Our World Today

Posted on October 20, 2013 by Bert Hielema

Oct.20 -13

(If you have trouble reading this, click on ‘home’).

Collapse?!

We have three bird feeders. In the past month no birds came. No, that’s not correct:  one lonely chickadee fed on my feeder, a far cry from years ago when I routinely spotted sparrows, juncos, wood peckers and many others. We have lots of crows, however: their screeching wakes us up in the morning.

Monarch butterflies, you wonder? Well I saw one. For all practical purposes this beautiful butterfly has disappeared, another victim of our greed for speed. Now that most people live in urban areas, city people do not notice these changes, but we, some 5 km from the built-up area of the Village of Tweed, population 1800, see this and are dismayed and worried.

Are these disappearances omens of collapse?

Yes, they signify collapse of some sort. Apart from the lack of birds, it has been a fabulous year for growing. I have never had such an abundance of everything as this season: my root cellar is filled with apples, potatoes, cabbages and carrots. We had to buy an extra freezer to accommodate the apple sauce, apple-carrot juice, kale, leeks, beans, beets and other produce.

Each year I try something new. This year, for the first time, I made sauerkraut. Now that I have done it – it is so easy – I will do it every year from now on.

Collapse is not a popular topic, just as talking about preventing heart attacks is a taboo subject. Several friends of mine have had one: totally predictable, of course. It usually is the result of lack of exercise and fatty diets, resulting in expanding waistlines and clogged arteries. I was at a banquet a few weeks ago, sitting at a table with an overweight older man who was putting layers of butter on his bun: a perfect candidate for trouble which, out of the blue, hits: chest pains and a rush to the Emergency Room. Fortunately these people there are pretty good. After a bypass doctors recommend a totally changed lifestyle with daily walks and a different diet. In my book prevention is better than a cure. Prevention prevents the excruciating pain as well as the immense expense to society in Canada, and possible bankruptcy in the USA where a heart operation cost $100,000.

Just as a coronary is often the result of wrong habits which can result in some sort of collapse, our economy too suffers from faulty behaviour. Collapse there too is preventable but there too our living habits ensure that collapse is in the cards, and when it happens it means death of the economy and with it the death of many. Just as a heart attack is the result of undisciplined  living so economic collapse too has its roots in discarding common sense, often the result of allowing spending and polluting to continue without regard for the consequences.

Our Golden Decades

As a Western society we have become slaves of the past. The half-century, from 1950 to 2000 were the golden years with 3+percent economic growth. It was a perfect period for politicians capable of promising the cake and delivering it with icing: bountiful support for retirement after 60 or 65; generous disability benefits; excellent support for medical problems and all sorts of extra help such as free prescriptions and subsidies for hearing aids and walkers. A growing Gross Domestic Product made that possible.

Today all we hear from governments is that their first aims are to engender economic growth. No politician can expect to win on a platform of cutbacks and reduced pensions and benefits. Yet these days are here, and have already come in many parts of Europe.

Growth is down to a level less than the rate of inflation, which means reduced tax income and greater deficits because the opposite is happening on the expense column: there more money is needed for food stamps in the USA and welfare in Canada. Higher unemployment places greater pressure on the health-care system as uncertainty and discontent are detrimental to one’s health and also causes more domestic violence.

I once was unemployed in my first year in Canada in 1951-52. My most miserable memories go back to that week when my brother and I lived in a room in downtown Hamilton: he sick, I no work. Fortunately it only lasted only a few days: a caring couple took in my brother until he was healthy again and I soon found work.

The plight of politicians

Politicians are caught in a real bind, evident in the situation in the USA. The recent last minute agreement there means nothing and has solved nothing because the Tea Party’s religion founded on theocratic theories of government exposes insoluble problems, not of a religious nature. What has developed over the last 50-60 years, ever since World War II, will not be solved in one session, actually will never be resolved: the era of extravagance is over. We are dealing with a total new economic environment since that post-war period was completely exceptional in human history. What is coming is a reverting to the normal: living within our means, economically and environmentally but that will not happen before there is a disastrous overshoot: a total or near total collapse, not unlike a heart attack in a person’s life.

In the 1930’s the new oil driven machinery made farmworkers redundant and threw a lot of people on the street for which there was no work and no other source of income. Then many still had roots in the farming community where they were fed by their relatives. Now farmers are mostly mono-crop producers. Only the cessation of the armistice of 1918 and the 1939 resumption of hostilities between Germany on the one hand and the World War I allies – France, Great Britain and Russia- on the other hand, created enough economic activity to soak up all available idle hands to ensure prosperity for the next 60 years. We now face a number of different challenges: where in the late 1920’s cheap oil furloughed thousands of workers, today, with at least four times the number of potential workers, robots and smart software are one important obstacle to rewarding work, potentially making untold millions of willing workers superfluous. The other drawbacks are environmental depletion, global pollution and massive population growth. These factors are setting the stage for a disastrous reversal, the real reason why we see political turmoil in the USA and Europe. People sense this intuitively. Rather than less government we need more, as the obstacles are so great that even universal action cannot reverse this predicament, made worse by our reluctance to face the truth.

The Disappearing Middle Class

Take robots. Robots pay no taxes. Robots also need no medical insurance. Robots never go on strike, never complain. Robots and software are taking middle class jobs in the name of efficiency, making the rich richer and the poor poorer, leaving unemployment and low-wage jobs in their wake. No work is disastrous in many fronts: psychologically, economically and physically. “Idleness is the root of all evil,” says an old proverb.

Don’t believe the official line. Governments face the impossible task to secure money for idled hands while at the same time forced to fund extra support for physical and psychological problems at a time when tax income is drastically reduced.

Just as a heart attack takes place when a person lives beyond his or her physical limits and so experiences a possibly fatal collapse so too the entire economy may experience a complete economic stagnation when too many simultaneous malfunctions cause monetary mayhem, resulting in total stoppage of normal life. A heart attack involves a small part of the body: clogged arteries leading to decreased blood flow, preventing the heart pumps from providing blood to the rest of the body, so too blockage of the money flow from taxpayer to government and back to where it is needed can lead to economic cataclysm. Had in the USA the debt ceiling not been extended, global chaos could have been the result. And someday soon this will happen. “You shall not live by debt alone”. Debt is financing much of our lifestyle, increasingly consisting of environmental debt as well.

By and large the reigning media fail to report the true picture in the world. Bad news does not sell, so they keep on repeating that technology or ‘fracking’ or ‘the tarsands’ will save us, fostering false hope. As a species, Margaret Atwood observes in her dystopian novel “Oryx and Crake,” “we’re doomed by hope.” Absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking.

