We of course never exhaust our resources, but resource depletion certainly changes the economics of things. In the 1980's, the talk in aerospace was about supersonic passenger flight. The rise in fuel prices totally killed that idea, and set the direction for the past three decades in the industry, research into more efficient subsonic turbofan powered aircraft.
Fuel was an issue, but only one. Other impacts, including the prospect of over-ground supersonic flight inflicting millions of people to multiple sonic booms daily was another.
Garrett Hardin (of "Tragedy of the Commons" fame) was one of the critics of SST, and I believe it was that which prompted him to note, effectively, that humans didn't simply have to follow the technological imperative: that because we could do something we had to do it.
I'm surprised that, post-Concorde the claim is that Concorde was actually making BA a profit. It had always been presented as a commercial failure to my recollection:
On average Concorde made and operating profit of £30-50 Million a year for British Airways in the boom years where many passengers were travelling first class. British Airways reportedly received £1.75 Billion in revenue for Concorde services against an operating cost of around £1 Billion. Air France made a much smaller profit.
