Morbus posted:

The Al Bartlett talk is a good one, but perhaps the best part about it is that it was made in the early 1990's, and therefore many of the trends he talks about can be examined 20 years later.

The price of a ski ticket at Vail's has indeed continued to grow at roughly 7% a year. But the population of Boulder has been relatively flat (as has the population of Los Angeles, which also no longer suffers from abysmal air quality), and US oil production, which had been declining sharply from 1971 to 1992, is now higher than it was when this talk was made.

As far as material resources go, its worth distinguishing between consumable and non-consumable resources. Things like fossil fuels are gone once you burn them, and the only way to get more is get it out of the ground, and if it isn't there tough poo poo. Things like rare-earth metals don't disappear once they are put in a product. Lots of metals are routinely recycled. In other cases (like lithium ion batteries at present), it doesn't always make economic sense. But the stuff doesn't go away, it's just a question of 1.) how easy is it to recover material from discarded or obsolete products and 2.) how much total material needs to be in circulation based on present demand, and how does that compare with the amount currently available or the rate of extraction?