This really just feels Malthusian. Many of the elements that are currently 'scarce' are not actually scarce, just not found in extremely high concentrations elsewhere. There's essentially a maximum price that these resources will reach (often not much higher than they currently are), before other methods/locations of extraction become viable. To suggest we'll revert to preindustrial squalor is absurd.
Drawing ball after ball has kept humanity progressing. Extend his analogy a little further. What if there are no more white balls to draw? What if we are "impeded" from drawing them by the fact that there are now more gray and black balls to draw instead of white? Or, since we have to reach further into this lottery jar, what if we don't reach them in time?
Malthus rested his conclusion on the assumption that we would never hack agriculture the way we have (nitrogen, phosphorus, etc). You rest your conclusion on the assumption that we will always successfully draw a new trick out of the hat, like find ways to recover all the rare earth metals from phones for which we have no current mechanism for economic recycling. You rest your worldview on the idea that our potential is limitless, that humanity's progress is inevitable, a god-given right if you will. I rest my worldview on the idea that nothing is guaranteed, that complexity begets fragility and diminishing returns, and that entropy will always, always, have the last laugh.
I come to think about the adage that scientific answers often bring with them more questions. Those ever expanding questions I sometimes imagine as an exponentially growing circumference of unknowns, surrounding a circle of what’s currently known.
Perhaps those unknowns could be thought of as corresponding to the gray and black balls, so that what’s dangerous is essentially that which we don’t fully understand and therefore cannot fully control.
Finally, I’m thinking that the area covered by all previously gathered knowledge (area because knowledge synergies with itself) will increasingly likely outweigh the danger that we uncover as the circumference of unknowns grows and dangers are discovered along the perimeter.
The natural world alone has disease, disaster, predators, and threats from space but would exist independent of knowledge. Technology allows us to mitigate those, and as a trade-off we get biological and chemical weapons, mass shootings, the Tsar Bomba, etc.
Yes, eventually we will find our hands empty for resource solutions. I do not expect it to be in my lifetime, whether it end by old age or nuclear fire.
That was an argument decades ago, but today, a) if we keep extracting more and more, then climate change will be worse and worse (all ready not looking good) and b) it seems like we are around the production peak of oil (of all kinds), while conventional peak oil was around 2008.
So yeah, energy is going down, because we don't have viable alternative to fossil fuels. What is unfortunate is that the end of fossil fuels is coming too slowly, so we still have plenty to mess up the climate. And then we won't have it anymore to face the consequences.