CC7

May 4 2010

Does the earth feel pain? Of course, if you believe what the Bible says in Romans 8: 22, where it is recorded that the whole creation has been groaning from pain. It must be screaming now that oil is destroying very vulnerable wetland in the Southern states.

What is the ultimate price we are willing to pay for oil, not only in dollars but especially in natural habitat destruction? The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is just the most recent  The other costs are more hidden: air pollution, asthma, global weirding, so perhaps the latest news that we are approaching PEAK OIL should perhaps be regarded as Good News. The bad news is that the approach of Peak Oil means that the easy stuff is gone which increases the danger of getting out whatever is left.

Who says that we are approaching Peak Oil? The United States Joint Forces Command in a press release a few weeks ago has told the world that “a severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity.” It suggests that “by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.” The report warns that a chronic constraint looms behind the immediate crisis: even under “the most optimistic scenario … petroleum production will be hard pressed to meet the expected future demand”.

Less available energy for the world’s household can be compared to a family suddenly facing job losses or decreasing wages. That would not in itself be a bad thing, if prices would also decline and so purchasing power maintained,  but if the cost of living goes up, that family will experience a double whammy, and may be reduced to sudden poverty, it not worse.

A family needs money to operate, just as oil is needed to keep the world economy going: money can be created out of nothing, that’s why banks are so profitable, but that is not the case with Oil, which is becoming ever more difficult to obtain, while demand goes up, because India and China, with close to 40 percent of the world’s population, have an increasing appetite for energy, which will produce mushrooming prices.

Less oil will actually produce more pollution, because everyone, including China –already using 80 percent coal to generate electricity – will increase the use of much higher polluting coal, especially as electric cars become all the rage.

The recent eruption of that volcano whose name I cannot possibly remember, which stopped airplane traffic dead, is but a pinprick prelude of what is at store when high octane airplane fuel will no longer be plentiful and cheap. It will not disappear, of course, but tripling the cost of the airplane power source will put an effective stop to all but the most necessary air travel. And that will only be a minor nuisance compared to other inconveniences, such as food costs, or even its very availability.

During the past five decades agriculture has become energy-intensive in every respect. The earth we own has, by and large, lost its natural state and its soil has become a chemical soup laced with pesticides and herbicides – both synthesized from oil – and other chemicals. With the price of nitrogen fertilizers, produced from natural gas, increasing exponentially at the same rate as its carbon-brother oil, and tractors and other farm machinery burning diesel fuel and gasoline, with crops trucked long distances, and food packaged in oil-derived plastic, by the time it has traveled from land to mouth, very few people will be able to afford it.

One hundred years ago 70 percent of the population was rural. Today, 2010, in its US census forms there are so few full-time farmers, that such a category no longer is included in the list of occupations. It can be safely said that with no oil, or only extremely costly fuel, society as we know it, will cease to function.
Jeff Rubin, former economist with the CIBC, in his book, Why Your world is about to get a whole lot Smaller, oil and the end of Globalization, writes that our long-distance food supply, will cease to function and local produce, a 100 feet diet, will become the norm. With a 100 feet diet I mean that you will step outside your door into you garden and eat your own produce. Of course that will not be possible when you live on the 15^th floor of a condo downtown somewhere, so, with high fuel prices, these places might not be your best bet anymore. Jeff Rubin sees 60 cents for a pound of bananas or $4 for a dozen oranges or cheap California lettuce or impossible to eat Mexican tomatoes as a quirk of history, only made possible through the temporary spurt in cheap fuel.

What should we do, in the light of these circumstances?

More about that in a next column.

Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) has a web site – hielema.ca – on which essays, books, and more than 500 columns are available free of charge.

PROPHETS

In Greek drama, Cassandra, daughter of King Priam of Troy, was given the gift of prophesy by Apollo, but when she spurned his advances, he ordained that her prophecies would not be believed. Today we live in Cassandra times, when the many warnings are simply ignored.