Infinite Growth is Infinite Insanity

Infinite growth is infinite insanity. Just as patients after a by-pass must change their lifestyle or else, so we too must go back to simpler ways. The anthropologist Joseph Tainter in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” looked at the collapse of civilizations from the Roman to the Mayan. He concluded that they disintegrated because they finally could not sustain the bureaucratic complexities they had created. Obama-Care is a good example. Layers of bureaucracy demand more and more exploitation, not only of the environment but of the laboring classes. They become calcified by systems that are unable to respond to the changing reality around them. They, like our elite universities and business schools, churn out systems managers, people who are taught not to think but to blindly service the system. These systems managers know only how to perpetuate themselves and the system they serve. They have no clue that by doing this we collectively are killing the planet ruining everything we hold dear.

Final times are upon us. As a human race we are racing toward the end, but deny it by frantically believing that what worked in the past will also work tomorrow and beyond. We insist that continued reliance on fossil fuel and speculations will sustain the empire. We promote extravagant and senseless projects and imperial adventures. The predominant view is that economic growth can continue indefinitely, without slowing down or stopping. Last week Prime Minister Harper, in the Throne Speech has again pronounced the pursuit of economic growth as Canada’s national religion. In the USA Bernanke bombards the system with $85 billion each month. It is like a patient who needs constant blood transfusions to stay alive.  Our current monetary system is built on Infinite Growth: it must work that way because debt and the repayment of debt depend on it. Only Infinite Growth makes it possible to have liberal state pension plans, Social Security, and the many wonders that our financial system can deliver. Only Infinite Growth makes more and better technological innovations possible because there is always an infinite supply of the resources available to make these innovations.

We all are victims of a false religion. All false gods are an illusion. My paternal grandfather started his prayer at meal-time with the words of Psalm 115: “Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name give the glory.” That same Psalm relates something to us today: “their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands…..Their makers will come to be like them and so will all who trust in them.”

Our idol is Infinite Growth fueled by borrowed billions. Our society, constructed on the idol of Infinite Growth, will collapse as soon as infinite borrowing stops. We are rapidly reaching the point where the costs of increased debt and the expense of extracting oil and other minerals are so high that in total, society is worse off, in terms of the total amount of goods produced by society. We already are reaching diminishing returns with oil which is a major reason why world economic growth is slowing. It is also a major reason that many of the heavy oil consuming nations have been struggling with recession-like symptoms. These symptoms are mostly being covered up with deficit spending, ultra-low interest rates and Billions in Quantitative Easing. If this stimulus – new blood – stops, the economy – the body – collapses. Our collapse will take the whole planet with it.

Lord’s Day 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism comes to mind. “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” The answer to that question is our only hope.

 

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Our World Today

Posted on October 13, 2013 by Bert Hielema

RELIGION FOR DUMMIES

The Christian Right and Obama.

R.J. Rushdoony was a Presbyterian preacher, who claimed that he based his beliefs on the teachings of Calvin and Dooyeweerd  No wonder Calvinism does not have a good name nowadays because one of his quotes was: “The heresy of democracy has worked havoc in church and state … Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies.” He proposed that Old Testament laws should be applied to modern society.He wanted to see the country ruled by God’s law as recorded in the five Books of Moses so he started a movement now known as ‘Dominionism’. He wrote: “We are very much in need now of Christian pioneers. This means a people who are zealous to grow and to exercise dominion in Christ.” That sounded OK to me until he defined ‘dominion,’ referring to the sort of ‘dominion’ that is found in Genesis 1: 28 in the King James translation: “Ye shall have ‘dominion’ over land and sea. When Jesus talked about ‘power’ he said that he had come to serve and not to be served.  In Genesis 2:15 God asked the human race to take care of the earth. I have been told that the Hebrew word used there is the same as in Joshua 24: 15 where Israel’s leader tells his people: “As for me and my household we will serve the Lord.” In the same way we must ‘serve’ creation. Bonhoeffer wrote that God, creation and the human race belong together. Of course, it’s God’s creation and we belong to it with every sinew of our existence.

This brings me to today’s Republican Party.

Religion for dummies: just keep the rules, believe that the world is created in 6 days, no voice for women, the earth is there to be exploited, is basically evil and, since we are going to be raptured anyway, we can safely leave behind the mess we made. Dummy religion is where black is black, white is white, and where there is no dialogue.

Today all religions suffer from this simplification. Islam has its Taliban. Judaism has its conservative element. Christianity, both Roman Catholic and Protestantism have their own fundamentalist wings. I left a Christian Reformed congregation in St. Catharines, On. when its minister proved inapproachable. He later left the denomination to serve in the Orthodox Reformed Church.

There’s something afoot in religion, something new. Here is what I read in the New York Times: “Take the New York Jewish population which is quite large. Among the general Jewish part many are no longer attending synagogue. There has been religious growth, but this growth was almost all among Orthodox Jews. The city’s Reform and Conservative populations continued to drop, as did Jewish religious observance over all. As a result, New York’s Jewish community is increasingly polarized, with more Jews at the most traditional end of the theological spectrum, more Jews entirely detached from the institutions of their ancestral faith — and ever-fewer observant Jews anywhere in the middle. What’s happened in New York is happening nationally; a recent Pew Study found a similar pattern of growth among the Orthodox and a similar waning of religious practice and affiliation in the rest of the American Jewish population.

“This is not just a Jewish story. It’s been the story of religion in the West for over 40 years. The most traditional groups have been relatively resilient. The more liberal, modernizing bodies have lost membership, money, morale. And the culture as a whole has become steadily more disengaged from organized faith. There is still a religious middle today, but it isn’t institutionally Judeo-Christian in the way it was in 1945. Instead, it’s defined by nondenominational ministries, “spiritual but not religious” pieties and ancient heresies reinvented as self-help.

“Of late, this process of polarization has carried an air of inevitability. You can hew to a traditional faith in late modernity, it has seemed, only to the extent that you separate yourself from the American and Western mainstream. There is no middle ground, no center that holds for long, and the attempt to find one quickly leads to accommodation, drift and dissolution.” So far the New York Times article

If you want to have a thriving church, dumb it down. Go to the Old Testament, pick and choose something that is easy to do and not difficult for people to grasp and you can start a mega church and become rich in the process. Of course this works only in the USA, where the general level of education is pretty low. Adults in Japan, Canada, Australia, Finland and multiple other countries score significantly higher than the United States which came in 16th overall in reading, math and problem solving.

A few more rules: Don’t mention Christ and his love commandment. Don’t mention Paul who said that we have to investigate everything and retain what is viable (1Thessalonian 5:21). Don’t tell them that (Philippians 2:12) “We have to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.” Why? Because to be a Christian is hard work, involves a constant struggle and a lot of prayer and uncertainty, especially since most churches are no help at all: they are stagnant and unable to evolve.

In these last days to be relevant means the integration of the Created Word with the Written Word. Churches don’t know how to do that even though they have the correct formulation such as the Belgic Confession which says: “We know God first by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book…. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20: “all these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse.”

I call creation God’s Primary Word. His Secondary word, as defined in this same article says: “Secondly He makes himself known to us more openly by his holy and divine word, as much as we need in this life for his glory and for the salvation of his own.”

