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The experts were just so wrong about peak oil, weren't they?
Not only did the world not reach peak oil in the late 2000s as predicted, but US production grew so much it is now 30% above its prior 1970 peak.
I'll venture that we really will reach peak oil in the next decade, but not because of lack of supply (we are discovering oil faster than we are burning it), but because of lack of demand.
We never ran out after all.
The big thing that the environmentalists got wrong is that it's basically impossible to run out of a resource. Nothing that we extract gets annihilated.
The resource simply gets more and more expensive, in the worst case, or you find new ways to extract it more efficiently, in the best case (as what happened to oil). And in the worst case, the higher prices lead to development of substitutes and more efficient usages - as always, high prices are the cure to high prices.
This seems like saying the same thing in more words (not always a bad idea!).
Assume that technological progress will not gift us Pareto-optimal replacements for anything that we need more of. In that case, the different between ‘running out’ of something and ‘no longer being able to do many tasks that require it because it’s too expensive and there’s no good replacement’ is essentially semantic.
That's kind of assuming the conclusion. The fact is that high prices incentivize finding substitutes for lower value applications of expensive commodities.
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