Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

January 3 2016

2016 Anno Domini –in the year of the Lord

Horae, dies, menses, anni, sicut umbrae fugiunt.

That is Latin. It means: hours, days, months, years, are as fleeting as shadows.

A new year. A Dutch song plays through my head, which, translated, goes: “Whatever the future holds, God’s hand will guide me.” I believe that. That line is especially relevant for the time we live in.
Last week I read a quote by Karl Barth, a great Protestant theologian and contemporary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Barth wrote, “Theology is done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” When Barth and Bonhoeffer first met in 1931 at an informal gathering at Barth’s residence, Bonhoeffer said, “There is a passage from Luther which says, ‘the godless man’s curse can be more pleasing to God than the hallelujahs of the pious.’ According to an eyewitness Barth shot out of his chair: “That’s wonderful! Where is that passage?”

Years later, in 1942, the two met again at Lake Geneva, where Bonhoeffer asked Barth whether or not he believed that all creation will one day come back again: “Will it be – like Lake Geneva”, to which Barth replied, “Yes! Like Lake Geneva!” Quotes like that bring tears to my eyes. There in one sentence is the core of my belief.

Back to the first quote: “Theology is done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” That’s exactly what I am doing all the time in my blogs: we must see all of life in the light of Scriptures and all of Scripture in the light of today. That does not mean that the Bible is a book that predicts certain specific events, even though, in broad outlines it does that. It tells us that God created, that he gave this creation for us to develop, that we surrendered it to the Evil one who now is in charge, that Christ bought it back at the expense of his life, and that soon creation will be restored to its full glory. Then, finally, we will be able to do what Adam and Eve were mandated to do: develop creation to its full potential.

I do believe that all signs point to an imminent return of Christ, which will be preceded by tremendous turmoil, the likes of which humanity have never experienced.
Today we experience the initial tremors, which, in the year 2016, will intensify. So brace yourself.
Ahead lies another year. Climate change combined with the most powerful El Nino will make matters everywhere more risky, so follow Jesus’ advice: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” as recorded in the King James version. My NIV (Matthew 6: 34) simply says, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

I also know that Jesus said, “look at the birds, the heavenly father feeds them, so why worry”. That was good for his time when nature was still in balance, but now matters have changed: the bird population is way down, even as the number of humans has increased exponentially. Jesus always tells us to look at what’s happening around us in nature: when trees and seas fare well, so do we. The opposite is true as well. In Matthew 24 Jesus advises us (verse 32) “Learn the lesson from the fig tree which tells us when the seasons change,” from which I conclude that, when birds disappear and human multiply and disasters become more frequent, the Day of the Lord is approaching fast, at a time we least expect it.

At the beginning of a new year there always are lots of forecasts. One, supposedly reliable source, a Harry Kent who runs his own consulting firm is quite specific: “My forecast today: the stock market will start to crash by early February, if not sooner”. That’s pretty daring, because that’s only a few weeks away. Fact is that institutional money has been fleeing the stock market for months, while the Moms and Pops, the common folk, have kept the shares.
Making prediction is foolishness, especially about the future, someone once said. Almost four years ago, at the time of the Olympics in London in August 2012, I did make a prediction in my Christian Courier column. Here what I wrote in September 2012.

“I don’t like mega churches, but I loved it when 400 million people world-wide heard an old-fashioned sermon at the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics. It happened at the end of the show recalling the sinking of the Titanic, then exactly 100 years ago. The Titanic now is a name synonymous with disaster. The ‘lesson’ was delivered by a regal-looking Emeli Sandé who sang all five verses of Abide with me, the hymn supposedly played while the ship slowly sank into the icy seas. (By the way American TV refused to broadcast this, it being too disheartening). She projected into the planet such biblical truths as: “Change and decay in all around I see,” but also beamed across the globe the glorious gospel of “I need your presence every passing hour. What but your grace can foil the tempter’s power?”

The Titanic reference couldn’t have been more up-to-date. In 2012, one hundred years after its sinking the entire world is in a Titanic mode: drowning in an ocean of debt. The phrase “fast falls the eventide” reminded me of Oswald Spengler`s famous book Der Untergang des Abendlandes, the Demise of the Evening Empire: our Western world, yet few, if any, of the 400 million viewers realized that then and there they may have witnessed “the global swan song”, when she intoned “Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day, earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away”. It may seem farfetched but to me it meant that Brazil’s preparations, already underway for 2016, may well come to nought, because the 2012 London Olympics could well have been the final one.

“Do I today really think that the 2012 Olympics could be the last of the global games?

“Here’s what could very well happen. Today a four year term is like a century, that’s how fast events are happening. Just look at the speed of Climate Change. Next year millions will starve as harvests are down everywhere, with worse to come. The most e-mailed article in a recent New York Times issue was: “Hundred – Year Forecast: Drought.” Imagine no rain year after year!“

That’s what I wrote almost four years in the Christian Courier. The editor did not like it at all: too pessimistic!

Today Brazil is in a lot of trouble. If Harry Kent’s prediction is true – and we will soon find out – and the stock market falls as much as he predicts, then the entire world economy is at risk, heralding times as bad as the 1930-40 depression which was only cured when the 1939-45 war called for millions of soldiers to fight and die and untold material war production of tanks and ships and airplanes revved up job growth and put a stop to high unemployment. That may well mean no 2016 Olympics.

So what are the trends?

Usually what lies ahead is a continuation of the past. 2015 was the year when deflation started. It seems to me that deflation – a fall in prices of commodities, such as steel, coal, oil – will continue, due to overbuilt capacity, especially in China. Also the refugee problem will be with us for a long time, made worse by low oil prices which mean that no money is available to bribe the people in the Middle East, which will fuel the unrest and public dissatisfaction. Angry people kill, meaning millions more refugees.

Here at home, in Tweed, Ontario, I am a member of a board – head the finance committee – to sponsor a refugee family. We only have seen the beginning of this effort to help those displaced by war. It seems to me that this trend will not only continue but intensify. In times of stress, people fight. And stress will be with us, including environmental stress which, at this point is displacing millions of people everywhere: Australia, the Philippines, South America, the Southern USA, and also in Great Britain. In the years to come rising sea levels will force many more millions from their homes.

What is happening in the Middle East is the result of political decisions made 100 years ago when Victorious France and Great Britain divided the defeated Ottoman Empire between themselves and tore up the cohesion maintained by the Turks. Of course Climate Change is something that has been going on since the early 1800s with the start of the Industrial Revolution. We now are facing the consequences of the “sins of the fathers.”
What 2015 should have made clear, and did in a way but not nearly clear enough, is that the world economy is falling apart due to a Ponzi bubble of over-production, over-capacity, over-investment, over-borrowing, all of which was grossly overleveraged: there simply is too much debt out there, and that debt especially applies to our physical world: water, air, soil. Add to this the fact that most of the investments are highly leveraged, which means that typically a loss of just a few percent can wipe out the principal, and a notion of the risks becomes clear.

Janet Yellen’s rate hike in the USA will mean some extra profits for those same banks at the cost of the rest of the financial world, but with growth not going to return for a very long time, and with deflation hitting everything in sight and then some, matters do not look good for 2016 and beyond.

