How Long Will Earths Finite Resources Last?
Calculate How Long Earth’s Resources Will Last We live on a planet with finite geologic reserves of oil, coal, natural gas, uranium, copper, phosphorus and even fresh water. It would be easy to believe that we will always have them in abundance. We have lived in a golden age of excess. How is it possible that we have ignored the warnings of leading scientists for the last half century? One such scientist is Albert A. Bartlett, Professor Emeritus, Physics, Colorado University at Boulder. He began his lifetime effort to alert us to the problems associated with exponential population growth and associated resource consumption in the late 1950s and has given his famous lecture on Arithmetic, Population and Energy over 1,600 times since September 1969, an average of once every 8.5 days. “The consumption of resources is generally growing exponentially, and we would like to have an idea how long resources will last. … Imagine that the rate of consumption of a resource grows at a constant ra
