A new discovery of lithium this last week led to a flurry of headlines touting the finding as one of the biggest lithium deposits in history. The discovery comes amid fears that a shift towards electric vehicles would exhaust too much of the world's supply of lithium—an important component in batteries.

Fear about the availability of lithium is only the latest doom and gloom prediction about humanity's access to resources. Throughout the 20th century, experts predicted that we would run out of food, land, and oil among other things. Consider for example the history of "peak oil" predictions in the US.

Figure 1: Timeline of bad "peak oil predictions"