David Stockman, Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget now seems to have firmly caught up with the deflation theme. Stockman too says that we are entering an epic deflationary era with the result that the world economy is actually going to shrink for the first time since the 1930s.
He writes:
“There has been so much over-investment in energy, mining, materials processing, manufacturing and warehousing that nothing new will be built for years to come. [..] .. there will be a severe curtailment in the production of mining and construction equipment, oilfield drilling rigs, heavy trucks and rail cars, bulk carriers and container ships, materials handling machinery and warehouse rigging, machine tools and chemical processing equipment and much, much more.”
You won’t find this in the general newspapers, but here and there people are finally acknowledging that all is not well. Deflation is much more dangerous than modest inflation. Deflation means that the value of an office building that once sold for $100 million is suddenly worth only $60million. Money goes POOF, it disappears: money that appears to be real and present just vanishes, goes up in smoke.
2016 could well be the year when a lot of ‘underlying wealth’ evaporates. Trillions of dollars already have disappeared in the commodities markets, but, again, our media don’t tell us about it, or at least they frame it in different terms. They use deflation to mean falling consumer prices, but then insist on calling lower oil prices at the pump a positive thing, without recognizing that those falling prices eat away at the entire economy, and at society at large.
Trends are all important. Falling prices of oil – disastrous for Canada – and the lowest steel prices in the last decade will create trouble on the employment picture not only at home but also in China and everywhere, because China has been the growth engine for the world economy. The downturn will continue in 2016. Combine that with the “weirding of the weather” and we have a recipe for retrenchment.

If history is any guide then governments, seeing their country slide down into a deep enough pit, may consider going to war. That’s the last thing we need: our fragile cosmos can no longer afford a peace-time economy, let alone all-consuming warfare.

On a parting note:

This year EERDMANS in Grand Rapids will publish two books by Dr. J. H. Bavinck I have translated

In May THE RIDDLE OF LIFE, described as follows:

In the spirit of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, eminent Calvinist
thinker J. H. Bavinck’s Riddle of Life offers a compact and com-
pelling treatise on Christian belief, starting with the eternal
questions that haunt every conscious human being: Why are we
here? Where do we come from? What is our destiny? How should
we live? He goes on to explore essential topics including sin, salvation,
and Jesus the Redeemer; faith and idolatry; God’s great plan
for creation; and the ultimate purpose behind our lives.
This lucid new translation of a classic text will make Bavinck’s
profound reflections on faith and the meaning of human life
accessible to a new generation of seekers.

Later in the year a book on REVELATION by the same author will be published. I will keep you posted.

DECEMBER 27 2015

DOES CHRISTIANITY NEED ANOTHER PARADIGM SHIFT?

(I am struggling with this idea: comments are appreciated.)

2000 years ago there was indeed a paradigm shift in the concept of what was seen as the true religion, one from being saved by adhering to the laws of Moses, the Torah, to Paul’s message of being saved ‘by grace alone through faith’. There were significant outward changes as well: the Saturday Sabbath became the Sunday Day of Rest, honoring Jesus’ Resurrection. Circumcision was replaced by Baptism: deed was combined with word.
Are similar changes needed today? The ‘being saved by grace alone’ is just as true as before, but is Sola Scripture still valid now after 2000 years? Is “Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus”, no salvation outside the church, a Roman Catholic doctrine, also outdated? Has being saved based on the preaching of Scriptures alone become the equivalent of what used to be the adherence to the law?

All these are controversial questions, perhaps highly inconvenient for the ministers of the gospel, whose stock in trade is being questioned here, putting their job at risk.

Let me throw a good Reformed slogan into the mix: Ecclesia Reformata, semper Reformanda, meaning that “The church is reformed and always is in the process of Reforming.

I’d wish this were really true, because Christianity desperately needs a different Reformation, a total change in direction, witness the exodus of many, especially the youth.
Why now? The naked truth is that we are entering a time of alarming and bewildering change — the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a totally new employment scene, while simultaneously coping with multispecies mass extinction and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Yes, the end of the world is now openly discussed. That’s why the church, which I love, also needs a total different approach.
Fact is we do experience the end of civilization as we know it because we all, Christian and non-Christian, have been sucked in a way of life that destroys God’s Holy Creation. A number of focused studies — by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for instance — have warned us that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a ‘perfect storm’ within about fifteen years.
Church people by and large refuse to see this, thanks to the Heaven Heresy: why bother with the earth if we go to heaven anyway? That the world groans under the weight of seven plus billion humans, while every new birth adds another mouth hungry for food, another life greedy for energy, is not seen as important by them.
We forget that God has removed himself from the earth. 1 John 5: 19 explicitly tells us that the Evil one rules. God has left us to our devices and we are on our own. Deuteronomy comes to mind: “I shall hide my face from them; I will see what their end will be.” (Deut. 32:20). We are on our own. The world has become Satan’s domain. Nietzsche has written somewhere that when God is dead – and we have declared him as such – then everything is permitted. Just imagine: Right-wing denialists – usually the church-going crowd – insist that climate change isn’t happening, or that it’s not caused by humans, or that the real problem is terrorism or refugees, while left-wing denialists – usually the liberal Democrats, Canada’s Justin Trudeau included – insist that the problems are fixable, under our control, merely a matter of political will.

Perhaps it is dawning on people that since nothing is fixable anymore, we might as well kill as many people as possible, before we kill ourselves, as now happens all too frequently. Meanwhile, as the gap between the future we’re entering and the future we once imagined grows ever wider, nihilism takes root in the shadow of our fear: if all is already lost, nothing matters anyway.
Signs that nothing matters anymore are everywhere: in TV shows, I am told, because I never watch TV except for news programs, and these newscasts now are called ‘shows’ too because they have to be entertaining. What is so entertaining about tornadoes and Trump and his nonsensical tirades, or about drowning refugees and the rush to war, sectarianism and racial hatred?

At the core is the total absence of religion: what is missing is the belief that ultimately God is in charge and that his Kingdom is on the way. The concept of the kingdom, the new earth to come, is totally absent in the ecclesiastical scene, so nihilism, religious nihilism has taken over. The heaven-heresy simply encourages this.

The greatest failure in our times has been the churches, just as they were in Germany in the time of Hitler. When Bonhoeffer argued this point he was killed. Yes, there are still voices that argue against ‘the spirit of this age’, Pope Francis among them. But is there true reform in the Roman Church? No. Where are the women in the Roman Church? Why that destructive celibacy ordinance? And then all these elaborate vestments and a strictly enforced hierarchy, from cardinal down, an organizational form more Old Testament than the freedom Christ proclaimed.
Perhaps churches today are as outdated as the synagogues in the time after Pentecost. Of course churches are still needed, because the new birth has to start there, just as Christianity is a child of Jewry.

Friedrich Nietzsche, one of Western philosophy’s most incisive diagnosticians of religion, wrote near the end of the 19th century: “Man will sooner will nothingness than not will.” That to me suggests that we prefer ‘nothing’ over something: the entire entertainment enterprise basically consists of nothing, including the fanatic attachment to a certain sports team, or the Jihad movement in the Middle East, both totally nihilistic – Satan inspired concepts. When Nietzsche wrote “Man will sooner will nothingness than not will,” he offered an explanation for today: we, on the precipice of nihilism, would rather choose self-annihilation over a simply structured life.

