Supertrends

6.THE IMPORTANCE OF INNOVATION FOR RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT

Throughout my childhood and youth, I was bombarded by newspapers and books etc. (we did not have television at home) with forecasts of an impending acute lack of resources, global famine, and air pollution. One book claimed that air pollution was getting so grave that everyone in big cities would soon have to wear gas masks. One of the prophets was the aforementioned Paul Ehrlich, who was expecting total collapse within a matter of a few years. I have to admit it all got me a bit flustered, and it did not get any better when I was 9 years old and William and Paul Paddock published their bestseller, Famine, 1975! (1968), which described the global famine that would occur in 1975 – in other words, when I was 18 years old. Terrible! Meanwhile, my parents’ bookshelves contained The Limits to Growth (1974) by Dennis L. Meadows, Donella H. Meadows, William W. Behrens III, and Jørgen Randers, which predicted that humanity would soon run out of a number of essential raw materials. Here are the book's most important forecasts in terms of when we would run out of things:

Pessimistic scenario	Optimistic scenario
Aluminium	2005	2029
Zinc	1992	2024
Copper	1995	2022
Gold	1983	2004
Silver	1987	2016
Natural gas	1996	2023
Oil	1994	2024
Mercury	1987	2015

So, according to the book's pessimistic scenario, by now – in fact, a long time ago – we would have run out of aluminium, zinc, copper, gold, silver, natural gas, oil, and mercury ...