A few years ago I read Julian Simon’s book, The Ultimate Resource. What is the ultimate resource? You can’t find it digging the hills. But you can find it in the mirror.
“The ultimate resource,” writes Simon, “is skilled, spirited, hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit as well as in a spirit of faith and social concern.”1 All resources pale in comparison to the ultimate resource: human ingenuity.
We know how make more with less and develop our world in ways previous generations couldn’t fathom. Take food, for example. A hundred years ago, half of all American families worked on farms. Today, less than two percent. With six times the output of a century ago.2
In a sense, human ingenuity increases natural resources. Consider oil. Some alarmists believe we’ll hit a wall of depletion and spark a global crisis. At current rates of consumption and production, we’ve go fifty to a hundred years.
But when we invent a way to double our efficiency, it doubles our supply. The invention of higher-mileage automobiles, for example, increases oil reserves by a hundred years in one flash of genius.
Truth is, a century supply is child’s play. “We have centuries left of coal and other nonconventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands and oil shale. This may seem like slight consolation, since it is hard to put coal into the gas tank. Yet chemists know precisely how to do that, using an industrial process known as Fischer-Tropsch liquefaction, which converts coal into oil at relatively low cost.”3 In one shot, human ingenuity converts decades of supply into five centuries of supply. Add in efficiency gains and we’re talking a thousand years.4
As if a thousand years weren’t enough, we can keep going. Ingenuity offers a never-ending supply of oil. A Discover article from April 2006 titled, “Anything into Oil,” reveals a process called thermal conversion “to manufacture oil indefinitely, out of garbage, sewage, and agricultural waste.” The article’s subtitle says, “Turkey guts, junked car parts, and even raw sewage go in one end of this plant, and black gold comes out the other end.” The inventor claims the cost is $80 per barrel.5
This is how people become what Julian Simon calls the ultimate resource. We turn trash into gas and crap into crude with mind power.
1Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. xxxviii.
2Willard Wesley Cochrane, American Farm Policy, 1948-1973 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), p. 13. Index estimates of output were obtained from the Agricultural Adjustment Research Branch, Farm Production Economics Division, U.S. Department of Agriculture.
3Jeoffrey Sachs, Common Wealth (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008), p. 42ff
4For numerous examples of human innovation and its impact on the effective world oil reserves and the effective amount of other natural resources, see economist Paul Zane Pilzer’s book, Unlimited Wealth: The Theory and Practice of Economic Alchemy (New York: Crown Publishers, 1990), p. 25ff. “The world’s supply of physical resources is not decreasing,” says Pilzer, “On the contrary, our effective supply of resources is increasing.”
5Brad Lemley, “Anything into Oil,” Discover, April 2, 2006.