Curiously God’s Secondary Word is called holy and divine while God’s Primary Word by which men stand convicted and left without excuse is not mentioned as holy and divine. It is about time for the church to remove that difference. Psalm 119: 105 combines these two Words beautifully: God’s Word- his Secondary – is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path (in God’s Primary Word.) We stare so much into the light- the Bible- that we are blinded to see our way clear in God’s Created Word.

Back to those ‘religious’ Republicans.

Chris Hedges, an investigative journalist, has made a special study of the religious background of the Republican movement in which the Christian Right has found its home. He writes: “There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and “Christian” America.”

He continues: “Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives. This ideology, which is the driving force behind the shutdown of the government, calls for the eradication of social “deviants,” beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these “deviants” are removed, other “deviants,” including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible—will also be ruthlessly repressed. The “deviant” government bureaucrats, the “deviant” media, the “deviant” schools and the “deviant” churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The rights of these “deviants” will be annulled. “Christian values” and “family values” will, in the new state, be propagated by all institutions. Education and social welfare will be handed over to the church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with relentless indoctrination.”

Pretty radical stuff and taken word for word from the Rushdoony script, rooted in a radical ideology known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism.  It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights.

The current debt ceiling gives these people a perfect excuse to implement their fundamentally unbiblical view of religion, totally based on the Old Testament, totally ignoring the teaching of Christ who has given a new commandment, one much more simple and much more difficult: “Love God and his creation above all and your fellow citizen of whatever colour and sexual orientation as yourself.” The Republican Party fuses the Christian religion with the script and language of American imperialism and nationalism and combining it with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism, in the process flagrantly distorting and misusing the Bible.

Politics in the USA is in shambles, has been for a long time. Politics always everywhere is a matter of compromise. The first criterion is the welfare of the land and the betterment of the poor. Obamacare is trying that and the Republicans- 75 % of its supporters are church-goers –are dead-set against that. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies. Science is dismissed as undemocratic. Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister, would perfectly fit in that Republican Party if he were a US citizen.

Let me speculate a bit. Where does this irrationality come from?

I believe that this irrational stance has something to do with the times we live in. People are baffled, angry and armed to the teeth. They fear for the future. The ruling element in the Republican Party is the white middle class, living in the Southern states where the colour bias has never disappeared. They see having a black person in the White House as an abomination. They hate Obama and will do anything to thwart his ways. They also are deeply influenced by Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” and the “Left Behind” series, both predicting a speedy end to this world, and Rapture, the unbiblical idea that the true believers will be fetched up  into the sky to meet Christ.

This means that there is a distinct suicidal element in this latest political drama. Combine this with the prospect that we are on the way to economic slowdown and possible collapse, and the scene is set for great anxiety and false explanations.

Here is what Stephen D. King, chief economist at HSBC, the author of “When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence” has to say. (The HSBC is one of the world’s largest banks.) “As bad as things in Washington are — the federal government shutdown since Tuesday, the slim but real potential for a debt default, a political system that seems increasingly ungovernable — they are going to get much worse, for the United States and other advanced economies, in the years ahead. ….The numbers no longer add up. Even before the Great Recession, rich countries were seeing their tax revenues weaken, social expenditures rise, government debts accumulate and creditors fret thanks to lower economic growth rates….We are reaching end times for Western affluence. …….In the United States, which ostensibly has the right institutions (if not the political will) to deal with its economic problems, a potentially explosive fiscal situation could be resolved through scurrilous means, but only by threatening global financial and economic instability. Interest rates can be held lower than the inflation rate, as the Fed has done. Or the government could devalue the dollar, thereby hitting Asian and Arab creditors. Such “default by stealth,” however, might threaten a crisis of confidence in the dollar, wiping away the purchasing-power benefits Americans get from the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency.”

Religious Dummies believe that there is a simple answer to a very complicated problem. They opt for this illusion because the reality is too bleak to bear. But as the current fiscal crisis demonstrates, facing the pain will not be easy. And the waking up from our collective illusions has barely begun.

Welcome to Century 21. The short 20th Century started in 1914 and lasted till 1989 with the break-up of the USSR, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The interim period is over. We now have entered an even more devastating new era.

 

 

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Our World Today

Posted on October 6, 2013 by Bert Hielema

 October  6 2013

The March of Folly is becoming a Run toward Ruin.

 On May 27 1985 I bought a book: The March of Folly, fresh off the press. The author, Barbara Tuchman, started it with: “A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.”

She cites in some 400 pages, plus notes, four examples starting with “The Trojans take the wooden horse within their walls”, jumping a few thousand years when (1470-1530) “The renaissance Popes provoke the Protestant secession,”  then relating how “The British lose America,” and ending with “America betrays herself in Vietnam.” The USA was involved there from 1963 till 1975, losing almost 60,000 men.

America has one overriding obsession: oil. No wonder. When I travel in the USA, I am amazed how dispersed the population is. When the fire season was at its height- fire doesn’t seem to have an off-season anymore – thousands of homes, situated in the most remote areas, are at risk. People love to be ‘out there’ far away from everybody. But this is only possible when we have wheels, and a combustion engine to move these. All of this means that public transportation is impossible in most areas.

If we really tote up the price of fuel, then we have to include America’s Armed Forces, its Air Force, Navy and Army, almost solely busy protecting the life lines from the global oil fields to North America.  Of course, occasionally its roaming flotillas help out when a natural disaster strikes, because, wherever in the world there always is an American aircraft carrier task force nearby ready to help out, but they are everywhere not for that reason: our world is a dangerous one and we never know where there is a threat to American interests – meaning oil.

America sees threats where others don’t. Vietnam was such an example, a war then fought to thwart the Red Danger. Not surprisingly, once it was over and the US lost Vietnam it became peacefully united, and is now a tourist attraction.It’s been a long time since Vietnam, the last example cited by Tuchman. Since then foolishness has not ceased. On the contrary.

Foolish money

Europe has not been un-familiar with folly. The idea to make Europe something like the United States of Europe must be lauded. To be able to travel and trade across the continent without a custom check is admirable. To introduce a common currency for countries as diverse as Germany and Greece and the Netherlands and Portugal is proving to be utter folly. Southerly climates generate a different type of people. The Northerly harsh winters have inculcated in these sober Dutchmen and frugal Germans a notion of thrift and foresight that never was part of their Mediterranean neighbours who, in a pinch could live off the land year-round. That alone made their attitude toward life totally different. The Euro gave the Mediterranean folk cheap money, easy credit, and so they had a whale of a fiesta. Brussels, from where Europe is governed, knew their lies, tolerated their fraud, obsessed with an idea that would make Europe the envy of the world. The entire Euro experiment reminds me of a penny-pinching person sharing a joint account with a spend-thrift cousin. Count Axel Oxenstierna, onetime chancellor of Sweden during the Thirty Years’ War, said on his death-bed: “Know my son with how little wisdom the world is governed.” The March of the Euro is a March of Folly.

