Guardian gets it wrong on scarcity again

There is the usual nonsense in the Guardian again moaning about resource scarcity without any reference to actual facts.

Known reserves of resources are at all time highs, as is commodity production (see e.g. here and here). Stuff is abundant. And we are using it ever more efficiently. As I've noted before, the total material requirement for the UK economy is actually in decline. 

Environmentalists often worry that we will eventually run up against scarcity constraints as they think that the global economy may be able to deliver relative decoupling of resource use from economic growth, but not absolute decoupling.

I disagree with them. We are already seeing absolute decoupling in the UK (as well as some other rich economies I believe). For the world as a whole, growth in resource use seems to be fairly closely linked to population growth (source for graph). The world population is expected to stabilise around the middle of the century, at which time I suspect we'll see stabilisation in resource extraction. 

I could of course be wrong but I believe that there is also likely to be an environmental kuznets curve effect, which will mean that a richer global economy will enter a phase of falling material requirements - and absolute decoupling - as we have already witnessed in the UK.