In this section we look at the simple economics of a nonrenewable resource in which the basic quesion is: Given a known quantity of a non renewable resource, how fast should it be extracted and used? To address this in a simple but revealing way, we limit the analysis to just two time prriods, this year and next year. A two-period analysis is clearly unrealistic, but the essence of efficiency in this case is the balance achieved between “today” and the “future,” and the logic of this trade-off can be explored quite well with this simple model.