Natural resources cannot be measured and thus they are infinite. The supply of natural resources is not finite in any economic sense, which is one reason why their cost can continue to fall indefinitely.
Increased scarcity causes the development of its own remedy. This is the key process in the supply of natural resources throughout history.
Improved efficiency of copper use not only reduces resource use in the present, but effectively increases the entire stock of unused resources as well.
Principle: more people, and increased income. cause resources to become more scarce in the short run. Heightened scarcity causes price to rise. The higher prices present opportunities and prompt inventors and enterpreneurs to search for solutions.Many fail in the search, at cost to themselves. But in a free society, solutions are eventually found. And in the long run the new developments leave us better off than if the problems hadn't risen.
Discoveries of improved methods and of substitute products are not just luck. They happen in response to an increase in scarcity--a rise in cost. Even after a discovery is made, there is good chance that it will not be put into operation until there is need for it due to rising cost. Scarcity and technological advance are not two unrelated competitors in a Malthusian race; rather, each influences the other.
A conceptual quantity is not finite or infinite in itself.
The concept of diminishing rate of return applies to situations where one element is fixed in quantity and where the type of technology is also fixed. But neither of these factors applies to mineral extraction in the long run. Whether the cost rises or falls in the long run depends on the extent to which advances in tech and discoveries of new lodes counteract the tendency toward increasing cost in the absence of the new technology.
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