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In addition, growth in China and India will not only drive up demand and limit the availability of conventional energy fuels, but drive up the cost and limit the availability of lots of minerals, such as the already rare earth minerals required to make lithium ion batteries and solar panels. As the Chinese and Indian middle classes move up from only owning bicycles to owning mopeds and scooters to owning automobiles, we could see a jump from 2 billion motor vehicles in the world today to 4, 5 or 6 billion motor vehicles in the world tomorrow. Our global supply of easily accessible natural resources and energy fuels to keep building this number of motor vehicles (that require replacement every 5 to 10 years) is just not there. No one in the world is thinking about this today.

A very few number of people are thinking about the world’s energy supply and its outlook based on global population growth looking out 50 years or more. Most who look at this, believe we are in big trouble, since our easily produced fossil fuels will be gone by then and although there will be lots of fossil fuels remaining, they will require more energy to extract than they will produce when they are consumed. They call this a negative Energy Return on Investment or negative EROI. It will never be economically practical to consume more energy in extracting a fuel resource than that fuel resource can actually generate once it is extracted. This is really just simple math.

The same is true of minerals, but with a slightly different twist. It is only economically practical to produce minerals as long as the selling price for those minerals covers the cost of the energy and labor consumed in the extraction process along with the cost of the dedicated infrastructure used for the extraction process. When the cost of the energy, labor and infrastructure development for the extraction processs increases exponentially due to the limited availability of fossil fuels and easily accessible minerals for energy production and infrastructure development; it will become economically impractical to extract minerals. So, the global consumption of all the easily accessible fossil fuels will not only drive energy costs higher, but will drive the cost of mineral extraction higher. In both cases once the easily accessible energy fuels are consumed, we will very rapidly reach a point where it is economically impractical to continue to produce both fossil fuels and minerals.

No one is thinking about this today, either. Worse still, the industries that continue to profit by extracting the easily accessible fossil fuels and minerals will do so until they are exhausted. They will also lobby congress and other elected officials, policy makers and political leaders to keep laws in their favor and discourage competition and the development of renewable and replacement energy sources. They will also lobby for continuing the status quo of building and expanding roads and consuming fossil fuels exponentially because that will drive up the price of fossil fuels and make them and their stockholders greater profits. This is free market capitalism at its best which focuses only on short term gains and not long term trends that might impact the general public in a negative way.

Political leaders today simply assume that we will develop renewable energy resources to take the place of fossil fuels by the time fossil fuels become too costly to produce economically. So no worries. But constructing the renewable energy infrastructure on a global scale that will be necessary to replace our reliance on fossil fuels and our exponentially increasing global appetite for energy; will take enormous amounts of energy, minerals and labor which we are not currently setting aside for that purpose. The current analysis would suggest that by the time our global political leaders (especially the Neanderthals in the US – both Democrats and Republicans) realize that the era of cheap fossil fuel consumption is coming to an end, there may not be an adequate supply of the traditional energy and mineral resources to actually convert our economy from a fossil fuel consumption based economy to a renewable energy based consumption economy. In a world of finite resources, simple math will tell us that perpetual increasing and thus infinite demand in both energy and natural resources is not possible. But our global leaders do not understand simple math, so this basic fact will continue to be ignored until we are at a crisis stage.

My point is that 50 years from now, if we are smart, we will see the exact opposite of what we see today in terms of travel behavior. Many more of us will live in urban environments and travel less because it will be more energy efficient, more convenient and less costly to do so. The percentage of the population that use public transportation as their primary means of transportation in 50 years may approach the number of people that use private vehicles as their primary means of transportation today. Transportation investment in long life cycle, energy efficient mass transit infrastructure such as maglev and super energy efficient trains, will be a far better use of our public dollars and our limited energy and mineral resources than continuing to encourage the production of private vehicles that need to be replaced every 5 to 10 years.

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