Praschl, C., Lutter, S., Giljum, S. (2008)
‘The oil stocks of our country will be depleted within the next 9 years!’ With this sentence the CEO of the United States Geological Survey Institute (USGS) already raised some kind of apocalyptic sentiment after the First World War in 1919. As a reaction, President Coolidge installed the ‘Federal Oil Conservation Board’ to enact various laws which should protect national oil resources. But it soon became clear that there exist larger fossil fuel resources than mankind imagined at that time. After the resource intensive war periods, post war exploitation by the industrialising world followed, and fossil fuel and mineral sources still seemed infinite.
But when the Club of Rome published the study ‘The limits to growth’ in 1972 which predicted a depletion of oil resources at the end of the twentieth century it became clear, that there exists an end to unlimited growth based on fossil fuels.
The book was based upon the first research to make serious use of computers in modeling the consequences of a rapidly growing global population. Most of the scenarios pointed to a major economic crisis happening in the early 1990s. Obviously, this is not what happened.
However, global extraction of natural resource is steadily increasing. Since 1980, global extraction of abiotic (fossil fuels, minerals) and biotic (agriculture, forestry, fishing) resources has augmented from 40 to 58 billion tonnes in 2005. Scenarios anticipate a total resource extraction of around 80 billion tonnes in 2020 (200 % of the 1980-value), necessary to sustain the worldwide economic growth (Giljum et al., 2008). Depending on the level of economic development, trade patterns and industrial structures, growth rates and extraction intensities vary between different world regions.
The European economy is increasingly dependent on resource imports from other world regions. In comparison to the overall global growth rate (45 % over the last 25 years), Europe’s resource extraction grew only by 3 %, but studies
show that these domestic raw materials are increasingly substituted by imports from other world regions. Latin America, for instance, is specialising noticeably in the export of resource-intensive products, such as metal ores or biomass for
biofuels. In 2005, Chile extracted fivefold the amount of copper of 1980, Brazil threefold the amount of sugar cane – being the raw material for ethanol fuel.
On the one hand, this development leads to a considerable dependency of Europe on the imports of other countries, which may put industry at risks of higher prices and more difficult access. On the other hand, it also leads to an “outsourcing” of the environmental burden, connected to resource extraction and processing activities to other world regions.
In the following report, the questions of how much of the reserves and resources of fossil fuels and minerals are still in the earth and how they are distributed between the world regions are answered. When considering the results of the analysis, it becomes more obvious that a fundamental change in energy and resource use politics and economics has to take place in the European Union and other countries with highly developed economies. In addition, in the case of not
only fossil fuels, the majority of resources are located in political unstable areas. Furthermore, climate change is a serious and fundamental problem. Therefore, a drastic rethinking and a switch to renewable energy technologies in Europe is not only advisable, it is necessary.
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