Superlative folly

Then there is the world’s super power: the US of A. Compare its medical expenses to any other of the other large high-income countries. The US spends 18 per cent of its gross domestic product on health against 12 per cent in the next highest spender, France. The US public sector uses a higher share of GDP than those of Italy, the UK, Japan and Canada, though many millions are left uncovered. US spending per head is almost 100 per cent more than in Canada and 150 per cent more than in the UK. What does the US get in return? Life expectancy at birth is the lowest of these countries, while infant mortality is the highest. Potential years of life lost by people under the age of 70 are also far higher. For males this must be partly due to violent deaths. But it is also true for women. Now these crazy Republicans have provoked a Government crisis for the sole reason to deprive the poor of low-cost health care. This is only the latest in a series of follies unequalled in modern history.

The folly of Iraq

The USA, from 2001 till 2008, was governed by President Bush who, when he campaigned, asked his father’s friend, Dick Cheney, to look for a suitable vice-president. Mr. Cheney looked in the mirror and found his man. As the CEO of Halliburton, an oil-service industry, his hungry eyes were always fixated on the Middle East where most of the easy-to-get oil was located. His new position gave him the opportunity to obtain access to this treasure.

September 11 2001 allowed the opening. That’s when America took the first steps on its major March of Folly, based on pure deceit, hubris and thirst for oil, that same polluting stuff that is turning the March of Folly into a Run toward Ruin.

The first obligation of a nation involves the welfare of its citizens: their education, their physical and mental well-being, and the state of their infrastructure, such as roads, water, sewer and utilities. In the last few decades the USA has failed in all these categories. As already noted its medical system is the most costly in the world by far while its populace must endure results far below most developed nations. The same applies to its elementary and secondary education. Where does the money go? The USA with 5% of the world’s population spends as much on the military as the remaining 95 percent of the entire world.

Blinded by the prospect of untapped oil wealth in Iraq, the USA duped congress into believing that Saddam Hussein had WMD – Weapons of Mass Destruction.  What other country could have invaded Iraq, hardly knowing the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite? If there ever was a March of Folly, it is the totally irrational Iraq invasion. Saddam, through brute force kept the population from killing each other in a religious strife. Now, with no central authority able to enforce a stand-off, ethnic cleansing between the two religious streams is killing hundreds of thousands.

Bush and Cheney launched the invasion with plans to garrison Iraq for decades, with the larger goal of subduing neighboring states, especially Iran. In an off the cuff remark Cheney said: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad; real men want to go to Tehran”.

Just imagine: The US military, in a bare few years in Iraq, have built a staggering 505 bases, ranging from combat outposts to ones the size of small American towns with their own electricity generators, water purifiers, fire departments, fast-food restaurants, and even miniature golf courses at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and then, only a few years later, abandoned all of them, dismantling some, turning others over to the Iraqi military or into ghost towns, and leaving yet others to be looted and stripped. Why? Because they planned to stay there for decades and use Iraq as a spring board to conquer the entire Middle East for the greater glory of Halliburton.

And that was only the beginning

Of course Bush Cheney expected to be there for a couple of decades. Why build a $750 million compound, 104 acre Vatican-size fortress in the centre of Baghdad unless the US administration had plans to stay put there for the foreseeable future? Just imagine: 27 blast-resistant buildings, an indoor pool, basketball courts, a fire station which was to operate as a command-and-control center for our ongoing garrisoning of the country and the region. Now, with the army gone, the embassy’s staff cut, it’s a global white elephant.

With $4-6 trillion wasted on two useless wars, two so-called “good wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq against lightly armed minority insurgencies have only accomplished what Hosea 8: 7 describes as “they sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.” The ungluing of the social fabric in the Middle East and North Africa can be traced directly to the invasion of Iraq.

The damage done by wasting these trillions rather than spend them on education, better health, re-building cities- Detroit comes to mind- will only be evident in the coming years when this March of Folly will have become a Run toward Ruin.

Much worse to come

 Right now the greatest leap into foolishness is still in progress. The stage is set for global disaster when temperatures soar beyond a range in which humans can comfortably thrive. Climate stability is now a thing of the past. As extreme weather events grow in severity, communities should but are not adopting strategies that build resilience against the effect of these and other climate shocks. Needed are dramatic steps to avoid raising global temperatures to more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. According to Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre, this would require a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions per year, starting now—a rate so significant that it can only be achieved through dramatic reductions in energy use. Will it happen? No.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has written that our inability to deal with climate change is due in part to the way our mind is wired. Gilbert describes that because global warming doesn’t take a human form this makes it difficult for us to think of it as an enemy. Also our brains fail to accurately perceive gradual change as opposed to rapid shifts. Climate Change has occurred slowly enough for our minds to normalize it, which is precisely the reason why it makes it a deadly threat. Gilbert writes, “because it fails to trip the brain’s alarm, it leaves us soundly asleep in a burning bed.” Climate change is history’s most dramatic and perfect example of the “boiling frog” phenomenon, in which slow, compounding, detrimental change goes mostly unnoticed until it reaches a magnitude where adequate response is exceedingly difficult and costly and even impossible.

The sorriest thing is that those who should know better, and I refer to the church-going crowd, are among the worst deniers of Climate Change. The reason for that is the “Heaven” heresy. The church people, almost unanimously, believe that upon death they go to heaven. So why bother with the earth? Satan is having a field-day in the church.

Governments are no help. They consist of elected officials who, if they are bringers of bad news, are voted out of office. So, always, without exception, they talk optimism, more jobs and greater growth. Governments are hell-bent to stimulate growth. Bernanke infuses $85 billion each month to artificially activate the stalled economy. Fracking is the total opposite of CO2 reduction because its takes lots of energy to free the fuel embedded in rocks underground.

When Hitler came to power in 1933 his aims were clearly outlined in his Mein Kampf. The world – England, and France in particular – chose to ignore his intentions and Munich was the result, now forever associated with appeasement. Chamberlain’s infamous words were: “Peace in our time”. But war came anyway, 60 million died and many more displaced.

 

Today we have manifold ‘Munichs”:” economic growth in our time”, ignoring the ever more evident signs of Climate Change. Warming of the climate system is beyond a shadow of a doubt. Since the 1950s the atmosphere and oceans have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea levels have risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased. This time death and displacement will be in the billions.

That is the ultimate event of folly: running headlong into ruin.

“A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.”

Climate Change is the folly of follies.

Just a thought:

I can imagine that the Lord might ask us: “What have you done to limit your Carbon Foot Print to prevent Climate Change ?”

 

 

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Posted on September 29, 2013 by Bert Hielema

September 29 2013

 Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet: John B. Cobb, Jr.

 Quite the pretentious title.

 John B. Cobb Jr. (born February 9, 1925) is an American theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist and the author of more than fifty books. Recently the older of my two younger brothers in Holland sent me Cobb’s 30 page essay “Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet”.

