I've always been a sort of mining hobbyist. Just thinking things through with the course we're on switching to electric cars and decarbonization.
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So John D. Rockefeller articulated our economic foreign policy a hundred years ago: USE THEIRS FIRST
This is the rational approach to ending up as "King of the Hill" economically. It has been the ultimate aim of all Imperialism. As early as the Napoleonic Wars, this was the British foreign policy as well. Napoleon was for a while the British Stooge for eliminating the competition. But like many other grand FooBah stooges, he got too big for his britches and started nipping at the puppetmaster's gloved hand. Even on St. Helena, the British sought to re-employ him if he would mind his master. The movie [I]Eagle in a Cage[/I] [URL]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_in_a_Cage[/URL]. At any rate, for the British, his death from stomach cancer was not the point of the movie, which had an Irish dotor in the plot, who gave him some poison to keep him from being useful to the British once again. But I digress.
Resources have always, and will always, define population potentials, both opportunities and limits. Our smartest people in business have for some time been thinking of our limits.
Actually, the opportunities and limits are defined more by our technology than any gross quantity estimates.
We have a carbon cycle big enough to run carbon based fuels simply from pyrolysis of annual biomass, but that's not politically useful to cartelists. Give people little backyard mulch pyrolizers, and Rockefellers strategy just crumbles. "They" will never run out of fuel.
Our planet has gone from a mostly CO2 atmosphere to a low, a critically low, carbon-depleted atmosphere. It is limiting growth rates worldwide. We don't need polar ice or seashores reflecting substandard oceans. With more CO2 and bigger oceans say ten degrees warmer than now, we'd have polar rainforests once again.
We don't need to burn California forests to restore ourCO2 atmosphere. Just conserve and recycle CO2. Recover it from "irreversible" rock formations.
Aw, but we have even better possibilities with new technologies. Fusion, hot or cold.
If you look at any critical resource, we can do better with better technology. Some resources seem infinite. Well, maybe a hundred Trillion humans would create demand for gypsum (wallboard in buildings) an issue, but that'd take a thousand years. And, eventually, like everything else we use, recycling will at some point become a temporary answer.
But the more immediate crisis is the loss of our desserts to solar panels, and windmills on every hill. These contraptions are deplorable and must be ended now. They are more of a ruin than anything we've ever done before.
But politicians have been bought already. We're gonna ruin this world all right. The [URL]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_in_a_Cage[/URL] "Green" ruin the next generation will hate us for.
The one thing that will prove the ruin of mankind. Government with the power and the susceptibility to corruption.
With no government capable of deflecting our good sense, or our opportunities, we would make our way at some rate, and maybe have a lot of problems, but no problem so big as a government gone amok.
That is the monster we should fear more than anything. We do a pretty good job ruining one another, and our own backyards. Corporations do a pretty good job ruining one another and their holdings on planet earth. Countries ruin one another and their own territories well enough. But only global governance can ruin the whole planet once and for all. And that's what globalism will do, if we let it. If we even let it come alive.