How Long Will Essential Minerals Last

To a degree, the economic demand for and the price of a resource determine its availability. Higher prices lead to greater exploration, exploitation of less available resources, and often spectacular increases in supply. This phenomenon has led to the misinterpretation of the resource supply and demand equation by authorities whose understanding of economics is limited to only conventional monetary supply and demand models, without due consideration of sustainability aspects. The fact is that the total available amounts of most resources are limited, painfully so in terms of 

The United States is essentially without ecouomic reserves of a uumber of essential minerals. These include aluminum, antimony, chromium, cobalt, manganese, tantalum, niobium, platinum, nickel, and tin. Domestic reserves of fluorine, gold, potash, silver, tungsten, sulfur, vanadium, and zinc are limited. As far as the United States is concerned, metals of most concern are chromium, manganese, and cobalt. These substances are essential for a modem industrialized economy. Although global supplies are adequate for the immediate future, they are threatened by the potential instability of the countries from which they come— Zaire, Zambia, South Africa, and Russia and other countries in the former Soviet Union. 

As discussed in Chapter 9, Section 9.3, there is current concern regarding the availability of rare earth elements and the monopoly that China has developed for supplies of these elanents. Although they are not really very rare and potentially can be produced in several places around the world including the United States, there are some serious environmental challenges involved in the development of rare earth resources. 

The world economy will never totally run out of any of the aforementioned minerals. However, severely constrained supplies of any one or several of them will have some marked effects. For example, world food production now depends on fertilizers, which require phosphorus, of which resources are limited. Within the next century, a food crisis related to phosphate shortages may be anticipated. 

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