Where's Malthus when you need him?

Infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.

It's also clear that demanding ever more resources with finite supply will increase their price. Economics 101.

So shouldn't global warming solve itself? Eventually, we will be running out of fossil fuels to burn. Prices go up. We burn less.

True, except that all evidence shows that we are running out of atmosphere long before we run out of carbon buried under ground. We might be hitting limits on the sweetest, cheapest, easiest-to-get crude, but we are not running out of coal, gas, or oil (think tar sands) anytime soon.

That's what makes the latest resource price spikes so vexing. They point to real planetary limits, but they don't send the right signal when it comes to global warming—or at least they aren't sending it nearly quickly enough.

The prices of aluminum, barley, coffee, cocoa, copper, corn, cotton, gold, lead, oats, silver, tin, wheat, and many others including oil might be up. The price of natural gas is down. And the price of dumping the resulting carbon into the atmospheric is still a zero in the United States, sometimes even below.