Supertrends by Lars Tvede

Author:Lars Tvede
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119646846
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

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 and, according to its optimistic scenario, we would have run out of gold, silver, and mercury by now and the other resources in just a few years’ time. In fact, by 2025, there would only be some aluminium left, and by 2030, that would be gone too.

But none of this either happened or is anywhere near happening. In fact, the total opposite happened.

The reason is innovation. In the mid-1990s, the American economist William Nordhaus, who incidentally has now been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, conducted a number of experiments involving various sources of light. First, he lit a bonfire, then a Roman oil lamp, then a light made of animal fat, and then a light of whale oil, while constantly measuring how many lumens – the units we use for measuring light – each source of light produced. Nordhaus wanted to clarify how much cheaper a light unit had become. The result was overwhelming. Imagine the work a Stone Age man had to invest in making a bonfire to produce light of reasonable quality for 54 minutes, when today modern man can produce light of the same intensity – for 52 years! This means that the so-called time-price – how much time you need to work in order to achieve a given material good – has dropped 500 000 times for light since the Stone Age!

And it is still falling rapidly. For example, there is now a global shift to LED, to which the following rule applies:

For every decade, the price per lumen (light unit) generated by LED decreases by a factor of 10, while the amount of light an LED unit can generate increases by a factor of 20 for a given wavelength (colour) of light (Haitz's Law).

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