The Nazi movement was a good example of that. Today we see it in every new suicide attack by jihadi terrorists. As nihilism becomes more ingrained, we just might stumble toward another thoughtless war, asking young men and women to throw their lives away so we might continue believing the Western way of life means something. In essence war is active nihilism supplanting a passive one because war reduces everything to ‘nothing’, to nihil.
Nietzsche wasn’t himself a nihilist: he loved creation. When he saw a horse whipped to death by a cruel owner, he literally lost his mind. As a son of a Lutheran clergyman, and a grandson of one as well, and early in life slated to follow in their footsteps, he knew the Bible as no other. He also saw the church accommodating to the world and so became a severe critic of religion as was practiced in Germany in his day. With the church dead, he wrote that for all practical purposes God is dead as well.

Today, as every hour brings new alarms of war and climate disaster, we might wish we could take Nietzsche’s place. He had to cope only with the death of God, while we must come to terms with the death of our world. Peril lurks on every side, from the delusions of hope to the fury of reaction, from the despondency of hopelessness to the promise of destruction.

We stand today on a precipice of a total annihilation that Nietzsche could not have even imagined. There is no reason to hope that we’ll be able to slow down global warming before we pass a tipping point. We’re already one degree Celsius above preindustrial temperatures and there’s at least another half a degree baked in. The West Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, Greenland is melting, permafrost across the world is liquefying, and methane has been detected leaking from sea floors and Siberian craters: it’s already too late to stop these feedbacks, which means it’s already too late to stop apocalyptic planetary warming.
Yet the church refuses to see the signs of the times. Business as usual: pious sermons every Sunday to the chosen few. Or are they the frozen few? Unable to dislodge themselves from our Satanic way of life?

Meanwhile the world slides into hate-filled, bloody havoc, as foretold in the last book of the Bible, Revelation.
Yes, in a world founded on hope, built with “can do” grit, and bedazzled by its own technological wizardry, the very idea that something might be beyond our power or that humans have intrinsic limits verges on blasphemy.

I repeatedly am called a ‘pessimist’. Basically people believe that every problem has a solution; suggesting otherwise stirs a deep and often hostile resistance. It’s not so much that accepting the truth of our situation means thinking the wrong thought, but rather thinking the unthinkable. The church is at the forefront of this denial, totally forgetting the core of Bible teaching and the reason why Christ died: he died to save the world, the cosmos, now in the power of Satan and nihilism.
It seems to me that often the church has no message anymore for the world. Its function has been reduced to ceremonial and preaching to the converted. Converted to what? Its very existence in beautiful buildings, accessible only by automobiles, means that it must cling to a progressivist, profit-seeking, technology-can-fix-it ideology of fossil-fueled capitalism. The youth sees through this and is abandoning the church in droves.

So what must happen?

Instead the church and especially Christian Education from bottom to top, need to learn to let our current civilization die and gear up for the New World to come, a world as envisioned in the last chapters of Revelation. Christians need to work together to transform a global order of meaning focused on accumulation into a new order of meaning that knows the value of limits, knows the meaning of eternity, knows the truth of the holiness of creation.
We also need to learn to see the world not just with Western eyes but with Buddhist and Hebrew eyes and Inuit eyes, not just with human eyes but with golden-cheeked warbler eyes, with pacific-salmon eyes, and Arctic polar bear eyes, and not even just with eyes at all but with the wild, barely articulate being of clouds and seas and rocks and trees and stars.

The Bible tells us in 1 John 5: 19 that today the Evil one rules. That’s why Jesus told us that we don’t belong to that world (John 17: 14), a world dominated by evil. We belong to the world to come, God’s new world. That is the shift we have to make. Truly a paradigm shift. We all are like the proverbial frog, being boiled to death. Can we still extract ourselves from the death-trap we live in?
Today we are on the eve of what will be the human world’s greatest catastrophe. None of us chose this, not deliberately. None of us can choose to avoid it either.
As Christians we today have a different calling. The old way of life is gone. The new way of life is upon us. No longer can the old endure; no longer is it business as usual. Yes, the old ways have been good for us.

And here I address myself to my generation of Dutch immigrants and their offspring. They have done well in the new country, myself included: they have always been at the forefront of Christian action. Apart from a few tiny instances, these people and their offspring still act as if nothing has changed and will change. They, we all, have to accept that we live in the last days: all signs point to this. This means that we live in drastically different times. The church has to switch, make a radical change from exclusively regarding the Scriptures as the sole source of inspiration to concentrating effectively on God’s Primary Word, his Direct Revelation: God’s Holy creation: the world we will inherit!

Scripture and the church will disappear in the New Creation, where God’s Cosmos is All and in All. This is already happening! If Romans 1: 20 condemns those who have failed to see creation as God’s, then, indeed, John 3: 16 stands out as the center of the Gospel: Loving God’s Holy Earth and living so that it remains holy and we with it.

We have to abandon the ruinous way of life that’s destroying us today, and that has to start in the Christian education system, inculcating the youth and young adults. The Reformed Churches have been pioneers in “all things Christian”. Now it must lead in seeing all of creation as holy as well. Can they make these changes?
That means they have to prepare for a totally different life, a life of permanence, a life of permaculture, a life of eternal perpetuity in open defiance of the Evil one, in open obedience to God the Creator.
That is the new and final Christian message: none other is relevant anymore.

Is a paradigm shift still possible? Deed must be combined with word.

December 20 2015

ARE WE ABLE TO MANAGE THE EARTH?

The world is old, very old. The most prolific species on earth were and still are trees. In early days these trees gave the earth perfect health in the form of massive doses of oxygen, abundant rain, while strong storms battered their branches, wrenching out the dead wood, and so seeding the soil.
This beginning reminds me of a small volume of poems, Naked Trees, written by John Terpstra, an upright Frisian, now living in Ontario. Here is one of his poems:

Achievement

A tree will grow to the furthest limits of its gradually acquired strength. Leading a life of pure sensation, or rather, response: a life of pure response to its vegetable senses. And it is a major achievement of Creation to have prompted such various, unbroken replies. The earth and air, sun and water are all required: the response each time appears singularly inspired.
And yet, as it grows and spreads, budging and crimping the nether inches and taking more space from the sky, the tree will not move in the least from its original stand. Will end where it began. The sight is almost too familiar, and open to interpretation: rigid limbs extend the solid, uncompromising shaft: paralysis. Or, incomparable aspiration.
The tree grows, furthering only itself, to which end achieves this blatant majesty.

While typing in these lines I am reminded of my Father’s prayer. In the household on my youth my father prayed aloud before each meal. One phrase always was: “As the tree falls, there it remains,” hinting that when we die all chance for redemption is past: we better turn to the Lord before it is too late.