These Ten Ideas are:

1. Reality is composed of interrelated events.

2. There are gradations of intrinsic value.

3. God aims at maximizing value.

4. Humans are uniquely (but by no means exclusively) valuable and      uniquely responsible.

5. Education is for wisdom.

6. The economy should be directed toward flourishing of the biosphere.

7. Agriculture should regenerate the soil.

8. Comfortable habitat should make minimal demands on resources.

9. Most manufacturing should be local.

10. Every community should be part of a community of communities.

My preliminary thoughts

There’s nothing really striking about these Ten Ideas. They simply reflect the way Cobb thinks, influenced, of course, by his theology, just as my comments are influenced by my theology.

When two people engage in a dialogue, they usually start with something positive, accordingly I start to state that we both agree that we must live as if it were possible to save the planet. In everything I do I try to keep that in mind, and pray for forgiveness when I am unable to do so, which is the case quite often.

I miss in Cobb, the theologian, a biblical approach. He is what is called a Process Theologian, people who teach that God has limited knowledge, lacks foresight of what is going to happen, and so God doesn’t know the future nor can he predict its outcome. Process theologians deny the truthfulness of Scripture which clearly declares that God’s purpose is “unchangeable” (Heb. 6:17) and that he himself is the only constant in creation. His name is Yahweh which means One Who Is and Was and Always will be.

I am fully with Cobb when, in his introduction, he writes that “I realized that theology must be eco-theology if it is to be helpful to how we live in the world. The world, after all, is not simply a human world. It is a web of life.”

Excellent, but then he fails to implement this approach. Unless theology takes into account the ‘oikos’ the entire ‘house’ we live in, the outcome tends to be mere words. “Faith without deeds is dead” writes the apostle James. I see these deeds primarily relating to love the ‘oikos’, our earthly abode. When we do that we automatically love all it contains, including our neighbours.

I also agree when he writes: “We must be honest. We live in a terrible time. We know that our actions are destroying the ability of the Earth to support us, but we seem incapable of changing direction. We plunge blindly ahead, either ignoring the reality of what is happening or hoping that some technological miracle will save us. It will not. The modern world has overshot the limits of what the Earth can bear, and our civilization will collapse.”

To me this sounds contradictory. How can we save something that will collapse anyway?

Ah, here comes his Process Theology! He writes: “But the powers of God are not absolute. God cannot reverse the past or manipulate the present like a puppeteer. God’s power is that of persuasion not coercion, of love not manipulation. In many ways it is too late. Too much has been lost. Too much is being lost. The poor are the first to suffer.”

I see God’s powers as absolute. I also believe that we will see a New Beginning, that our present polluting life will become pure living: our mourning turn into dancing.

Again something I like: “One reason we behave so badly is that the modern world has a misleading understanding of the nature of reality. What is mis-leading leads astray, and humanity collectively has been led far, far astray.”

I headed this section with the comment of “Quite the pretentious title”.  Cobb’s Ten Ideas remind me of the Ten Commandments, rules to live by if God gives us the grace to abide by them. God also laid down conditions that would have kept us from destroying the world. The Year of Jubilee comes to mind, where, in every 50th year all property sold would go back to the original owners, forever preventing people from becoming too rich.

It is true that we are incapable to save us from ourselves, and the paradox is that we don’t have to, for the simple reason that the world – and us – has been saved already. It was saved on Golgotha when Jesus gave his life as a ransom to buy the world back – redeem – from the Satan who had been able to lay hands on it.

I compare this act of salvation to a real estate transaction. (I was a real estate broker for a while). After all, our planet is essentially ‘real estate’. The price to buy it back has been paid – Jesus’ blood was the principal sum, his life was sacrificed – by which all the conditions of sale were completed and – as we say in Real Estate terms – the sale is final. The closing date, the transfer of the property, the planet and all it contains from Satan to the new owners – the followers of Christ – will take place when Christ returns.

Now to the meat of the matter: since I found the first four ideas too theoretical I will skip them and start with number 5 and give my comments only. 

Education is for wisdom.

Cobb claims to be an eco-theologian, so it is surprising that he nowhere mentions that “The fear of the Lord is the start of wisdom”. For an eco- theologian this is a gross oversight because wisdom can only come when we look at creation in awesome wonder and study its intricacy and marvelous composition. Then and there we are at the start of amazing discoveries. Wisdom begins with wonder in the double sense of the word.

6. The economy should be directed toward flourishing of the biosphere.

The biosphere includes the air we breathe, now being polluted because of energy use. Today the economic world is synonymous with energy: it takes energy to make anything, from a piece of steel to a loaf of bread. It takes energy to transport anything. Humans need energy in the form of food to continue to live. In general, the more external energy used, the more humans are able to control their environment.  We are now reaching energy limits on two fronts: we running low on external energy and we are damaging the environment with it.

We can’t save the earth and continue to use energy as we are doing. The only way to save the earth is to use human and renewable energy- sun, wind- only.

Today we have more than seven plus billion consumers in the world, all striving to better themselves by using more energy. The only way to do that is to exploit everything for a while, until the entire structure collapses. No way can we keep the economic system we have devised going at the current rate. This past week the IPCC report came out: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It recommends cutting back on energy use. Will you? Nobody I know is driving less or plans to become self-sufficient and attempts to live a carbon-free life. Fracking is postponing Peak Oil for a while, the most terrible way to delay the inevitable. Rather than cleaning the air, the hard-to-get fuels, including Alberta’s Tarsands, will accelerate cosmic collapse.

7. Agriculture should regenerate the soil.

To meet the need for greater food supply, humans began using agriculture about 10,000 years ago which increased the amount of human food available per acre, and also made population growth possible. The world did not reach one billion people until 1812. Then doubled it to two billion in one century and tripled it in my life time thanks to oil. It also meant that pesticides and fertilizer run-off and the use of heavy machinery added to erosion, all leading not to regenerating, but degeneration.

Frankly the only economy that is totally sustainable is the hunter-gatherer one. It had little need to “save for tomorrow,” because it was difficult to carry anything during travels. The amount of food an individual could eat was pretty much limited by appetite, so having “more food” for one individual wasn’t particularly helpful. The Garden of Eden comes to mind.

Today, even with water shortages looming, a major portion of agriculture comes from irrigation, which leads to salt deposits. If we really love the land – See John 3:16 – we must let land lay idle, use crop rotation, grow organically, which is much more labour intensive but will put a lot of people to work!

8. Comfortable habitat should make minimal demands on resources.

Europe was built with two legs in mind. North America was built for four wheels. No wonder Europe does well on 50% less energy than the USA.

Cobb recommends people moving to well insulated high rises. Toronto is going that way, except that these condominiums are mostly clad with glass, a very poor insulator, which brings me to energy use.

