OCTOBER 25 2015
HE’S COMING AND WE MADE HIM.
Have you cut down on your driving, lowered the heat in your house, downsized to 1950 housing standards, walked or biked where it was possible, gone vegetarian, ripped out that lawn and started to grow your own produce? Of course not. Nobody else you know has done that, so why should you.
Let me go back a few years. When I started selling real estate in 1963 the first house I sold was a new 3 bedroom brick bungalow, full basement, measuring 40 feet by 25 feet or 1,000 square feet for $12,000. Then the family size was 4.5 persons, giving each person about 220 square feet. Now the average new house is 2400 square feet, occupied by a small family of 2.6 persons, or close to 1,000 sq.ft per person. Cheap and abundant energy made this possible, and, of course, cheap money, thus lots of debt. Downsizing to 1960 standards would mean 600 sq.ft. dwellings and a huge saving in carbon!
Appealing to people to restrain themselves by self-enforced abstinence alone is a waste of time. By and large, we consume as much as our incomes allow: the more we earn, the bigger the car, the larger the living space, the more we fly, the further away the vacations. In other words: we love to tell the world that we are well-off.
My opinion
We will not, we will never, change our living habits voluntarily. That bodes ill for climate change and will cause HIM to come. Nobody in the Western world – of course there are a few exceptions – will go against the grain, will be a climate change leader, yet we will have to if the world will stop the process of Climate Change.
Next month the world will meet in Paris to discuss this matter. With Stephen Harper out of the picture in Canada and the Australian Abbott also booted out, two vocal Climate Change deniers will not be heard. However the USA is still the wild card. Obama is convinced that the world is in danger, but less than 35 percent of its population shares that view.
The only way to stop Global Warming is to enforce it by law. Only when enforceable and enforced constraints are in place for everyone, can manmade global warming be curtailed. That simply means that we need a world-wide body to legally enforce the way we live. Does that point to the HIM, the Anti-Christ?
Justin Trudeau in Canada and whoever will be president in the USA have their work cut out for them. In Europe it is a little easier. They have the Euro area, comprising most of that part of the world. There is a governing body in place to start a process of carbon use curtailment. Also, generally, Europeans are much more climate conscious than we in North America. I can see Canada come around somewhat, but there is no doubt that it is almost impossible to curtail energy use there. We simply cannot abandon the McMansion we have built everywhere. The only way to force people to alter their wasteful living habits is to tax them on the carbon fuels they use. In other words: a carbon tax.
Of course a carbon tax solves nothing. The rich can afford to pay it. And the poor? Well they’ll sell their ration to the rich, so it is a sort of wealth transfer. More about that next week when I take a stab at the number 666.
Let’s face it: we have painted ourselves in a corner. We have built a society based on cheap and abundant and – presumably – friendly fuel. We now know that this was totally wrong, but once on that road it is impossible to turn back: it is a one way street to universal suicide.
When the substance used in refrigeration was seen to cause the Ozone layer to disappear, the so-called Montreal Accord was universally accepted because there was a non-polluting alternative readily available. Now we must replace fossil fuel with solar and wind power, which is possible to some degree as long as energy to make thee panels and towetrs is cheap and widely available because it still takes electricity to fuel hybrid cars; it still takes all sorts of steel and other material to fabricate them, using perhaps as much energy to manufacture and transport them than they save in fossil fuels. And then there is long distance trucking and airplanes.
Elections
I closely followed the Canadian elections and still do so for the USA where politics has become a total farce, which bodes ill for the world. Were the government there to legislate a carbon tax there, the country would see a revolt.
For Canada too it does not look promising. Take Canada`s recent election. The mantra all party leaders forcefully proclaimed was that Economic growth would be their prime goal. The Liberal Trudeau went the furthest by promising deficit financing to build or repair the infra structure so that heavily polluting cars and trucks would have a smoother ride. Expanding the infrastructure means new jobs, more carbon costs and also more taxes: Infinite Economic growth in a Finite World is impossibility. None of the politicians even hinted at this.
We all love our television. We love watching sports. We love the situation comedies, all financed by advertising which have as sole purpose to sell us more things we don`t need with money we don`t have.
I repeat: it just can’t be done, assuring that HE will come.
A steady state economy, which means a no growth society, will only be achieved when a new human consciousness emerges. That means a totally new mindset. This means a complete reversal of the way we now live. Even if this were to happen, even if everybody would suddenly be a convinced environmentalist, nothing would change because of the sort of suburban society we have created, including the massive Wal-Mart stores, the Big Box business model: change has become structurally impossible. We simply cannot go back to small dwellings, small local communities and local enterprise, no matter how willing we are. Only demonic repression, a ruthless dictatorship, a regime with a wide-spread secret police and death penalties for energy abusers is able to only somewhat make this possible. Prepare for HIM to come.
