Exponential growth in material resource consumption is necessarily a short term phenomenon on the scale of known history. The UCSD Do The Math guy has shown why exponential supply growth is not possible in the long run. The more binding constraint is the lack of demand growth. Even if the world had the capacity to supply every person with an extra 100 tons per year of steel or an extra 10 tons of pork, why would everyone buy that much? There's no point. It would be like hoarding drums full of seawater. Whether we plan for the end or not, the exponential growth era is transitory.