Soon after agriculture began, humans began to use resources of other types, such as wood from forests and metals such as iron and bronze. With any of these resources, there is a tendency to use the “cheapest” (easiest to extract, closest at hand, highest ore concentration) first. If extraction is to continue, increasing amounts of energy per unit extracted are likely to be required for later extraction. Take Europe. By 1500 Europe was on the edge of a fuel and nutritional disaster. It was saved in the sixteenth century only by the burning of soft coal and the cultivation of potatoes and maize. The use of coal allowed more energy per person, and took pressure off of limited forest resources. After coal came oil and natural gas. Once these sources are exhausted, we have nothing to fall back on except sun and wind, and thus we are back to Square One, the hunter-gathering society and a greatly reduced population. The world today can never support 7 billion, let alone the projected 10 billion in 2050.

9. Most manufacturing should be local.

The availability of fossil fuels, starting around 1800, has allowed much of what we now call “technology.” Without fossil fuels, our ability to make materials such as metals and glass is severely restricted. Without fossil fuels, we are also lacking for the basic building blocks for plastics, synthetic fabrics, and even modern medicines. Technology provided ways to use fossil fuel resources in ways that helped overcome many human limits. The desire to use more technology led to increasing use of fossil fuels in the 19th and 20th centuries. Cobb’s point to keep manufacturing local, rather than use China, is well taken.

10. Every community should be part of a community of communities.

We have created a society where it is exceedingly difficult to be part of a viable community. We live far too spread out, in subdivisions away from the core and in exurban homes far from work and recreation. The long drive to work, the two-jobs to make ends meet, makes life so busy that there is little or no time for anything else but eat-sleep-work.

Look at the churches, the prime example of community: “I believe in the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints,” the only article in the Apostles’ Creed that needed a qualifying statement. Almost all churches are suffering, perhaps, with the exception of mega-churches, so big that community is hardly possible.

General remarks.

Looking back I have noticed that when civilizations collapse, it was generally for financial reasons. Here’s a possible scenario – evident today. Shortages of resources lead to falling wages for the common worker. The government must provide more and more services such as welfare, unemployment insurance and medical service, leading to a need for higher taxes. The increasingly impoverished workers cannot pay these taxes and this clash between needed taxes and ability to pay these taxes brings about the collapse. We already see many resource wars and revolutions, leading to deaths of workers. Egypt, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Kenya, all recent examples of desperate people. The coming financial turmoil in the USA is another symptom of decline.

There’s no way that we can save the world as it is today: not a John R. Cobb, not an Obama, not the United Nations. The world is hell-bent to destruct itself. We know our society and economy must soon change. We will not do anything seriously to prepare for that change. So it will be even more damaging when it comes.

And that’s the way it was ordained to be from the day when humanity in a paradise setting decided that going without God was the way to go.

Posted in Co-owning the Earth | Leave a comment

Our World Today

Posted on September 22, 2013 by Bert Hielema
September 22 2013

FUKUSHIMA :

A fuku-shame

 
 Nuclear power was supposed to free us forever from fossil fuels: “too cheap to metre” was the dream. It reminds me of Dick Cheney and his deputy who sold the Iraq war with the promise that the people would welcome the US army with open arms and that the invasion would pay a dividend. Never believe political promises, certainly not in this age of decline. You’re counting on a good pension? Forget it. All pension funds are in trouble. They are assuming 8 percent return on their money. How about 2-3 percent! And people live longer as well. At 8 percent return one dollar doubles in less than 10 years. At 3 percent it takes more than 20 years.

Back to the scourge of the season: nuclear power. I remember when, in 1977, the people in Chalk River, where Canada has its Atomic Energy Headquarters, wanted to bury Ontario’s nuclear waste on a site just north of us. At the community discussion in the auditorium of the Centre Hastings High School in Madoc some 1,000 people gathered to protest with banners and placards and chants. The experts soon abandoned the burial. Even now, 35 years later, no solution has been found for nuclear waste disposal. And the toxic waste accumulates. It takes a million years to de-activate the radiation. With the Lord a million years is as one day, but we, in human time, we have to safeguard the poison forever. Poor next generations: another burden on their already over-burdened shopping list. One of the banners at that gathering suggested an alternative site: “Bury it on Parliament Hill!”

True, the world was shocked following the 1973/1974 oil price increase. After that France and Japan covered their respective territories with new reactors. These countries have a history of high-handed policies where the voice of the ‘experts’ prevail, while in other countries, Germany, Finland, Italy the “Greens” were able to block the development of any new nuclear power project. In the United States, despite the accident at Three Mile Island it was the oil lobby, not the “Greens”, who organized the shutdown of nuclear power development.
Now with constant high fossil fuel prices, courtesy of China, India, Brazil and other emerging countries, and the desire to limit CO2 emissions we saw a return to nuclear power. All the countries that had frozen their programmes were beginning to dust them off, planning the construction of dozens of new plants. The world’s stock of nuclear plants was getting ready to double in a decade, until……

Japan has no oil or gas, so it went nuclear in a big way, quite ironic because Japan is the only country in the world where, in 1945, two atom bombs obliterated Nagasaki and Hiroshima. No wonder the people there vouched never to pursue a nuclear arsenal.

Now another Japanese tragedy is in the making, a frightful Fuku-shame, thanks to an earthquake on a scale rarely experienced, accompanied by a tsunami of unimaginable height, and the shocking discovery that the FUKUSHIMA nuclear plants were unable to cope with these two highly improbable events. This happened not in India, where one would expect it, or in Russia, which saw its Chernobyl disaster, but in Japan, over-regulated, hyper cautious, terribly afraid of nuclear incidents.

Coming to a location near you.

Nowadays the impossible has become the probable and the unimaginable a reality. A month ago our entire family spent a week in Colorado near the Rocky Mountain National Park. Today that entire area has been flooded, a year’s rain in a few hours. Too often the 1 in a 1000 year event is now commonplace. It used to be that a waterfront location sold at a premium. The premium now is the extra insurance cost. Look what happened in Calgary this past summer. Nothing is safe anymore. Prepare for the unexpected. Yes, disaster, weather related or connected to the environment, can come anywhere, anytime. It is prudent, I believe, to be ready for any emergency.

I don’t know whether it has anything to do with it, but Japan has always resisted Christianity. Only one percent is affiliated with one of the scores of Christian expressions. I remember reading that in the 17th century Japanese authorities sent a delegation to the Netherlands to explore religion there. Then the Netherlands was a leader in all fields: highly successful in commerce, arts, medicine, science and tolerant in religion. These delegates were not impressed apparently. Blame those dour Dutchmen. Perhaps the absence of the love commandment has given the Japanese overconfidence in technological prowess, because this very faith in technology has terribly misfired. Even though the Western world is now totally secular, yet there is a basis of Christianity there, evident in their monetary support for disadvantaged countries, something Japan does not have.

Are disasters a punishment?

