The production and consumption of most nonrenewable resources is so removed from our daily lives that most people have no idea of what and in what quantities materials are needed to provide our current standard of living. For example, while we might have some idea of how much energy we consume, say in the form of fossil fuels to heat our homes and power our automobiles, we are, for the most part, totally unaware of the energy costs that go into food production, transportation, and so on. The overall per capita consumption of natural gas in the United States is, for example, several times the average per capita consumption used for heating homes. Similarly, huge nonrenewable industries such as the mining of sand and crushed rock aggregate for producing concrete and cement are essentially invisible to the general public.

As stated before, it is possible to find a measurable if minute quantity of any potential material almost anywhere. If you looked hard enough, you could find tiny diamonds blown around by the wind in dust storms or a few atoms of gold in a gallon of sewage. What makes a resource a recoverable resource is its concentration and availability as an ore.

The estimation of the quantity of any given resource is an integral function of modern industry and government, and many authors have taken novel approaches at making such estimates. Perhaps the most soundly based of these approaches was made by Brian J. Skinner in 1980 and 1986.

Skinner systematically examined two aspects of the distribution of metallic elements: their overall abundance and the frequency distribution of ores of various grades (concentration). To understand the overall abundance of metal resources, Skinner looked at data available from the mining industry itself within the context of what geochemists know about the likely overall concentration of those same elements in the Earth's rocks. Skinner based his analyses on the fundamental difference between what he classifies as the "abundant" and "scarce" metallic elements. Abundant elements (such as iron, aluminum, calcium, sodium, etc.) are those that are integral components of the common silicate minerals that make up the majority of Earth's surface rocks. The scarce elements (such as gold, silver, tin, chromium) exist only in minute quantities within most silicate minerals and rocks at concentrations even less than might be expected, given their overall abundance in the Earth. Thus, some fraction of the scarce elements shuffles off by geologic processes over time into local concentrations that we call "ores." The frequency of discovery of ores of different quality for the common elements resembles a single-peaked bell-shaped curve, because the distribution of such elements is more or less a random process. In contrast, the frequency distribution for scarce elements is bimodal--one small peak represents the discovery of an ore, while another low-concentration peak represents the rare substitution of a scarce element for an abundant one in a silicate mineral.

The results of Skinner's analysis have two important implications. First, since he found that nearly all economic dimensions of metal resources correspond to the known crustal abundance of the elements, it appears that humans are near, if not at, the point at which we either know about or have already used up all known nonrenewable resources. Second, the consumption of scarce metals (gold, silver, platinum, chromium) may well be near or at the point where further exploitation may no longer be profitable in energy consumption terms. We have plucked the easy pickings; what is left will cost us dearly.

References:

1) Hubbert, M. King. 1975. "The Energy Resources of the Earth." Pp. 31-40 in Energy and Power. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

2) Lomberg, Bjorn. 2001. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

3) Meadows, Donella H., Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens. 1974. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: New American Library/Signet.

4) Meadows, Donella H., Jorgen Randers, and Dennis L. Meadows. 2004. Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green.

5) Skinner, Brian J., ed. 1980. Earth's Energy and Mineral Resources. Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann.

6) Skinner, Brian J., James R. Craig, and David J. Vaughan. 2001. Resources of the Earth. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Free term papers are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can use our professional writing services to buy a custom written research paper, term paper, or essay on Argumentative Topics at affordable price. CustomTermPapers is the best solution for those who seek help in writing term papers, essays, and research papers related to Argumentative Topics and other relevant topics.