Ian Mortimer: what was new in 2012?

This article by Tim Worstall in the Daily Telegraph has been grating on my nerves for the last week. Its message is basically 'Don't panic, let's carry on as we are' and he gives one example of why it is okay to do this. To quote: 'we've got 1 million tonnes of copper and that's it. We use that copper to make paperweights. Then we learn how to make copper into computer motherboards and we recycle all paperweights into computers. We value the computers more than the paperweights: we've just had GDP growth, we've just had economic growth, with no increase in the consumption of resources. Even in this steady-state economy therefore, even one in which everything is recycled, we can still have economic growth through advancing technology.' This is reductionism, which is perhaps necessary for a daily newspaper; but I cannot help feel it is unhelpful. Today's news that GDP in the UK is down due to a 4.8% decline in the construction industry is another indicator that such thinking is wrong and such complacency unwise. His model of 'infinite growth' by infinitely recycling and adding value is based on the assumption that most resources fit this model. They don't. In fact probably none do. For a start, some resources (like gas, petrol) simply can't be recycled. Some things are not cost-efficient to recycle, so no one will do it. And some things have severe limitations on their recycling potential. Consider land: although one can continue rebuilding and thus 'recycling' land, there will come a point where a limit is hit. Imagine all the available land was developed (this excludes National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, farmland and pasture, floodzones, lakes, roads, listed landscapes, gardens and previously developed land, so it is likely to run short soon), you'd have to knock down and rebuild housing stock and industrial buildings for the sake of it, just to keep that sector of the economy buoyant. In other words you'd have to waste energy and other resources deliberately in order to maintain the construction industry at today's levels, forget growth. The same thing applies to 'computer motherboards'. To take David Worstall's own example: you can't recycle your 1,000,000 tonnes of copper endlessly. Some uses will remain permanent, as resources find their most efficient or most valuable use, so (unless you adopt the energy-draining strategy of the pointless destruction of everything created) the amount of any resource available for recycling will diminish over time - and it only has to diminsh a little for that sector of the economy to contract, lessening the potential for growth. As I see it, we have finite resources (and Worstall does not disagree) and so the availability of those resources is bound to reduce, and even though we may find ways of adding value in the recycling process (as Worstall argues), the best we can hope for is that the 'added value' temporarily compensates for the reduction in the availability of resources; no one can presume that it will lead to 'growth'.