Last week I read Psalm 107 at breakfast time and was struck by verse 34: “(He changes) fruitful land into a salty waste for the wickedness of those who live there.” There is a definite connection between faith in the Creator and the way we treat his work of art. When we regard creation as holy, then the land- and humamnity – benefits. Substitute salty waste – a result of irrigation or overgrazing (greed in other words) – for Monsanto seeds or monoculture or, yes, nuclear power, all the result of the wickedness of the people, and disaster is waiting in the wings. Actually there are numerous bible passages that confirm that: “they will eat the fruit of their ways” (Proverbs 1:31); and “the evil deeds of the wicked ensnare them; the cords of their sins hold them fast” (Proverbs 5: 22); “Your wickedness will punish you; your backsliding will rebuke you.”(Jeremiah 2: 19). Climate change world-wide and Japan’s plight are of our own making.

Yes, Japan is in a real fix. The damage to the 4 nuclear reactors is a threat not only to the land of the rising sun, but to the entire world. The country has an insurmountable problem: they don’t know how to fix the nuclear damage. Fact is that the Fukushima reactors have been leaking huge amounts of radioactive water ever since the earthquake 2 years ago. Some 330,000 metric tons of contaminated water has been pumped into storage pits and above-ground tanks. If one of these above-ground tanks collapses or catches fire, it could have severe adverse impacts not only on Japan, but also for the rest of the world, including North America. These storage bins offer no protection against another earthquake or the onset of a severe hurricane.

Fukushima’s extensive leakage spreads highly radioactive water not only into the surrounding soil but also into the Pacific ocean on the way to the shores of Korea, China, and the West Coast of North America. Water contaminated with nuclear radiation is a source of cancers and causes birth malfunctions. Since the engineers cannot approach the damaged buildings, they have no idea where the cores of the nuclear reactors are.

Last week Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, told workers at the Fukushima nuclear power plant that “the future of Japan” depends on their ongoing struggle to contain leaks of highly radioactive water at the site. Fat chance: they, the owners of TEPCO, which stands for Tokyo Electric Power Corporation, have been fumbling the issue from Day 1. The utility needs to keep pouring water over the reactors to keep fuel in the cores from overheating. But that has been complicated by the estimated 400 metric tons of groundwater that seeps into the area from higher ground each day.

The looming danger

Here is what the new fuzz is all about. The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is preparing to remove 400 tons of highly irradiated spent fuel from a damaged reactor building, a dangerous operation that has never been attempted before on this scale. This spent fuel contains radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima 68 years ago. There are more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly together. They need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to collapse, should another large earthquake hit the area. Each fuel rod assembly weighs about 300 kilograms (660 pounds) and is 4.5 meters (15 feet) long. There are 1,331 of the spent fuel assemblies and a further 202 unused assemblies are also stored in the pool. These rods also contain plutonium, one of the most toxic substances in the universe. Plutonium gets formed during the later stages of a reactor core’s operation. There is a high risk of accidents if these bundles get too close to each other. The real danger comes when TEPCO tries to de-commission the fuel pools.

In November the ‘experts’ who caused the accident in the first place, are going to start doing this very difficult operation on their own. Former U.N. adviser Akio Matsumura calls removing the radioactive materials from the Fukushima fuel pools “an issue of human survival.”

Of course this has caught the attention of the world’s media.

The New York Times notes: “Thousands of workers and a small fleet of cranes are preparing for one of the latest efforts to avoid a deepening environmental disaster that has China and other neighbors increasingly worried: removing spent fuel rods from the damaged No. 4 reactor building and storing them in a safer place.”

The Telegraph reports: “Tom Snitch, a senior professor at the University of Maryland and with more than 30 years’ experience in nuclear issues, said: “[Japan officials] need to address the real problems, the spent fuel rods in Unit 4 and the leaking pressure vessels. There has been too much work done wiping down walls and duct work in the reactors for any other reason than to do something….  This is a critical global issue and Japan must step up.”

The Japan Times writes: “In November, TEPCO plans to begin the delicate operation of removing spent fuel from Reactor No. 4 [with] radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. …. It remains vulnerable to any further shocks, and is also at risk from ground liquefaction. Removing its spent fuel, which contains deadly plutonium, is an urgent task…. The consequences could be far more severe than any nuclear accident the world has ever seen. If a fuel rod is dropped, breaks or becomes entangled while being removed, possible worst case scenarios include a big explosion, a meltdown in the pool, or a large fire. Any of these situations could lead to massive releases of deadly radionuclides into the atmosphere, putting much of Japan — including Tokyo and Yokohama — and even neighboring countries at serious risk.”

TEPCO is already in a losing battle to stop radioactive water overflowing from another part of the facility, and experts question whether it will be able to pull off the removal of all the assemblies successfully. “They are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods,” said Arnie Gunderson, a veteran U.S. nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, who used to build fuel assemblies. The operation, beginning this November at the plant’s Reactor No. 4, is fraught with danger, including the possibility of a large release of radiation if a fuel assembly breaks, gets stuck or gets too close to an adjacent bundle, said Gunderson and other nuclear experts.  That could lead to a worse disaster than the March 2011 nuclear crisis at the Fukushima plant, the world’s most serious since Chernobyl in 1986.

No one knows how bad it can get, but independent consultants Mycle Schneider and Antony Froggatt said recently in their World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2013: “Full release from the Unit-4 spent fuel pool, without any containment or control, could cause by far the most serious radiological disaster to date.” The utility says it recognizes the operation will be difficult but believes it can carry it out safely.

And if before the fuel is fully removed another strong earthquake strikes that topples the building or punctures the pool and allow the water to drain, a spent fuel fire is possible releasing more radiation than during the initial disaster. That will threaten Tokyo about 200 kilometers (125 miles) away. The 2020 Olympics are supposed to be held there.

What is certain is that we live in a dangerous and unpredictable world. Be prepared for all eventualities.

 

Posted in Our World Today | Leave a comment

Our World Today

Posted on September 14, 2013 by Bert Hielema

September 15 2013

Our Fatal Addiction to Oil

We all know that we live in a volatile world. It looks that, for now, the Syrian situation is going back to the pre- chemical gas stalemate, where neither side can win, but which has created a refugee nightmare which is becoming a burden for you and me because somebody-those who live in the rich countries- has to pay to keep these people alive.

All this will end badly. Assad is still in power, his opposition is still strong, Iran is still developing its nuclear whatever, Sunnis and Shiites still hate each other, the after Gaddafi Libya is still in shambles and Egypt is back to a Mubarak-like regime. The sad truth is that stalemates seldom stay stale.

All this bickering has an economic component because today’s economy, no matter where, totally depends on a steady supply of oil: no oil means death, simple and sure, therefore today oil or the lack thereof is always at the centre of every dispute everywhere. The Bible says that ‘the lust for money is the root of all evil’, today the craving for crude is the cradle of all corruption, including climate change, the world-wide weather weakness.

Yes precious oil is always poking its ugly finger into each global scenario: in Yemen the insurrection there periodically halts oil exports; in Algeria Al Qaeda is slowing foreign investment on the oil patch; the House of Saudi with its 10,000 princes and its prime-grade oil must keep on bribing its spoiled citizens who are soaking up more and more of its own production. Of course the mess started with Iraq, a war that was supposed to pay a dividend and ended up costing trillions. The resulting chaos in MENA – Middle East North Africa- has already taken a million or two barrels of oil off the world markets.

