Again, I’ve been listening and have been lectured to by these dour losers for 40 years – every time we turn around we’re told we’re running out of this, running out of that, and either we all are gonna die NOW, in 5 years, in 10 years, or that I HAVE to stop doing this, that, or something else. Each and every time, it is clear that these Eyores keep forgetting one very important item – the ingenuity of humans to either overcome, find a technology “override” making a problem irrelevant…
…or find more of what the dismal-deathers say we don’t have:
As one of the researchers put it, “[t]here’s a lot more fresh groundwater in California than people know.” The breakthrough here involved searching for water deeper underground than aquifers designated for human consumption typically lie. The drawback (there’s always a drawback) is that the deeper water tends to be more brackish, and is naturally more difficult and costly to extract. Moreover, the deeper one drills for water, the closer one gets to oil and gas drilling (typically thousands of feet of rock layers separate hydrocarbons from groundwater tapped for consumption), and the greater the chance there is of contamination. All of that being said, this remains a remarkable find for the parched state.
Halfway across the world a different group of scientists employing a novel new detection technique found an enormous new supply of helium gas—an increasingly scarce element that’s critically important for advanced scientific research and medical technologies—in Tanzania. . . .
In addition to making your voice squeaky or your kids’ birthday balloons float, helium helps keep high-tech gadgets like MRI machines or the Large Hadron Collider cool. As Durham University’s professor Jon Gluyas, one of the researchers, told the BBC, “Helium is the second most abundant element in the Universe but it’s exceedingly rare on Earth.” Helium prices have quintupled since 2000 as supplies have started to dwindle. You can understand, then, why this discovery is being described as a “game changer,” and not just for the fact of this specific supply alone, either: this was the first place these scientists employed their new surveying technique. They’re batting 1.000, and could now apply this technique in areas with similar geology in different parts of the world.
The Malthusians of the world are always right until they’re wrong. They’ll warn of impending resource depletion until they’re blue in the face, but time and again human ingenuity (and natural providence) has made fools of them. We’ve seen two welcome new examples of Gaia’s riches this week—what’ll we find next?
(H/T: Instapundit)