In the beginning there was the tree: the Tree of Life because the Tree personifies life. The world today will surely perish because we are mercilessly eradicating the tree. We have no regard for its blatant majesty. The Bible starts with the Tree; it ends with the Tree and in the center there is the Golgotha Tree. In the last book of the Bible, the very last chapter, it says: “The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” Just as we killed Christ, who, in that act, saved us, so we destroy the trees, and these trees too will do the opposite: their final act is healing the harm we do and have done to creation. It is so fitting that Jesus died on a tree. His flesh was first embedded into the tree. His blood first penetrated into the tree. When we kill the tree we kill ourselves.
While our violence towards each other has diminished somewhat (no large-scale wars since 1945), our violence towards the living planet is intensifying. The megafauna – trees from shore to shore, animals everywhere – that once dominated most parts of the world is now confined to small and shrinking pockets, from which trees are also disappearing at stupendous speed. In this year’s fire season, much of the Indonesian rainforest has been fragmented and drastically reduced. The marine ecosystem too is collapsing in front of our eyes, with food webs unraveling by overfishing and pollution. Soil, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Association, is being lost so fast that the world has, on average, just another 60 years of crop production.

Are we able to turn the corner? Can we really rectify this situation?

Professor Dr. Jan Tinbergen, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics wrote in 1987 a small volume, entitled: “Are we able to manage the Earth?” (Kunnen wij de AARDE beheren?).

That question came up in me when I followed the Paris conference on Climate Change. There 195 heads of states hammered out an agreement supposedly making it possible for the earth to exist a bit longer. In essence there too the unspoken question was: “Are we really capable to create a healing, healthy environment for LIFE? I write LIFE in capital letters because we cannot exist on the earth in isolation. Dying trees, uprooted trees, trees perishing in persistent conflagration, mean dying human, dying animals, dying species.

Tinbergen starts at the earth’s beginning, writing how for a very long time the earth existed without human beings: but there were trees, trillions of them. Had I existed then breathing in the rich atmosphere, saturated with oxygen, inhaling pure air, undiluted, free of any contamination, my whole being would be almost geared to live forever, just as the people in the beginning of Genesis who lived well into their tenth century.
Tinbergen traces the roots of civilization, telling us how our Western culture owes much to the ancient Greeks and Romans. To the Greeks we owe art and science, democracy and religion; to the Romans our legal system. To Christianity we owe the love for our world-wide neighbors, still evident today in the way we in Canada, in Germany and Sweden, welcome the refugees, the lost and homeless.

Tinbergen cites a book by a Finnish scientist and politician, translated in 1987 – before inclusive language – as: “The World of Man”, wherein Pekka Kuusi starts with something we all need: food. In the beginning food came exclusively from trees and plants, and from hunting and fishing. Gradually this nomadic lifestyle changed to more settled life, when agriculture became the norm.

Kuusi estimates that some 40,000 years ago there were only between half to one million people in the entire world, growing to some 5 million 8,000 years before Christ, and some 250 million people at the time of Christ, concentrated around the Mediterranean, which literally means “The middle of the earth”. Then Primary Productivity was 100 percent, which basically meant that all animals could live unencumbered by human danger, except for hunting, of course. . And trees were everywhere, so the air was pure, the water was pristine, the soil uncontaminated. Primary productivity is now reduced to 50 percent.
Of course, all people were religious, not necessarily Christian, but all believing in a god or gods. There simply was no other explanation for what people observed and experienced.

It is remarkable that every 500 years there emerges a new type of worship. Starting in the year 1000 before Christ, the Yahweh temple was erected in Jerusalem, about 500 years later Buddhism was born. We start our calendar from the date of the birth of Christ and the rise of Christianity. In the year 500 Islam came into being and quickly conquered the Middle East world because Christianity, so successfully replacing paganism by means of the Apostle Paul, had become fossilized so they quickly embraced the new gospel of the prophet Mohammed.
Europe, after the Fall of Rome in 460 AD, was traumatized, while the Crusades, the Viking invasions, the terrible plagues, then constant wars, meant that for close to 1000 years, until 1500, development stagnated, and the population remained stuck at some 250 million, too preoccupied to break the hold of Roman Catholic Christianity.

All this finally changed with Martin Luther in 1517, and the start of the Protestant Reformation.

That event is now 500 years ago, time for another major new Religion to emerge. Is the Anthropocene Epoch the new religion: the age when Humanity totally lives without God? Or the wrong God? I think so.

On July 1 2001 I bought a book in Stratford, Ontario, nothing special, since even now I keep on buying them. “Something new under the sun” was the title. The author, a historian from the University of Chicago – Canadian born – J. R. McNeill, gave it the subtitle “An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World.” Most people today have little Bible knowledge, so its title probably means little to them because in Ecclesiastes 1 the Bible tells us, “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
McNeill starts his book with that quotation and says that these words today are out of date: “There is something new under the sun….. The place of humankind within the natural world is not what it was. In this respect at least, modern times are different, and we do well to remember that…………..In the 20th century humankind has begun to play dice with the planet, without knowing all the rules.”

Of course, without God there are no rules.

McNeill starts with the development of Economic Growth, still the leading measure for every finance minister in the world, because without it taxable income stagnates and the Welfare Society collapses.

He provides a table with date and GDP (Gross Domestic Product). In 1500 the world’s GDP was $100 billion, expanding to $250billion in 1820, $825 billion in 1900, $12,000 billion in 2,000, while today, I might add, it is about $15,000 billion or $15 trillion. In other words the world economy today is about 150 times bigger than in 1500, while the population has grown by a factor of perhaps 30 times, from some 250 million to the present 7.2 billion. We know that consumption is not evenly distributed, with us Westerners consuming the lion share, while a third of the world’s people suffer.
Paris COP 21 was an attempt to help the poor nations at the expense of the rich. That will be difficult because we have become addicted to growth. I had a good friend who was an alcoholic, who followed us when we moved to Tweed thinking that having a good friend would save him from the consequences of drinking. It didn’t work: he died in a car accident (DUI). Being addicted to carbon is worse than to alcohol because our entire economy depends on growth.
Addiction always starts slowly. First trees were used to save us from freezing in the dark. When Europe’s forests were at the edge of exhaustion and Europe became too crowded, America’s rich shores came begging. Then coal came to the rescue, and after that dirty fuel, OIL became the Savior of Mankind: Middle East Oil especially. Now we are hooked.

In their hearts all delegates to that powwow in Paris knew that all their talk and resolutions to reduce oil use would be useless. They knew that in our ‘Anthropocene Era’ the strong lord it over the weak, the rich build dikes, the poor drown. They knew that there’d be walls everywhere: around Europe, around the USA. They knew that we live in nation-states that are only theoretically accountable to universal moral and legal standards, that global capitalism doesn’t take into account the lives of poor people or the health of the ecosphere. Our political and economic systems are designed to discourage actions necessary to prevent catastrophe: so disaster is the obvious outcome.

Can we really manage the earth?

