Could the world’s resources could last forever?

THE NEWS IS NEVER SHORT OF HEADLINES TELLING US THAT ANOTHER RESOURCE IS ABOUT TO RUN OUT. BUT ECONOMIST AND CONSERVATIVE PEER MATT RIDLEY ARGUES THAT HISTORY SUGGESTS OUR FUTURE MIGHT BE BRIGHTER THAN YOU THINK…

Tory peer Matt Ridley thinks that innovation will stop resources from running out.

Steller’s sea cow was a most unusual beast. The herbivorous, cold-water-dwelling relative of dugongs and manatees was discovered in 1741 by Georg Steller when he and his shipmates were marooned on the uninhabited Bering Island in the North Pacific. Rich in blubber and meat, slow-moving and unafraid, this 10-ton, kelp-eating creature proved a tempting target to hunters that winter and in the years that followed. Within three decades of its discovery it was extinct.

This is a tempting metaphor for the impact of human beings on the planet. The seven billion people on Earth, together with their domestic animals, use a large proportion of the planet’s resources. They have already caused the extinction of many species. According to Prof Helmut Haberl of Austria’s Klagenfurt University, about 14 per cent of all the new green vegetation on the planet is eaten by us and our tame animals each year, while another 9 per cent is destroyed or prevented from growing at all. It’s hard to find an ecosystem we have not affected.

For several decades it has been a staple of the environmental movement that this cannot last, that resources will be exhausted, causing the collapse of civilisation. The first worry was that land would run out, this being the central concern of the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus in his famous 1798 book An Essay On The Principle