Jeremy Grantham has returned to the subject of finite resources. In his latest quarterly letter, he says he didn’t intend to get quite so doomy on us back in April:

With hindsight, there are a few additions and qualifications I would like to make regarding my letter on resources of last quarter. I will start with an overview of the prospects for our collective well-being: there is nothing about the resource limitation problem that we cannot resolve.  We have the brain power and, especially, the inventiveness.  We have some nearly infinite resources: the sun’s energy and the water in the oceans.  We have some critically fi nite resources, but they can be rationed and stretched by sensible, far-sighted behavior to fi ll the gap between today, when we live far beyond a sustainable level, and, say, 200 years from now, when we may have achieved true long-term sustainability.  Such sustainability would require improved energy and agricultural technologies and, probably, a substantially reduced population.  With intelligent planning, all of this could be reasonably expected.  A population reduction could be arrived at by a slow and voluntary decline (perhaps with some encouragement of smaller family size achieved, for example, through greater education). Read more