A Quick And Illuminating Tour Of Cornucopia, Inc's Market Magic Land!

EDIT

And, so it is with the cornucopian thinker. He (or she) explains that most accepted measures of human well-being have been rising since 1800. But so has population. Ergo, population increases simply cannot result in human misery in the future. The correlation--a rise in living standards while population increased--means that rising populations cause beneficial things to happen to most human beings. (Never mind that fossil fuel usage was increasing exponentially during most of this period. And, never mind that the cornucopian only considers human well-being, especially the ability of humans to extract their needs from nature in the short run. Never is the long-term health of the ecosphere on which all humans depend seriously considered.)

Another bedrock of cornucopian magical thinking is that substitutes will always be available for any resource that becomes scarce. As you will see below, our ability to think is supposed to allow us always to find substitutes. A favorite example is the use of fiber optic cable in place of copper as copper ores have declined in quality. Even now the high price of oil is creating increased demand for coal and renewal energy sources. Substitution has and does occur, but it is hard to see what substitutes there might be for potable water or a climate suitable for human habitation. Perhaps we will desalinate the oceans and geoengineer the climate. But, that would take huge amounts of energy and, when it comes to climate, we would need a precise knowledge about the climate effects of any proposed geoengineering fix so as not to create the wrong kind of climate.

As for energy, even the world's foremost cornucopian thinker, Julian Simon, admitted that energy is the "master resource" upon which the extraction and refining of all other resources depend. For Simon it is the sum total of all the efforts of an increasing population which will bring us solutions to any energy shortages. "Resources come out of people's minds more than out of the ground or air," Simon said in a now-famous Wired magazine interview. He went on to say that "inds matter economically as much as or more than hands or mouths. Human beings create more than they use, on average. It had to be so, or we would be an extinct species."

Now this is not exactly the belief that if you think about something it will happen, but it comes awfully close. It is the passivity that such ideas engender that move this kind of thinking over the line into magical thinking. We are led to believe that all of our environmental and resource problems can be left to technical experts who will surely solve them without much disruption to our lives. What Simon is implying is that if we think hard enough, human ingenuity will always find a way to overcome supposed limits on the human species. (Notice also that he says above that people "create" rather than extract resources which one should put down to just plain confusion about how the natural world works.) And, just so people would get his point, he stated the following in another article:

EDIT

http://www.energybulletin.net/39592.html