ABSTRACT
It seems reasonable to ask here what RMS might change in EROTRE today if he were returning to the question of exhaustible resource scarcity. I doubt he would change much. He might abbreviate his discussion of Hotelling, since the importance of capital theory to the study of natural resource use is now commonly understood. He might expand a bit on his thinking about discounting since there has been much work on this topic since 1973. He would likely reflect on the global warming externality associated with hydrocarbon extraction and use, and he might consider the implications to Solow (1974) of relaxing his assumption of a constant population. There have, in fact, been many papers in many different journals that descend from Solow (1974), some of which address population growth and global warming.
