For the sake of their own reputation the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries really do need to fire the fools that came up with this report:

In just over five years Britain will have run out of oil, coal and gas, researchers have warned. A report by the Global Sustainability Institute said shortages would increase dependency on Norway, Qatar and Russia. There should be a "Europe-wide drive" towards wind, tidal, solar and other sources of renewable power, the institute's Prof Victor Anderson said.

The report itself is here and is over a year old. It's also the most monstrously steaming pile of horse puckey you're ever likely to come across. Piffling balderdash personified.

I, given my background, looked at the section on minerals and their potential supplies in the future. They're taking their evidence from places like The Oil Drum (a home for peak oil phantasists, not people who know anything about minerals) and this miserably pitiful excuse for an article in New Scientist, something that used to be a good magazine. Forgive me if I seem a little brash here but these people know nothing at all of the subject under discussion. They confuse mineral reserves with the amount of a mineral that is available to us: seemingly ignorant of the fact that "reserve" is an economic concept. Price changes and reserves do. Further, reserves are the working stock of currently extant mines: they bear no relationship whatsoever to the amount that is likely easily available (resources) nor to total availablility. They end up with some barkingly mad predictions as a result: aluminium is, I think, 8.5% or so of the crust of this planet yet they have it as being in very scarce supply. They think that gallium might run out when there's a thousand year supply just in the bauxite we already know we'll dig up for aluminium. They have phosphate rock and potash as being very scarce when resources of these two (recall, this is stuff we already know where it is, how to dig it up and we're likely to make a profit from doing so, we just haven't actually proven it yet) will last 1,500 and 13,000 years, not to mention that they make up 0.2% and 2.5% of the crust of the planet. We'll not run out before the heat death of the universe.

Lord alone knows who has paid these people or why but before they besmirch the reputation of the Institute of Actuaries any further it's my very strong recommendation that they fire them.

This report is nonsense of a kind that even Edward Lear would be ashamed of as it's not even funny.