This isn't an Erlich predicted limit to growth. It's lack of prior planning commitment to open resource mining, which is dirty, expensive and hard to justify when your problem is some future boards KPI.

The right time to have started opening new silver mines was 10 or more years ago, not now. Least cost planning invites this kind of risk.

While I think Erlichs base concepts are... fine(ish)... the timing is WAY off. We mine the easiest stuff first and then throw more energy are lower grade deposits to overcome supply limits and lower ore grades. That only has so much life in it, the inflection point is somewhere between next Tuesday and 500 years from now.

As for the current silver limits, this may go on for a fair while. Those I know in the mining industry say the quickest metals mine they have ever seen come online was 7 years from approval to production. Most are a decade or more. Thus if we were to jump on the silver boat now, we might not see any form of relief until the mid 2030s. Interesting times ahead.

There are exceptions to this time frame, here in Oz we got a lithium mine operational in 12 months, but lithium is a very different processes as a whole.

7 years is inside my 10 so I see this as agreement/confirmation. I did a tour of Mt Isa last year, and they were stockpiling rich ore, processing the overburden they had kept for 5+ years: The price of gold finally made extraction of this stuff worthwhile. So miners with a 25+ year planning cycle and land already do price sensitive stockpiling and deliberately process the dross when it's worthwhile.

You would think with the use of silver so widespread we'd be more aware of silver recovery options. People talk about gold from PCs but we don't hear much about silver recycling. I wonder if all the old filmstock people in the b&w news days made money from silver nitrate?