Peaks in general
From Silent Revolution
Once of the most common misconceptions in the environmental movement is that of the concept of imminent peaks. Whether it's peak lithium, peak oil, or any of hundreds of other theorized peaks, people have been making these claims for hundreds of years. It doesn't matter whether something, like oil, can outright be manufactured so long as there's not "peak energy", let alone harvested from vast alternative sources, or whether something like lithium can be extracted from seawater at a still trivial cost compared to the price of lithium-ion batteries. You'll still hear someone predicting an imminent, permanent depletion of said resource. This comes from a number of faulty premises. But first, let's back up.
[edit] The Simon-Ehrlich wager
He always found it somewhat peculiar that neither the Science piece nor his public wager with Ehrlich nor anything else that he did, said, or wrote seemed to make much of a dent on the world at large. For some reason he could never comprehend, people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they'd been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days "experts" spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker. -- "The Doomslayer"
Julian Simon was a professor of business at the University of Maryland, who earned fame in the early 80s by repeatedly promoting a wager with environmentalists who predicted imminent and permanent shortages of various resources. Under the terms of the wager, various resource prices would be tracked in inflation-adjusted terms. If they rose, Simon would pay the difference between the original price and the new price. If they fell, he would receive the difference. He found a taker for this wager in renowned Stanford entomologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, a book predicting an imminent series of dire shortages that was published in 1968. The wager tracked price differences in five metals between 1980 and 1990. When all was said and done, every one of them had fallen in inflation-adjusted terms. Two were less than half their 1980 prices.
The logic that had led Ehrlich to his error, as well as countless doomsayers before and after him, is simple. Reserves are reported as a fixed number of tons, barrels, etc. A certain percentage is estimated not to be found yet; so the doomsayers often credit some of that as having been found. Then they look at resource consumption and its projected growth, and can readily come up with a time when all of a sudden, available reserves should reach zero. The fact that a resource can be made (such as oil; check out peak oil for details) or is available in the crust in quintillions of kilograms quantities (such as lithium) is dismissed as "too expensive" or that we "can't scale up fast enough"; these claims are typically presented with either minimal or no backing.
While this logic seems simple enough, it has numerous errors that make it almost impossible to run out of most resources. Reported reserve figures are currently economically recoverable reserves. This relies on two primary things: the technology available for recovery and the current market price. Increasing either of them doesn't add minimal reserves to the mix, nor does it add linearly more; it adds exponentially more reserves. Top quality deposits of any resource are incredibly rare. The lower the quality you're willing to accept, the vastly increased amounts you can recover. In the case of oil, you go from the rarer deposits of shallow light sweet crude over land to sour crude, heavy crude, deep crude, arctic crude, and then to syncrude from ultra-heavy, bitumen, coal, and shale, and ultimately any kind of Fischer-Tropsch or Sabatier process). In the case of lithium, you go from brine pools to vast volcanic deposits to the entire oceans of the planet.
In short, market prices for a given resource is a race between production technology and availability with a given technology, except that the game is skewed extremely in favor of the technology side due to the exponential resource scaling. This is one of the primary reasons why world GDP growth and even per capita income almost always exceeds inflation; overall, things are getting cheaper in absolute terms, and almost always continue to do so. Even if technology didn't have the benefit of exponential resources coming online, with the rate of technological advances in recent years, betting against technology would almost certainly be a poor bet. And even if technology didn't advance, a doubling of market prices would increase supply not by double, but by many, many times over due to the exponential scaling as you move into the vastly more common, and now economical, poorer resources.
Sadly, many people conflate short-term price fluctuations due to poor prediction of supply or demand (and an associated lack of production infrastructure at a given point of time), and market bubbles with long-term trends, and predict imminent doom based upon this. They also tend to either vastly underestimate human capacity to extract resources and the small percentage of the world's economy that goes into extracting any one resource (even oil), or to ignore the realities of a market which invests money wherever there is the most profit to be made, no matter how much is needed.
[edit] Further reading
For more details about how faulty logic leads to erroneous conclusions that there are imminent shorages, check out the specific cases of peak lithium and peak oil.