Voluntary curtailment just can’t be done.
Like so many others we too have kids spread out over North America which mean airplane trips either for us to see them or for them to visit us. Our grandchildren want jobs, need economic growth to make a career. In short: a no growth society is a pipe dream. We can’t change anymore. Nobody wants a stagnated society, not a soon-to-graduate student looking for the first job; not immigrants who arrive with almost nothing; not newlyweds considering starting a family; not academics building research programs or pursuing tenure; not development officers of green non-profit organizations; not the newly elected Prime Minister of Canada. Perhaps a few old fogeys like me, a somewhat well-off retiree. That’s about it.
Granted, we in North America certainly could do with less. Europe, with an equal if not higher standard of living, manages to do so at half the carbon use. But how about China or India, where a good portion of the population lives on a dollar or two per day. No way will ROW, the Rest of the World condone a no-growth policy.
What will eventually happen?
We eventually will see the implementation of some sort of wartime energy rationing, perhaps by means of electronic coupons that must be surrendered with each fill-up, electricity payment and heating fuel. Each person receiving an equal share. That how it was done during the war in Europe with food and clothing. Extra coupons too be bought from those who use less. It means, of course, a world-wide police state. More about that next week. Failure to implement this mean unrestrained weather catastrophes. We are well on the way for this: every month this year has been the warmest ever, with September exceeding all.
Yes, we live in interesting times.
It is fascinating to follow the USA political scene. What is going on there is a snapshot of what is happening elsewhere. Gone are all illusions. The United States is abandoning its self-imposed overseer of international order. What Paul Kennedy in his classic book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers predicted, is happening: money problems and budget constraints will force once Great nations to stop policing the world- as the US has been doing – or face monetary collapse.
The real problem is that we have abandoned God.
Jesus once wondered whether he, upon his return, would still find faith on earth. Indeed our deeper problem is spiritual. Capitalism has brought the world to the edge of environmental collapse. Now all sorts of pseudo religions are appearing, one of them evident in the USA in the Tea Party vision of individual priority where Government action of any kind is seen as evil. And that in an age where only concerted action to combat Climate Change can give us a bit of hope.
Common sense is no longer an option there. In the USA are emerging fanatic movements, devoid of reason. In case after case, “reasonableness” has been trampled by behavior and creed that is stronger, darker and less temperate. As David Brooks wrote in the New York Times: “Fanatics flock to the Middle East to behead strangers and apostates. China’s growing affluence hasn’t led to sweetening, but in many areas to nationalistic belligerence. Iran is still committed to its radical eschatology. Russia is led by a cold-eyed thug with a semi-theological vision of his nation’s destiny. He seeks every chance to undermine the world order.”
All politicians are at a loss how to counter this. Canada may have elected a charming new leader, but smiles and hugs are no remedy for Climate Change, budget deficits, falling oil prices, universal deflation, or a Super El Nino. Persons such as Trump in the USA and Carson, both leading the polls in the Republican contest for the Presidency, are purely false prophets. Can Hillary Clinton rescue us? No person can because the problems are larger than life.
I once wrote long ago that civilization started in the Middle East and it looks like it will end there too as Russia and its arrogant leader has now increased the odds of this happening.
No longer can diplomacy and appeal to common sense be used to rectify the world situation.
Last week NASA, the USA National Aeronautics and Space Administration, predicted that California will experience a major earthquake in the next 30 months. The Revelation of John, the last Bible book, predicts that one of the signs of the last days is a giant earthquake.
A super El Nino is on the way. There was also one in 1918, the year of the Spanish Flu, which killed anywhere from 40-100 million people when the entire world population was less than 2 billion. People now think that the 1918 El Nino contributed to the onset of that pandemic as an El Nino affects weather patterns throughout the entire world, causing extreme droughts in some places and floods in others. A similar pandemic today with 7 billion plus people in the world could well kill hundreds of millions, especially since, according to the influential medical magazine The Lancet, 90 percent of the world population already suffers from some sort of disease.
Where is this all heading?
Writing in The American Interest, Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown argues that we are heading toward an “Age of Exhaustion.” That sounds true to me. Most certainly we are at the end of Capitalism whose mantra is ‘creative destruction’. We have used up 50 percent of all life on earth to satisfy our growing population and its inexhaustible appetite for all things natural. I repeat that Infinite Growth in a Finite World is impossible, yet our politicians utter this phrase all the time and win elections on this platform.
The Bible tells us time and again that “we must love God above all and our neighbors as ourselves”. To love God means to love his creation. That is the core of our failing. The world is full of false prophets: the Donald Trumps in the USA, the Le Pens in France, the ISIS caliph in the Arab world, and Vladimir Putin in Russia. They will make matters worse and speed up the coming of a world ruler, the Anti-Christ, who will try to enslave us all.
Next week: What could the number 666 mean?