The analysis assumes resources are finite and exponential growth is impossible, then makes educated guesses at how some quantities interact. Are you arguing that the model didn’t predict fracking correctly or what’s your point exactly?
Resources are potentially infinite and that's ignoring that we are consuming a non-perceptible amount in the visible universe. We are a long way from consuming anything.
They're only potentially infinite if we figure out ways to expend an ever-increasing exponential amount of energy to capture them. Energy is cost, there's absolutely no way to know if we will figure a way to produce the energy required to extract resources from outside our planet, even less to know if we won't expend the most easily accessible resources before we can start digging for more outside of Earth.
We should be treating our accessible resources as finite, and improve the efficiency of using them, just to make sure we can keep enough until all the breakthroughs we need to explore resources outside of Earth exist.
It's like the propaganda from the oil industry, talking about how plastics are so damn important for modern life and we couldn't live without the oil industry. It's absolutely true, but it also gives a very clear argument on why we shouldn't be wasting fossil resources to be burnt for energy if we can find other ways to access energy, we should be keeping as much as possible of this finite resource (which very likely doesn't even exist in any close proximity to Earth) for its more useful material products like plastics.
We are sitting on a giant pile of matter, and we get a steady stream of fresh energy from the sun everyday.
Yes, resources are technically finite, but we are a long way away from that mattering.
Until then, there's a limit on how cheap we can get our resources---and human ingenuity is chipping away on that. But scarcely a limit on the absolute amount of resources.
> Are you arguing that the model didn’t predict fracking correctly or what’s your point exactly?
The model didn't predict anything correctly. Fracking is just something on top of people's minds now, but the model didn't take the green revolution into account, when that was already underway when they formulated it.
But the growth doesn't automatically mean that it happens because of the resource use increase. Growth often results in technologies that use _less_ resources: cars and lighting are prime examples.
> Are you arguing that the model didn’t predict fracking correctly or what’s your point exactly?
I'm arguing that predicting the exact point where the growth limits are reached is impossible. Especially when it's not due to something fundamental like the Sun's total energy output multiplied by the lowest possible entropy increase quantum.
At risk of speaking for the parent, I think that sentence sums it up. Specious is the fancier word for it.
These 'analyses' take a myopic view of a complex buffered system and well beyond the predictive power of the analysis.
Kind of like saying $MSFT went up 1pct today, so by this time next year it will be up 365% and in a decade its exponential growth will collapse the economy.
For a recent non-contrived example, projections of electric vehicle ownership haven't exactly followed expectations.