The European Union was an attempt to make sure that the calamities of the 20th Century would never be repeated there. Today this union is on the verge of disintegration. The same is true in the USA where the political spectrum is fraying, witness the rise of a Trump, an egomaniac par excellence. The Middle East now spells mayhem. Even the weather has gone weird, thanks to our insatiable hunger for more.
Can we manage the EARTH? In 1987 Tinbergen had his doubts. Today, almost 30 years later, it looks more unmanageable than ever.
In Revelation, the last Bible book, the end of the world is spelled out in gruesome detail. There people, frustrated at their utter impotence, fully aware that their own gods no longer function, rise up against the Prince of this world, as Jesus calls him. He, the Ultimate Evil one, then uses his ultimate weapon.

Here’s how J. H. Bavinck, in a soon to be published book on Revelation, sees it:

“There is only one solution, one radical and total cure: a nuclear bomb. For the sake of preserving the realm, the capital city must be sacrificed. All these grand buildings and its beautiful squares, all its magnificence has to go. It takes a while before they dare to make that decision, but in the end the world ruler, in consultation with his ten governors, is not afraid to execute this extreme edict. During the night one single plane from a remote airport flies high in the sky over the sleeping city, never to wake again. A bomb is released, slowly a mushroom cloud ensues, and….a rebellious Babylon is abolished forever.”

Since we are unable to manage the earth, we, by our own actions, will destroy it.

December 13 2015

Is there still a Christian Life Style?

Many a moon ago Francis Schaeffer wrote a book entitled “How then shall we live?” concentrating on Bible reading and prayer, not unlike the way the orthodox Jews and the conservative Muslims use their holy book. At the time I basically agreed with him, but no longer. I have graduated to people such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and J. H. Bavinck, and, I guess, have developed my own way of thinking, stimulated by these great men. Bonhoeffer, so extremely ahead of his time, labeled the life of most of the church-going public as ‘pious secularism’, an apt articulation because his description points to combining our creation destroying life – as secular as it comes – with what is generally understood to be Christian morality.

“How then shall we live” is not easily answered. I am sure that I am at odds with the major segment of church-going people in believing that there is no heaven to which we go upon death. I do believe that God created us to dwell on earth now and in our eternal state. That emphasis totally colors my view of “How then shall we live?” That notion implies that the manner in which I live today has to resemble the conditions I expect to see in eternity, a perpetually stable state. That is a tremendous challenge, because our entire way of life today is dominated by two factors: a wasteful existence totally dependent on carbon energy and a spiritual view of life that has an escape- to – heaven – orientation. It is nigh impossible to free ourselves from these conditions, both seen as the gospel truth.
Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t what you know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure, that just ain’t so.” This is especially true as far as ‘the heaven-thing’ is concerned. We are so convinced that Christian people go to heaven, that we never question that assumption. And this is the teaching the church has sold to its public. That’s also the reason why we simply have difficulty changing our creation-destroying habits.

So, what must we change in order to somewhat resemble a creation-friendly life?

I believe there is only a piece-meal approach. Just one example: meat-eating. I know I have talked about this before. Again and again I read how devastating the livestock industry is for the increase in global warming. It is barely mentioned in climate summits. Yet livestock and their byproducts, as Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn point out in their book, “The Sustainability Secret,” account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Methane and nitrous oxide are rarely mentioned in climate talks, although those two greenhouse gases are, as the authors point out, respectively, 86 times and 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Cattle, worldwide, they write, produce 150 billion gallons of methane daily. And 65 percent of the nitrous oxide produced by human-related activities is caused by the animal agriculture industry. Water used in fracking, they write, ranges from 70 billion to 140 billion gallons annually. Animal agriculture water consumption, the book notes, ranges from 34 trillion to 76 trillion gallons annually. Raising animals for human consumption takes up to 45 percent of the planet’s land. Ninety-one percent of the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest and up to 80 percent of global rain forest loss is caused by clearing land for the grazing of livestock and growing feed crops for meat and dairy animals. As more and more rain forest disappears, the planet loses one of its primary means to safely sequester carbon dioxide. The animal agriculture industry is, as Andersen and Kuhn write, also a principal cause of species extinction and the creation of more than 95,000 square miles of nitrogen-flooded dead zones in the oceans. Yes, the COP 21 agreement, just concluded in Paris, has no provision for this at all, assuring that Climate Change will go well beyond the 2 degree C. mark.

In order to do your tiny bit, try becoming a vegetarian.

A person who eats a vegan diet, they point out, a diet free of meat, dairy and eggs, saves 1,100 gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 30 square feet of forested land, 20 pounds CO2 equivalent, and one animal’s life every day.
Therefore, it seems to me that today, given the dangerous circumstances we have created, to the point where the viability of modern life is at stake, part of the Christian – read responsible- life style ought to be the vegetarian one. Not necessarily vegan, that means no milk and eggs, but at least a meatless diet. My wife and I have had this diet for many decades and we have done well with it.

And that brings me to agriculture in general.

When Adam and Eve were in Paradise, they had a healthy diet by eating from the trees and plants that were there in abundance. Michael Pollan, in an article in the New York Times a few years ago, wrote: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”
That’s what my wife and I do, mostly home-grown. And that’s what Adam and Eve did in Paradise. When they were expelled from there and trees and plants suddenly were no longer cooperating, they were forced to starts growing their own food: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.” (Gen. 3: 17). That’s true even now, in spite of pesticides and Monsanto.

I am city-born and raised but my grandparents were country folk, low tech, down-to-earth farmers. At that time- before World War II and, of course, also during the war – they practiced agriculture the way their parents and grandparents had done with horses and simple tools and hard work: lots of time to think as they milked the cows by hand and spread the manure over the land.
They did not see the change to mechanized farming, requiring elaborate machinery and expensive tools. They were true environmentalists, loving the earth, preserving it, enriching it. Farming was, well, just something farmers did, not an ecological question.

Today, being environmentalist is expressing concern over pollution in human communities and the need for wilderness preservation, while farming today has become just another arm of industrialization, which really means that there is no solution to environmental problems without facing the problem of agriculture. It has changed from a benefactor of humanity to one of the most destructive practices of the modern age.
Wes Jackson has been a modern-day critic of factory farming. He points out that our species’ fundamental break with nature came roughly 10,000 years ago when Adam and Eve, the humanity then, started farming. While gathering-hunting humans were capable of damaging a local ecosystem in limited ways, the shift to agriculture and the domestication of animals meant humans for the first time could dramatically alter ecosystems, typically with negative consequences. While there have been better and worse farming practices in history, soil erosion has been a consistent feature of agriculture, making agriculture the first step in the entrenchment of an unsustainable human economy based on extraction.

Agriculture’s destructive capacity was ramped up by the industrial revolution that began in the last half of the 18th century intensifying the magnitude of our assault on ecosystems. This revolution unleashed the concentrated energy of coal, oil and natural gas to run the new economy that dramatically increased productivity, transforming all manufacturing, transportation, and communication, also radically changing all social relations. People were pushed off the land and into cities that grew rapidly, often without planning. World population soared from about 1 billion in 1800 to the current 7 billion, which was made possible by the application of those industrial processes to agriculture. Vaclav Smil estimates that 45 percent of the world’s population—more than 3 billion people—would not be here without the Haber-Bosch process, creating fertilizer from natural gas, which in the early 20th century made possible the industrial production of ammonia-based fertilizers from atmospheric nitrogen, which greatly expanded food production.

