I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;re not.  The issue is, &quot;economically viable&quot; is a useless phrase by itself, and is usually used to imply &quot;economically viable at current prices&quot;.<p>For most non-energy non-renewable resources, humanity can just pour more energy than they do now into securing the scarce resource, and things will be a bit more expensive, but less concentrated ores will be targetted and more expensive extraction methods used and the supply will hold up at a higher price.  Substitutes will be sought and some will maybe be found, if they work out better than the now-pricier resource.<p>Finance abhors an inexpensive depleting natural resource it has no substitutes or emergency supply for: if it is economically viable for one investor to buy all the world&#x27;s remaining supply of Technetium, he will stockpile it and trickle it out to the resource-starved market at ten times what he paid.  To assert that &quot;lack of education&quot; is the problem is ignoring the numbers issue: it only takes a single smart investor to turn the whole market towards appreciating reality-mandated scarcity, and he earns a very large profit for educating the market.<p>Fossil fuel extraction concerns have a better basis: they have a floor at which it is mathematically impossible to profit from extraction, EROI&lt;1, so long as you are using the energy you extracted to harvest more energy.  I was for a period of five years or so an alarmist on this point.  Even so, it looks like there exist enough positive EROI deposits to raise global CO2 by an untenable amount (an amount which depopulates &gt;10% of the world&#x27;s presentday habitation due to high wet bulb temperatures), long before we run out of coal, oil, gas, &amp; kerogen shales.