Quote:
Originally Posted by CrossoverManiac
Once cost increases, alternatives would be more viable. It's not cost effective to use electric vehicles at this time, but as the cost of gasoline increases and technology develops, electric vehicles become more viable. It's not accurate to say that once the resource is more expensive, standard of living must drop.
|
The problem there is there won't always be a viable alternative, and even if you have one, you're starting the cycle over again and still driving the cost up. As things get more expensive, people are spending more and more of their money on them, which means they have less and less to spend on other things, so the standard of living drops. The only thing we can do is try to slow down the consumption in the first place. Hopefully, humanity will one day soon do something like build a space elevator so we can get into space cheaply and gain access to the vast materials there. There's lots of metals for refining and hydrocarbons to make plastic with out there after all. Until that day comes though, we need to make the best of what we have here, which is most certainly not letting people use a resource until it's no longer economicly viable to do so. That method
will lead to a drop in standards of living.