At the fringes of the core, on the edges of Europe, Australia and North America, real problems are crawling upward and are affecting the heartbeat of the mighty nations.  At the periphery climate change and excessive population growth are cutting into the food and water supply, while medieval cultural practices are increasingly out of tune with the rest of the world. The temporary presence of easy oil from 1950-2000 has allowed populations to grow far beyond the earth’s carrying capacity.

Gail Tverberg, an actuary, writes an interesting blog. In her latest she writes: “Take Egypt as a prime example. Here we have a civilization that has survived for thousands of years. Their underlying problem today, however, is that there are now about 84 million Egyptians, up from the 2 million or less that got along so well for all those millennia. The Nile simply can’t support a population of this size and the country is already dependent on imported food while continuing to grow at a breakneck pace. This was OK for a while, except that Egypt can no longer afford to pay for their imported wheat, or their oil for that matter, and are dependent on the richer Gulf Arabs for handouts.”

Egypt used to export oil, but now its population consumes the 700,000 b/d the country produces. No export means no income. No income means being dependent on Saudi charity to keep the lights on and the tractors traveling. The Suez Canal brings in some tolls, but the unrest in the country has kept tourists away.

Internal troubles in the OPEC countries and mushrooming domestic consumption there are slowly taking a toll on the world’s oil supply. True, the USA has its growing domestic production – see my column on ‘fracking’ – but it still amounts to less than half the unplanned drop in Middle Eastern production, which means that Peaking Oil Prices are still with us. Last time I looked world oil was well above $110 per barrel.

Why is it so high? Some of this is due to concerns about what will happen if the growing unrest in Syria keeps going, but the rest is due to slowly tightening supply/demand situation around the world. The Chinese are still consuming oil at an increasing pace and the world is still adding about 70 million new “oil consumers” to its population each year. As I pointed out a few weeks ago fracking in North Dakota and Texas is not nearly enough to offset the waning supplies available outside the oil-producing countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Syria, even if there were no civil war there, would still be in deep economic trouble. All was fine as long as oil production was increasing. By exporting oil the money earned could be used to fund food subsidies, education, and building highways. In 1980 Syria had 8.8 million peaceful citizens and plenty of oil to spare. Now it has 22.8 million rebellious skeptics and decreasing supplies of oil, not enough to keep up the standard of living. Due to the unrest in Egypt, Syria and Libya the production of this precious commodity combined with normal depletion has dropped dramatically.  

There is no reason for the West to be complacent. What is happening at the edges of the empire – our Western world is a capitalist empire – will soon happen to all of us as well. That’s how the Roman Empire started to crumble. When its legions no longer could protect its far flung borders, its fall was not far away. In 1980 Kenneth Boulding, himself an economist, wrote: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” Yet growth must be continued at all cost, even if the cost is war which proves that we live in a mad world. Eventually an all-out war will be the only avenue left. And that war will be about oil. That makes our addiction to oil fatal.

War may not happen in this round with Syria, but the situation is far from stable. Syria cannot solve its problems by itself. The only solution is to have a strong peacekeeping mission with the USA leading the rescue. In other words the very thing that the USA wants to avoid: no boots on the ground. This step depends on Iran which has its own agenda including nuclear ambitions something the USA and Israel will not allow even though Israel has this destructive capability. If ever the Royal House of Saudi will see an internal revolt threatening the export of eight million barrels per day, there is no doubt that the USA will intervene.

Oil is the new currency. It takes millions of years to form, while money can be created out of nothing. The past 5 years, ever since the Lehman Bros demise, the USA treasury has created as much as 5 trillion dollars by simply typing in some figures on a computer screen. This means that money has become something delusional. It can be created ex nihilo, but once it is magically called into being it is a debt which must be repaid: easy come, hard to repay. Oil, on the other hand is real and embodies everything that is bad. It is highly addictive, much more so than money. Oil is the ultimate danger: we are hooked on oil because each one of us has at our disposal 100 slaves 24/7/365. We simply can no longer live without them. We have heat or cooling at the flick of a finger; we can call upon hundreds of horsepower by merely stepping on the gas pedal; we travel anywhere in the world in total ease within 24 hours. A world without oil is no longer feasible.

The USA Department of Energy in a recent report predicts that global energy use will continue to rise rapidly, with total world consumption jumping from 524 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) in 2010 to an estimated 820 quadrillion in 2040, a net increase of 56%.  (A BTU is the amount of energy needed to heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit.)  China, which only recently overtook the United States as the world’s leading energy consumer, will account for the largest share — 40% — of the growth in global consumption over the next 30 years. We know that this means: coal consumption will skyrocket.

The consequences for the global economy, world politics, and the health and well-being of the planetary environment will be staggering.  To meet ever expanding world requirements, energy producers will be compelled to ramp up production of every kind of fossil fuel at a time of mounting concern about the ultra-dangerous role those carbon fuels play in fostering runaway climate change.  Meanwhile, the shift in the center of gravity of energy consumption from the older industrial powers to the developing world will lead to intense competition for access to available supplies. Apparently, just as economists believe in perpetual growth, bureaucrats believe that the planet can absorb infinite amounts of pollutants without any repercussions.

This simply means that the world is in the grip of evil. We are hooked on sin – because anything that harms creation is sin. Writes Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus spoke Zarathustra: “Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing.” Sinning against the earth carries its own punishment, as we are rapidly discovering. We are setting ourselves up for the ultimate cataclysm, which will come without warning once there is a tipping point.

Lack of love for God, expressed in lack of love for his creation, is a sin against the first and greatest commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” In Matthew 22: 37 Jesus quotes this text as recorded Deuteronomy 6:4. This all-important statement there – which touches upon the heart of the gospel – is preceded by these revealing words: “The Lord our God is One”. That simply means that God is what he says and what he does. Creation is God’s visible part. We express our love for God by loving his creation. We love great artists and show this by admiring and cherishing their masterpieces. Creation is God’s masterpiece: nothing remotely can be compared to the world and what it contains, including us, the human species – which we have to love as ourselves. Since God is invisible and a spirit, the best way to love God is to love his creation: it trumps all other means to love God. (Romans 1:20)

Jacques Ellul, professor of law at Bordeaux France, picks up on that. In his book Money and Power (l’Homme et l’Argent) he writes that “In the Bible love is utterly totalitarian. It comes from the entire person; it involves the whole person and binds the whole person without distinction. Love reaches down into the roots of human beings and does not leave them intact. It leads to identification and assimilation between the lover and the beloved (in this case creation). Love for money is not a lesser relationship. By this love, we join ourselves to money’s fate. “For where your treasure is, there will be your heart as well (Matt. 6:21).” Our treasure is oil. Substitute oil for money, and, writes Ellul, ‘this attachment pushes us headlong into nothingness.’

Oil is today’s currency. We can live without money for a while. We can’t live without oil. Our fatal addiction to oil will do our undoing.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

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