One part of this I've never understood: I'm often told that I shouldn't buy or enjoy helium balloons, as it's a waste of important helium. But such a balloon costs almost nothing, if helium is so scarce and so important, shouldn't that be reflected in the price?
At least that's how stocks work. If something will be in high demand/price in the future, it will shift and be in high demand now.
>if helium is so scarce and so important, shouldn't that be reflected in the price? //
It's like other "mined" raw materials.
Coal takes millions of years to form, requires large quantities of vegetation/animal life and large areas of land. If you charged based on replacement cost then coal prices would be effectively infinite.
As with helium. Helium doesn't bond with other atoms to make heavier molecules and so eventually leaks from the atmosphere after release. In order to recover a supply you're going to need to capture it from radioactive decay or do extraterrestrial mining or some similar high cost activity. So it's [comparatively] an infinite replacement cost. However, it's released as a by-product and we currently have enough. When we run out of natural gas sources we'll run out of our main He source too and using helium will become extremely expensive. Even at that point we'll still not be paying the "replacement" cost, just the cost of extracting from more expensive sources.
We should be, as a race, preserving helium but there is currently no economic incentive, the incentive lies in the future when our current round of magnates and politicians will likely be dead.
For what it's worth, the cost of a cylinder of Helium has risen exponentially in the past few years.
One of my first jobs was working in a welding supply shop, and I was astonished to find out that a '100lb' cylinder (they're filled by weight/pressure) of helium was nearly $200. As a comparison, a '100lb'of propane was only about $40.
A lot of the time I spent during my job there was preparing cylinders for testing, to assure that they were pressure-secure and airtight. Neat stuff, and a TON of practical physics went into everyday things there. :)
by what measure? 100lb of helium is exactly the same by weight as a 100lb of propane. By volume, in a cylinder, it is approximately the same (I believe).
By number of atoms, it is much more (a factor of 10 or so).
Weight is the same, but because the number of atoms is so much higher isn't the pressure a lot higher? PV=nRT and all that?
I presume the leakage loss in storage also raises the price of Helium. People buy propane just-in-case knowing they can store it forever while helium is a "buy it before you use it" kind of thing.
The U.S. government is selling large quantities of helium at below market prices, apparently (though I'm not sure what a below market price is...if they are willing to keep selling at that price doesn't it become the market price?).
That statement by the chairman of the Balloon Association doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Helium is an inert gas. Recycled helium is just as good as new helium. We extracted it from natural gas, and we can just as well extract it from "balloon air."
It's more a question of purity. If the gas pumped into balloons is actually only 99% helium and 1% miscellaneous gasses then that is not a problem. In many other applications that would make the gas unusable.
Yes but it wasn't pure when we first pumped it out of the ground, either. I'd bet natural gas has a lower percentage helium than "balloon air." We are able to purify helium.
I expect the difference is that when extracting helium from natural gas, the volumes are huge and therefore the purification process is economically feasible.
Trying to do the same for small amounts of helium collected here and there is possible but not economically feasible. It makes more sense to use it as balloon gas.
It also costs energy to extract helium from natural gas. If running out of helium is our concern, then the balloon air is a source of helium we can exploit just as well as natural gas. It's not like we have helium wells pulling pure helium out of the ground.
"Markets" only work when there is a seller, and neither helium nor tuna have a seller.
The price of Tuna is set of "how expensive is it to produce a can of tuna" rather than "how many tuna are left in the ocean".
In fact, the lower the production cost of tuna fishing, the higher the risk that we empty the ocean of all the tuna.
It's really a problem of the Tragedy of the commons. There is no cost of tuna in the ocean, except the cost of fishing it. So it's a commons, and it will be overexploited.
Tuna from the ocean at large may be a "commons", sure, but helium comes from natural gas deposits, which tend to be in areas where one nation or another claims exclusive rights to said deposits, treats them like property, and seeks to maximize the value they can extract from them (while still competing with other resource-holders in a market).
If those harvesting tuna had to meet the full cost, ie they had to replace the tuna, then tuna would be more expensive. The price doesn't reflect the cost because the planet/ecosystem is being robbed.
If I sell fruit but I get it by stealing it from a neighbour then I'll be able to afford to sell the fruit at a far lower cost than the cost of manufacture and still get a profit.
Fishing, at a low enough volume, it is sustainable, which humans have been doing for dozens of millennia.
The problem comes when the threshold is reached and passed. That is specifically the tragedy of the commons. It's a fractal problem - i.e., even if one country fixes the issue through regulation/taxes/prohibition, another country may still overfish a shared body of water.
The "full cost" wouldn't need to be replacing each fish caught. It would be a fee/tax to ensure a sustainable fish population - this could still result a reasonable market for fish.
>The "full cost" wouldn't need to be replacing each fish caught. It would be a fee/tax to ensure a sustainable fish population - this could still result a reasonable market for fish. //
There are lots of different types of tuna, some much more expensive than others. The tuna people talk about that is running out and that is used for things like high end sushi is Bluefin tuna which is very expensive. The stuff you get in cheap cans is either Skipjack tuna or Bonito (which are not technically tuna fish) both of which are cheap and relatively plentiful.
One thing to keep in mind is that the helium used for balloons is a fairly small amount of helium compared to say, an MRI machine, in the same way a dripping faucet is way less water than a garden hose. But if you leave the dripping faucet on long enough, your water bill is going to go up.
At least that's how stocks work. If something will be in high demand/price in the future, it will shift and be in high demand now.