The catastrophic visions keep coming, and yet the standard of living and human lifespan keep rising, especially in the developing word. The recent environmental campaigns titled "keep the X (coal, oil, and most recently, natural gas) in the ground" are an admission that technology has increased our recoverable fuel reserves so much that the original predictions of resource depletion is now now longer a concern for the foreseeable future. And whenever people want to get serious about clean energy development, billions of tons of Uranium and Thorium lay waiting. The few things that genuinely could hamper the rate of technological progress are inflation and precipitous energy cost increases, both of which raise the cost of research and development, and production of high tech devices. But the current price increases aren't related to resource depletion.