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I will say that vast swathes of the human population have little respect/understanding for the natural environment..
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I will say that vast swathes of the human population have little respect/understanding for
anything outside of their immediate personal desires.
I would like to point out that, economically, we are never going to "run out" of lead, or any other natural resource. What we
can run out of is
available resources at an
affordable price.
With about 2/3 of the earth's surface covered by water, the simple fact is that there is a huge amount of the earth that has never been explored, let alone mined. Logic suggests that there are the same deposits of minerals under the oceans as there are on dry land. We've been mining the land since the Copper Age, and haven't "run out" yet. With (possibly) twice as much raw materials still under the sea, I doubt running out will happen. But running out of affordable resources is a different matter.
As something gets more scarce, supply & demand raise the price. When the price reaches a certain point, something else will be substituted. Its really that simple.
The moon could be made of solid gold (or cheese), and we do have the ability to mine it (we already have - moon rocks), but the cost to do so is so far above the return that no one will do it.
We aren't even going to run out of lead, or any other raw materials. But we could run out of lead (for example) that you or I could AFFORD.