We are trained to think that new technologies mean progress, but the “advances” in oil/gas-based industrial agriculture have accelerated ecological destruction. Now soil from immense monoculture fields drenched in petrochemicals not only continues to erode but also threatens groundwater supplies and creates dead zones in bodies of water such as the Gulf of Mexico. Also modern farming is a primary contributor to reductions in biodiversity and declines in ecosystem health.

The fact that agriculture is failing takes many by surprise, given the dramatic increase in yields made possible by that industrialization of farming and the use of those fossil-fuel based fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. But this is what Jackson has called “the failure of success”: Production remains high while the health of the soil continues to decline dramatically, and so short-term success masks the long-term unsustainability of the system. The Germans have a beautiful word for that process: Schlimmbesserung, an improvement that makes matters worse. We have less soil that is more degraded, and there are no technological substitutes for healthy soil; we are exhausting and contaminating groundwater; and contemporary agriculture is dependent on a finite fuel source.

More and more people recognize these problems, which has meant more produce coming from home gardening, urban farms, and community-supported agriculture. But Jackson points out that about 70 percent of the world’s calories come from annual grains that take up about 70 percent of the world’s cultivated land. That’s why The Land Institute’s research into “natural systems agriculture” investigates ways that monoculture annual grains (primarily wheat, rice, and corn) can be replaced by perennial grains grown in polycultures (mixtures of plants that don’t require new planting every season)—farming that mimics nature instead of trying to subdue it. Jackson points out that when left alone, a natural ecosystem such as a prairie recycles materials, sponsors its own fertility, runs on contemporary sunlight, and increases biodiversity. Natural systems agriculture is one attempt to produce enough food while adding to ecological capital rather than degrading it.

The industrial economy treats the world as either a mine from which we extract what we need or a landfill into which we dump our waste. While there’s no telling whether perennial polycultures are going to be the key to sustainable agriculture, it’s clear that intensifying the industrialization of agriculture is a losing bet. The modern worldview ignores the fact that everything that supports life on the planet operates in cycles. Jackson offers a powerful image of what has gone wrong: The best symbol for nature is a circle; agriculture is a human attempt to square the circle; industrial agriculture flattens the circle into a straight line on the model of a factory’s mass production.

Is there still a Christian life style?

Frankly I am afraid that this is no longer possible. No matter what we do somehow we ‘sin against creation.’
My ‘earth-oriented’ vision has changed my total faith-life. Yes, I still immensely value the Bible and prayer, but I am becoming ever more conscious that – as Revelation 21: 22 clearly indicates – both Bible and prayer no longer have a place in the New Creation. I increasingly see Creation as God’s Primary word, his direct revelation, and the Bible as God’s Secondary word, his indirect revelation. Creation therefore is more holy than the Scriptures.
In my faith-life the most important Bible text is John 3: 16 where it says that God loved the world – everything created everywhere – so much that he sacrificed the life of his dear son to buy it back from the Evil One.
There’s something else I want to emphasize: 1 John 5: 19 explicitly says that “We know we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”

That’s the situation we live in now: That’s why it is so difficult to live a truly Christian life style. The entire world is under the control of the evil one, who has promoted the Heaven Heresy as proclaimed in most Christian hymns, at most funerals, and as Mark Twain so aptly put it: “It ain’t what you know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure, that just ain’t so.”

December 6 2015

ARE WE READY FOR A PANDEMIC?

A super El Niño is on the way. El Niño is Spanish for the child. It is the name climate scientists have given the occasional periods of Pacific Ocean warming that play havoc with global weather patterns. 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. A new study shows that the 1918/1919 El Niño was one of the strongest of the 20th century. The study also noted that the 1918/1919 El Niños central Pacific location linked it more closely to drought in India. The drought coincided with a flu pandemic that was sweeping the globe at that time – with tragic results. The influenza pandemic killed an estimated 18 million people in India. There was famine and a lack of potable water, thus a compromised population. It is clear that climate played a role in the mortality of people in India.
Were the two connected? Yes. People now think that the 1918 El Niño contributed to the onset of that pandemic as an El Niño affects weather patterns throughout the entire world, causing extreme droughts in some places and severe floods in others, and severely undermining public health. An El Niño occurs when warm water that has piled up around Australia and Indonesia spills out east across the Pacific Ocean towards the Americas, taking the rain with it.
Today we have a situation similar to 1918, except that we now have 7 billion plus people in the world. A pandemic today could well kill hundreds of millions.

What can we expect?

We already experience a very mild December and the long-range forecasts call for a very mild winter. Be assured that the coming of a very strong El Niño will disrupt global weather patterns and have broad consequences for agriculture, energy consumption, and public safety. It is also very likely that this El Niño and its consequences will be more intensive due to global warming.
So why do I offer the possibility that a Pandemic is on the way?
One reason is that, according to the influential medical magazine The Lancet, 90 percent of the world population already suffers from some sort of disease. Thus the general overall health is poor. Also there is not a person in the world free of chemical contaminants, due to the universal presence of airborne particles originating from automobile exhausts, electricity generating stations, pesticides and fertilizers. Yes, the tens of thousands of compounds originating mostly from our oil-based industrialization have invaded the very essence of humanity. Obesity too has become a world-wide curse, another symptom of poor health and the wrong food sources. Yet the main culprit to aggravate the situation, and make it ripe for a Pandemic, is the El Niño now gaining formidable strength. It will even further weaken human health and make it more susceptible for a contagious condition.

Is there a historic precedence?

I see a similarity with global conditions some 1500 years ago, when Roman domination came to an end, a time of great upheaval, not unlike we are witnessing today when the entire world is on the verge of tremendous change, and that not for the better.

I have a book with the telling title: Rats, Lice and History by Hans Zinsser. That book leaves no doubt that pandemics are part of the human make-up. About the Sixth Century- coinciding with the Fall of Rome – Zinsser writes: “The sixth century was a period of calamity rarely equaled in history…..A succession of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions – Vesuvius in 513 was one – and famines preceded and accompanied the series of pestilences which wrought terror and destruction throughout all of Europe, the Near East, and Asia for over sixty years. Of the natural convulsions, the most destructive was an earthquake, followed by conflagration, which destroyed Antioch in 526, killed between 200,000 and 300,000 inhabitants, and frightened away most of the remainder…… A succession of floods and famines added to the general misery. ….All this was accompanied by the great plague of Justinian. After the plague had ceased, there was so much depravity and general licentiousness that it seemed as though the disease had left only the most wicked.”

In The End of the World, Otto Friedrich devotes a long chapter to The Black Death 1347-50, some 700 years later. In a population of less than 100 million, 30 million, at least 1 in 3, died. They too were confusing times, both religiously and nature-wise. Again there were droughts, famines, swarms of locusts, deluges of frogs, lizards and scorpions, forcing rats and other rodents in search of food. Heavy rains in 1314 severely limited the grain harvests, so that the general physical well-being was greatly impaired, not unlike today. The rain persisted into the next year as well, causing the price of food to skyrocket.
Laurie Garrett in her book The Coming Plague gives an exhaustive overview of the viruses that are out there today and the conditions now that have come into being due to the improper use of antibiotics. Combine that with the tens of millions of refugees often living in deplorable conditions and today too the stage is set for newly emerging diseases in a world out of balance.

