NOVEMBER 30 2019
WE ARE TOAST
This past week a scholarly article in ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS via The Automatic Earth kept me thinking. I read it a number of times, and, although it struck me as utterly reflecting our current situation, one of grave danger and immense peril, its final paragraph threw me off. Here it is:
We are desperately in need of a set of guideposts and principles that include not only ecology but also biology, psychology, physics and emergent behaviors. This discipline will focus at least as much on ‘what we’ll have to do’ as on ‘what we should do’. And it will apply the evolving knowledge of experts with a view to the maps and charts made by generalists. Ecological economics was shaped as a next step from earlier classical ideologies so as to consider the inclusion of sources and sinks. Over the next 30 years, ecological economics must be both torchbearer for a systems economics and midwife to a smaller flame.
In other words, the experts, the scientists, will provide the answers. I maintain that it is too late: nothing can save us from total collapse and the demise of the world’s population. Nobody, not a single source, can now deal with the terrible outcome and the disastrous consequences of what is on store for us. Only Dr. Guy McPherson, the Arizona university ecology professor emeritus, the originator of ARCTIC NEWS, directly confronts us with the global holocaust we are facing when – not if – the methane stored in the shallow Arctic Ocean, is released. And that could happen soon.
We always hope for the best, but….
We are great in deceiving ourselves. A new study on EV – electric vehicles – shows that, although its tailpipe emissions are zero – there is no tailpipe on these cars – the equivalent CO2 comes from the electricity making colossi, the smokestacks of the generating stations. We are marvels at deceiving ourselves, but the weather is not so readily hoodwinked.
Yes, there is the increase in global temperature, but there too a lot of deception goes on. The UN uses the average global rise, but, as ARTIC NEWS reports, the temperature in the Arctic is more than double that of the Rest of the World.
These far higher values and the resulting melting of the ICE there, have major consequences for climate change – such as the melting of the permafrost and the release of the far more dangerous METHANE, and do not represent the seriousness of the climate crisis.
And then there is bad news about bad news.
The article in ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS looks at the world situation also from a personal perspective, taking human nature into consideration. Here is what it says,
“For good evolutionary reasons (short life spans, risk of food expropriation, unstable environment, etc.) we disproportionately care about the present more than the future, measured by economists via a ‘discount rate’. The steeper the discount rate, the more the person is ‘addicted to the present.’ Unfortunately, most of our modern challenges are ‘in the future’. ….When asked to plan a snack for next week between chocolate or fruit, people chose fruit 75% of the time. When choosing a snack for today, 70% select chocolate. When choosing a movie to watch next week 63% choose an educational documentary but when choosing a film for tonight 66% pick a comedy or sci-fi.”
In our words, we have great intentions for the future, until the future becomes today, then we chicken out. In other words, “We are emotionally blind to long-term issues like climate change or energy depletion. Emotionally, the future isn’t real.”
That’s bad news for all of us, including the church which is supposed to deal with death and the hereafter.
Our reluctance to look ahead and plan accordingly reminds me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, when he was 26-27 years old already had a double doctorate in theology. He, in 1932-33, just before Hitler came to power (who killed him in 1945), gave a series of talks on Genesis 1-3 at the University of Berlin where he was a lecturer. They were later issued under the title, CREATION AND FALL.
In his introduction to this 200 page book he wrote,
“The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”
He then quotes Isaiah 43: 18-19, “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing.”
Bonhoeffer continues, “The new is the real end of the old; the new however, is Christ. Christ is the end of the old. Not the continuation, not the goal, the completion in line with the old, but the end and therefore the new.”
Bonhoeffer – biblical scholar he is – wants us not to live in the present, but concentrate on the end, and what comes after that: the new beginning with Christ.
That is something no scholarly article will dare to suggest, even though the messages out there are becoming more ominous by the day. The nations of the world –not the largest polluters, the USA and China – solemnly pledged to reduce CO2 emissions in the Paris Accord four years ago, but this past week the UN reported that we are pumping more Green House Gases than ever.
And that is something this article confirms for the simple reason that we have become addicted to carbon and its death-enhancing aspects.
We are enslaved by our slaves.
Take a barrel of crude oil. It can perform about 1700 kW hour of work. Compare that to a human laborer who can perform about 0.6 kW hour in one workday. Simple arithmetic reveals it takes over 11 years of human labor to do the same work potential in a barrel of oil.
This energy/labor relationship was the foundation of the industrial revolution. Most technological processes require hundreds to thousands of calories of fossil energy to replace each human calorie previously used to do the same tasks manually.
