Scarcity of resources

Summary

COP15 successfully ends and all countries including China, Russia, and India start working toward new GHG emission target. Countries will introduce more energy efficient technology and renewable energies. However, global warming is not the all of problems which we are facing now. Resources also should be considered as a global level. Adoption of renewable energies and electric vehicles will make us less reliant on oil. Neverthless new technology will cause another problem of resource. For example, lithium which is a key raw material to prevail electric vehicles is distributed in a limited area. More importantly, rapid growth of population will cause food and water problems. The fact that developing countries are growing rapidly is also accelerating this problem.

Technological development will help solving this problem, but we can not expect that technology will solve them completely. Considering the basic economic concepts, a product price has to be higher when the demand increases with fixed supply. Thus, the competition to get resource will be fierce, and developped countries and countries which have affluent resources will apparently win this competition.

This scenario shows the future picture that developped countries will continuousely lead the world, and the least developed countries will be poorer.