Our faith in physical security is misplaced.

We now are also some 700 years after The Black Death. The life of Riley we live, totally dependent on fossil fuels, has done more harm than simply filling the air with CO2 and threatening our very physical existence. It also has given us a false sense of spiritual security, as if we no longer need God. It reminds me of Psalm 2, depicting the very situation we have today:
Why this tumult among nations,
Among peoples this useless murmurings?
They arise, the kings of the earth (Come to Paris!)
Princes plot against the Lord and his anointed.
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
The Lord is laughing them to scorn.
Then he will speak in his anger,
His rage will strike them with terror.
Don’t for a minute believe that the Bible only applies to historical situations, relates what happened to the people of Israel and the early Christians. When we read Revelation, then we know what is in store for us, and it is not pretty.

Next year a new book by J.H. Bavinck will be published dealing with the near future as depicted in the last Bible Book, the Revelation of John the Apostle. Here is a lengthy quote from this book:

“The Great Catastrophe
“Something is going to happen. We sensed right from the start that somehow the portrayal John offered could not last for long. Everything is simply too artificial, too downright crazy, too terrifying for it to endure. Something is bound to happen, something that will cause this so elaborately structured set-up to collapse. The description of that regime makes that quite clear. The main plank of this governing body is its hate against God. Its confession of faith is based on unlimited trust in human power. Its only hope in life on earth is to fully immerge oneself in the pursuit of pleasure. The basis of its morality is that nobody can be a somebody, that nobody can believe in their own responsibility, and is ultimately answerable to God. The regime of the beast has as sole purpose the extinguishing of even the tiniest part of personal life, personal joy, and a personal connection to God. It all is built on one colossal lie, on the total denial of the most fundamental and decisive reality. The culture of the new regime constitutes a tremendous push to suppress, to close off peoples’ minds so that it deprives humanity of the very essence to be human. It is a culture that promotes escaping what is truly human. Its most primary goal is to live totally without God.
“And this can simply not continue. Eventually the powerful presence of God will penetrate all pores. It is simply impossible to suppress it forever. All this nonsense will have to be exposed someday when, finally, that what was so perseveringly is suppressed will break through after all. On every page of the book of Revelation of John it is clearly shown that someday this house of cards will collapse. The only question remains how and when this will happen.
“But, exactly at what point this will take place, John’s book is not quite clear. When we observe how that kingdom is experiencing its highest expression then a new series of visions appear, visions all directly related to the last things, but which also leave us with a barrage of other questions.
“It starts with a vision of the infinite majesty of the Lamb. After all these deplorable depictions of the kingdom of man we urgently need some more information of the world behind the world. “And I looked, and there before me was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion.” Just a short snapshot of indescribable grandeur: the Lamb amidst the thousands who belong to him. That short vision for a brief moment interrupts that insanely dark and somber picture of that human busyness.
“And right after this we see the first signs of the coming deterioration. The walls start to crumble, and the initial symptoms of decay and fall are visible. But it now looks as if John starts to hesitate. He already hears the rumbling of the approaching storm but it looks as if he isn’t yet ready for it. It all is so terribly unsettling, so intensely horrible that he can hardly absorb it. Here, finally, the age-long suppressed truth knocks at the portals of the human heart with loud and ineradicable force. Here, finally, the forever scorned, the nailed to the cross Christ, stands, in his full majesty, before the door of the kingdom of man. This time he cannot be refused entrance, he cannot again be dragged outside Jerusalem’s city limits, he cannot again be pushed away as an unwelcome stranger. His knocking at the door becomes louder and more insistent. And that human structure that was built with so much artifice and cunning, that entire building starts to shake.”

So far J. H. Bavinck.

Yes, the times they are a’changin. And not for the better.
All conditions are in place for all this to happen and a pandemic is part of that scene for which there is no hiding place: it will affect poor and rich, white and black, male and female, old and young. What form will it take? Probably some new form for which there is no antidote, and with the over-use of penicillin having deprived us of our best defense, the stage is set for a calamity of historic proportions.
No, the Bible is not a book that predicts that on such and such a date this or that will happen. What it does tell us is that before the return of the Lord, some disastrous events will take place.

Matthew 24 gives such an indication. Jesus tells us that there will be great distress, unequaled. Had these days not been shortened, no one would survive.
Therefore keep watch: when you see all these signs you know that The Time is near.
Are we ready for a Pandemic? No, because it will come suddenly and will bring on a lot of other disasters in its wake. Revelation speaks about an earthquake that will be the very beginning of all the havoc. That earthquake could also be in the form of financial collapse. So there is a warning, but, as we all well know, earthquakes come unannounced, come “like a thief in the night”. Even the best scientists have no clue when and where the Next Big One will hit.

No, I am not predicting that 2016 will see a world-wide devastating unstoppable disease affecting all. I think that it will come after the financial collapse when the entire world is already in disarray. Then the odds for some immense health disaster are extremely present.

Are we ready for such an event?
Hope in the Lord and pray for the coming of his Kingdom, the New Earth where ‘righteousness will dwell’.

November 29 2015

COP 21: A COP-OUT?

Tomorrow the much anticipated conference – COP 21- on Climate Change starts in Paris, the scene of these brutal attacks on innocent people a few weeks ago.
Of course the word ‘innocent’ is a relative term. I believe we all are somehow implicated in causing terrorism, which has its root today in oil extraction and consumption, the atrocious act of forcing crude oil out of the earth where it has been buried for millions of years and squandering the product in a time span of seconds on a geological scale. Violence to creation always bounces back on all of God’s creatures, especially on its highest form, us, God’s images. As the torture of nature accelerates, expect much more violence, augmented by the increasing scarcity of water, fertile land and forests. If all else fails, the ultimate outcome is a global war.

For 10 days we will be inundated with detailed information on the dangers we face from our overuse of carbon products. If the previous 20 conferences – called COP, which stands for Conference of the Parties- are any indication nothing much will be accomplished: in other words another COP-OUT.
In the year 2000 I had the opportunity to attend COP 11 in The Hague, lodging with my brother who lives there. I went as an accredited member of the press, representing the regional daily newspaper for which I wrote a weekly column for 10 years. Then Canada had a real image problem, while the USA went BUSH in a presidential election that was decided by four of the seven judges of the highest court.
We know that in the USA the Republican Party, which has a majority in Congress, denies the occurrence of Climate Change, so the nation which is the largest polluter in the world – 17 tons of Green House Gases per person, versus a global average of less than 5 – will not come on board with any resolution. China, as a nation, is the next highest polluter, and together with India comprise between 35 to 40 percent of the world’s people. Both nations want to see their people achieve higher living standards, so, instead of them cutting back on carbon products, they will accelerate their use. Both India and China argue they have the right to modernize like anybody else. That inevitably means large increases in greenhouse gas emissions. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed “uncompromising commitment on climate change,” providing it doesn’t affect India’s ability to raise hundreds of millions of people up from poverty. One analysis found that if India sticks to its growth plans, its carbon dioxide – CO2 – emissions will increase three-fold over the next 15 years. China’s emissions will keep soaring, too. The world’s biggest emitter has promised only that emissions will peak by 2030. In the next 15 years, its greenhouse gas emissions are expected to rise by one-third.

