium, platinum, and rare earth elements. Demand for these scarce metals has accelerated along with increasing demand for green technologies, and shortages may limit the production of clean energy.

Indium and gallium are essential components in light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and flat-screen displays, and in the construction of solar panels. Commercially obtained as by-products of zinc mining, both metals are thought to have limited reserves; it is estimated that about 6,000 tons of indium exist on the earth, and about 1 million tons of gallium. Unless more deposits are found or alternatives to these metals are developed, the ability to produce solar panels will be limited.

The developed countries need lithium for lightweight car batteries if electric vehicles are to become viable in the long term. The largest known supply of lithium (more than 73 million tons) is in Bolivia, which has resisted exporting raw materials to Japan, the United States and Europe, preferring to attract infrastructure investment so that Bolivia can exploit the lithium itself. Lithium mines are in operation in Chile and Argentina, and much smaller deposits have been found in Tibet and Canada; exploration for the metal is ongoing.

Tantalum is an element necessary for the high-resistance capacitors used in cell phones, personal computers, and automobile electronics. It is mined in Australia, Brazil, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It has been alleged that the mining of tantalum ore (columbite-tantalite, or coltan) in the Congo endangers elephants, lowland gorillas, and other wildlife, and provides funds for the ongoing civil war there. Tantalum ore deposits are also known to exist in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Estimates of known tantalum reserves are in the region of 40 million kilograms (44,000 tons); in 2023 about 25 to 30 percent of the tantalum being used was obtained through recycling.

Rare earth elements are used for catalysts, ceramics, magnets, electronics, and in the chemical industry. Exploitable rare earth deposits (largely from the monazite) are known to exist in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Australia, India, South Africa, Russia, Vietnam, and China. By the early twenty-first century, about 95 percent of commercially available rare earth elements were derived from China. On September 1, 2009, China set a limit on the export of rare earths at 35,000 tons per year for the next five years. This limit was set to encourage foreign companies to produce high-technology items in China. On December 21, 2023, China announced a ban on the technology used to extract and separate rare earth elements, which means foreign countries would have to create their own methods of doing this.

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