My grandfather was a farmer who milked a dozen cows, some 90 years ago. Consider milking a cow using three methods: manual (human labor energy only), semi-automated electric milking machines (1100 kW h per cow per year), and fully automated milking (3000 kW h per cow-year). The manual milker, working alone, requires 120 hours of human labor per year per cow; semi-automated machines require 27 hours of labor; and full automation, 12 hours.
That meant that physically my grandfather could only look after 12 cows to be milked, plus pigs, chickens, calves. Today one of my brothers in law, with two robot milkers looks after 200 head of cattle, milking some 160.
This same ‘energetic remoteness’ applies to many key resources, including water, lithium, and food. We use around two calories of fossil fuel to grow one food calorie in our modern agricultural system – but we use 8–12 additional fossil calories to process, package, deliver, store and cook modern food.
It’s actually worse than that. Almost 20 percent of the food we buy in North America, we throw away. If that is true – certainly not true for our own ‘war-time’ conditioned eating habits – that means that we need perhaps as much as 20 CARBON CALORIES to give us ONE FOOD CALORIE.
In the natural world, this is unsustainable, because organisms that require much, much more energy to find food than the food contains, will die. We only get away with this because our institutions and policies treat the energy subsidy from fossil hydrocarbons as interest, not principal.
That means that everything we do will become more expensive if we cannot reduce energy consumption of industrial processes faster than prices grow.
Prepare for massive inflation and war-time food conditions with rationing and growing famine.
This same principle increasingly applies to most modern industrial processes: we save human labor and time by adding large amounts of cheap fossil labor.
Although modern industrial output is energy inefficient it is extremely cost efficient because fossil energy is much cheaper than human energy. Thanks to the “fossil subsidy”, companies make large profits and cause wages and standards of living to be considerably higher compared to previous civilizations.
“Today the average human in 2015 produced 14 times more GDP than a person in 1800 – and the average American 49 times more!”, says the article.
However, these windfalls come with a downside. Industrial profitability is vulnerable to energy price increases. Remember that oil is a finite product: we have tapped the easy, low hanging fruit. Now comes the hard part.
In 2018, the global economy ran on a constant 17 trillion watts of energy – enough to power over 170 billion 100-watt light bulbs continuously. Over 80% of this energy, was the 110 billion barrels of oil equivalents of fossil hydrocarbons that power (and is embodied in) our machines, transportation and infrastructure. Even at 4.5 years per barrel, this equates to the labor equivalent of more than 500 billion human workers compared to ?4 billion actual human workers in the entire world.
In other words, every person, woman or man, in the work-force, in Europe and America, in India and China, had 125 energy slaves at their beck and call.
These fossil ‘armies’ are the foundation of the modern global economy and work tirelessly in thousands of industrial processes and transportation systems. We didn’t pay for the creation of these armies of energy workers: that happened millions of years ago: we only facilitated their exploitation.
What ‘Economic growth’ means.
Someday soon the entire world economy will suddenly grind to a halt. As last year’s CO2 count illustrated, more people being born, more people wanting more, more people living in the ‘now’, more people refusing to look to tomorrow, means more energy use, means faster, a much faster arrival of D Day, Depletion Day, Depression Day, because there simply is no substitute for carbon energy.
Energy is needed to create and transform all material inputs and energy can only be substituted by other energy. Forget about solar and wind. To manufacture them needs energy as well. To transport and install them and maintain them, also needs energy.
We can’t go back, but going forward means disaster. So we ignore all signs. That’s human nature: “carpe diem” the Romans said, “seize the day” while we can, but that is not the answer, certainly not for those who profess to be followers of Christ.
Bonhoeffer was right. “The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”
He then quotes Isaiah 43: 18-19, “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing.” Bonhoeffer continues, “The new is the real end of the old; the new however, is Christ. Christ is the end of the old. Not the continuation, not the goal, the completion in line with the old, but the end and therefore the new.”
That’s the message the world ignores, and the church is loath to proclaim. Revelation 21 comes to mind. There it affirms Bonhoeffer’s advice. There it says that “Christ will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away.”
Yes, our economy with its built-in death culture will vanish: totally. Not a trace left. Yes, we are toast: we are in for death and disease. That is a given. But there is a promise the world cannot give. It is found at the end of the Bible.
“And the One seated on the throne said, “Behold, I will make all things new…..I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.”
The world, the scientists, the political and economic systems do not have the solution. Nothing human will help us.
In the beginning Christ created but we un-created. Christ died on the cross to restore creation to its original, unaffected, pure state, because he so loved the cosmos.
We can be part of that New Creation when we love Christ and show that in loving his creation.
All is well that ends well.