The conclusion: most material demand is for elements so common on Earth that supplies will never run out. Only more energy is required to deal with super-low-grade ores (like 10% Fe basalt instead of 15% Fe taconite). The rare elements can largely be substituted so that the residuum of non-substitutable demand can stretch supplies to millions of years.
As you'd expect of a paper coauthored by Alvin Weinberg in 1975, the energy solution proposed is "fission breeder reactors" but there's a nod toward the long term potential of solar power and fusion.
Yes, a lot of people on this post have mentioned that with proper planning, a more long-term perspective and consideration for human well-being, growth doesn't have the same limits.
Sure, but if you had a consideration for human well-being, if you had a society where people thought about "what should things look like in a hundred or a thousand years" you wouldn't have any impetus for exponential growth.
Exponential growth in material resource consumption is necessarily a short term phenomenon on the scale of known history. The UCSD Do The Math guy has shown why exponential supply growth is not possible in the long run. The more binding constraint is the lack of demand growth. Even if the world had the capacity to supply every person with an extra 100 tons per year of steel or an extra 10 tons of pork, why would everyone buy that much? There's no point. It would be like hoarding drums full of seawater. Whether we plan for the end or not, the exponential growth era is transitory.
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5045860
The conclusion: most material demand is for elements so common on Earth that supplies will never run out. Only more energy is required to deal with super-low-grade ores (like 10% Fe basalt instead of 15% Fe taconite). The rare elements can largely be substituted so that the residuum of non-substitutable demand can stretch supplies to millions of years.
As you'd expect of a paper coauthored by Alvin Weinberg in 1975, the energy solution proposed is "fission breeder reactors" but there's a nod toward the long term potential of solar power and fusion.