In other words if you live long enough you will experience hell on earth.

The question is whether the USA is even able to reduce its carbon foot print. Where the architectural make-up of Europe was determined prior to the Carbon revolution, with densely packed populations in small areas, and thus a natural for mass transportation, the USA was developed on the basis of unlimited use of carbon fuel, with suburban and exurban housing development, geared to individual automotive transportation, making the use of subways and trains almost impossible.
Already voices are emerging that the conference should forego a top-down approach that has guided the effort since 1992 to be replaced by a bottom-up model, relying on voluntary commitments by individual countries (and people?) to rein in their contributions to climate change.
True, the UN has no power to enforce restrictions on fossil fuels. Individual jurisdictions have more power, but can they enforce it? The only way is by upping the cost, which will hurt the poor. A bottom-up approach in the fight against climate change could be an important step forward, but politicians everywhere have a short vision: they want to be reelected. With economic activity – and thus tax income- already weak, a further charge on consumers will be far from popular. So brace yourself for higher temperatures and the resulting disasters.

In my opinion the entire Paris enterprise, where some 50,000 delegates and press people will gather, is an exercise in futility, because well in advance of the Paris talks, the UN announced that the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere has locked in 2.7 degrees Celsius warming at a minimum, even if countries move forward with the pledges they make to cut emissions. Hence, even the 2 degree Celsius goal is already unattainable, which, by the way, has already been reached in Canada. In effect, the countries are vowing to make changes that collectively still fall far short of the necessary goal. We, the world at large, are much like a patient who, upon hearing from our doctor that we must lose 50 pounds to avoid life-threatening health risks, take pride in cutting out fries but not cake and ice cream.

I live in Canada so I am keen to find out what Canada will promise, which is not the same as what they will do. At least there is a lot of willingness there, initiated by the newly elected Liberal Party. So far it looks like they will pledge to reduce the 2005 level by 30 percent, the same the previous government had I mind, but the bad news is that the pledges will still be short of what is needed, guaranteeing at least a 3 degree warmer world. That would mean higher temperatures than at any time in the last three million years, with potentially dramatic effects of intense heatwaves, flooding and climate refugees across the world.

All the big shots of the world will be in Paris, provided they can guarantee safety. Barack Obama will be there. Justin Trudeau will be there. Everyone who’s anyone will be descending on Paris in the coming week to strike a global deal to fight climate change. The rhetoric is remarkable: “We are at a turning point now,” declared UN climate chief Christiana Figueres. We are at “a moment of remarkable transformation.”

Recollect Copenhagen six years ago? That too was labeled as crucial, and it was a conspicuous fiasco. Nobody in the world can bind nations to cut down on energy use: they all want to provide more for their citizens, who are growing older and sicker, and they all need economic growth. But we can’t have growth and use less energy: we simply can’t have one without the other: the two are intrinsically related.
And then there are the poorer nations. They think their rich uncles in the West should pay for them to confront climate change because, let’s face the truth: We, the rich, created the problem in the first place. They’ve threatened to walk out if the developed world doesn’t fork over at least $100-billion (U.S.) a year. “Whether Paris succeeds or not will be dependent on what we have as part of the core agreement on finance,” declared South Africa’s delegate, who speaks for more than 130 nations.

The trouble is that the rich nations are already overbooked: they all run deficits, they all have awesome obligations. Look at Europe today: Totally divided about the refugee problem, with the ultra-right –almost fascist- parties gaining ground.
So what we will see in Paris is a lot of politics, a lot of positioning, and a lot of empty promises.

Here’s what I gleaned from a Margaret Wente column in the Globe and Mail:
“Even if all these problems were overcome and every nation lived up to its commitments, the effect on the planet would be negligible. Bjorn Lomborg, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, did the math in a new study published in the journal Global Policy. “If all nations keep all their promises, temperatures will be cut by just 0.05°C (0.09°F),” he stated in the news release. “Even if every government on the planet not only keeps every Paris promise, reduces all emissions by 2030, and shifts no emissions to other countries, but also keeps these emission reductions throughout the rest of the century, temperatures will be reduced by just 0.17°C (0.3°F) by the year 2100.”

The hard truth about global warming is that there is no public policy solution. The only solution is to quit using carbon based products. No technological breakthroughs on a massive scale are possible, nothing that we do will make much of any difference, not even if we figure out substitutes for fossil fuels, converting our entire global infrastructure to other power sources. That is the brutal truth.
About 80 per cent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency estimates that global energy demand is set to grow another 37 per cent by the year 2040. As greenhouse gas emissions level off in the developed world, almost all of that increase will come from poorer countries such as China and India. By 2040, the IEA estimates, 75 per cent of all our energy will still come from oil, gas and coal – the major sources of greenhouse gasses.

The other hard truth is a simple human one. No one is going to give up the material comforts of life today for the avoidance of an uncertain disaster many years in the future. Any politician who fails to reckon with that will soon be turfed from office.
That’s the sad situation we find ourselves in.

Some, such as Margaret Wente, believe that sooner or later, human ingenuity will bail us out. Fat chance. How can technology that brought us this condition, will then cure us from it? The Pharisees once accused Jesus by saying that “It is only by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, that this fellow –Jesus- drives out demons. (Matt. 12: 24). Jesus commented: “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined……… If Satan drives out Satan he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand?”
The same applies to technology which is purely driven by carbon power. Human technology lies at the base of this curse which purely is driven by Beelzebub, the prince of demons.

Meanwhile, the planet burns.

Japan’s meteorological office announced that this past September was, by far, the warmest September on record, and records now show that October has also become the hottest recorded October. As a whole, 2015 remains easily on course to become the hottest year ever recorded.
The COP 21 bulletins will truthfully convey that we indeed are at a critical junction of history. It could quite well be that this coming Paris meeting, is the last of its kind. Why meet when no significant reduction in Carbon emissions is possible?
The trouble is that nations cannot solve this problem on their own. This is a world-wide problem that can only be solved when every nation on the earth participates in reducing GHG – Green House Gases. And that will not happen. The problem is too big, so big that it can no longer be solved, so, as an increasing number of people conclude: we have to adapt.

Adapting means that we write off Africa and the Middle East, the most affected regions of the world. In due course, perhaps in the next two decades they will become inhabitable. Already it is from there where the majority of the refugees originate. What are millions now will be scores of millions in the near future.
We now have many good-willing citizens who welcome these poor people, and that is to be lauded. But when the trickle becomes a deluge, what will happen then? Then the law of the jungle will take over: the way in which only the strongest and cleverest people in a society stay alive or succeed.

Jesus has something to say about that as well.

In Matthew 25, when Jesus was approaching the end of his ministry, he also saw how the end of the world as we know was shaping up. What does Jesus want us to do? “For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger and you did not invite me in……I tell you the truth whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do to me.”

Our task is clear. No COP-OUT for his followers. We have to share our blessings with the poor – the refugees of all colors and faiths – of the world.