Why are they not heeded? Al Gore’s documentary and book The Inconvenient Truth were well received by the public, but since implementing its recommendations involved measures that would inconvenience peoples’ life styles, they are not acknowledged. The key reason New Orleans was not better protected, was simply optimistic inertia: it will never happen here. The financial meltdown two years ago was predicted by many, but The Market was seen as infallible. Of course the same is the case with the one substance on which we have built our life: not faith in the Infinite God – that too for some- but faith in an infinite supply of oil. Global Warming is an identical story: “we have driven the Earth to a crisis state from which it may never, on a human scale, return to the lush and comfortable world we love and in which we grew up,” writes the 90 year old Dr James Lovelock in his book The Revenge of Gaia, Earth’s climate in crisis and the fate of humanity. Curiously Lovelock, who is not a Christian, starts his book with a quote from Jesus: “Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.” (Matthew 23:24). A gnat is the tiniest of unclean animals. He refers here to political and environmental measures that are for appearances only but really have no substance. In essence he is saying what Peter writes in 2 Peter 3, where he describes The Day of the Lord, “Since everything will be destroyed in this way – the elements destroyed by fire – you ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of the Lord and speed its coming.” In that sense James Lovelock is a true prophet.

Prophets are unpopular because they question the status quo; prophets are unpopular because people hate change; prophets are unpopular because people are comfortable; prophets are unpopular because politicians avoid controversy at all cost, hate to be bringers of bad news, even though they know better; prophets are unpopular even in the church as it plain from even a cursory reading of the Old Testament prophets, where both the major and minor ones reveal that organized religion in the days before Christ resembled today’s rulers: they want to please everybody. And not much has changed in the after Christ institutions.

The average human thinks that a prophet is a special person who speaks for God or one who foretells the future, at least that’s what my dictionary tells me, but I take issue with that explanation, because it would limit the office of prophet to crackpots, since nobody can predict the future.

Let me go back a more than few years when I was young and attended the Young People Society in my home-city Groningen, where our Sunday-evening meetings were geared to students, and chaired by a university graduate. There some 20 young men, after having attended two church services of at least 90 minutes in duration, debated topics of general Christian interest, introduced by one of the members. There I learned that we as Christians have a three-fold office: that of Prophet, Priest and King. These weekly 2 hour Sunday- evening gatherings in the early and mid 1940’s, shaped my outlook on life.

So I am a Prophet, Priest and King? That’s a core Calvinistic declaration, but one that I don’t hear much about anymore. Perhaps the words of God to Ezekiel (chapter 2: 2-5) apply to today as well: “I am sending you to a rebellious nation that is obstinate and stubborn. And whether they listen or not they will know that a prophet has been among them”.

After this introduction, I better clarify what I perceive as a prophet’s profile. A prophet is a visionary, a seer. In the Bible they were called ‘seers’ not because they could see into the future, but because they could see the truth, could understand the deeper meaning of life and have a holistic view on events, not staring what’s going on in isolation, but grasping the true consequences of the day’s happenings, and the deeper spiritual message of the present moment. A prophet sheds unblinking light on the pain and injustices of the present. By doing so he or she links heeding to hearing and action to understanding.

Thus a prophet is not an extraordinary gifted person who knows the unknown, a sort of fortune-teller who magically foretells what is to come. No, a prophet is first and foremost a believer who refuses to nostalgically wallow in the past, but is convinced that a new present requires new thinking and different approaches.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who openly and unabashedly dares to look to what is happening ‘out there’ and, as a consequence, fully embraces his or her responsibility for the immense challenges evident in our quickly changing society.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who has the courage to critically look at past decisions, including those involving doctrines, to test them on their relevance for today and tomorrow.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who from his or her perspective on contemporary life dares to look to the future to keep creation viable for our children and grandchildren and also strives for a church in which these young people feel at home.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who by seeing Scripture as a lamp for their feet and a light for their path in God’s wonderful creation, knows that Christ, as the Son of Man, the Ben-Adam, the Son of the Soil, will return to make all things new. That’s why a prophet, in spite of all the sin and evil in this world, looks to the future with full confidence.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who now already can visualize what this future will be like and thus can critically evaluate the present in the light of the glorious future that is coming.

If I may be so bold to cast myself in the role that I have described above, and probably be condemned for doing so, what do I see?

Looking back how we have arrived at the circumstances we are in today then I detect that the economic boom that made America in the 20^th century the globe’s largest economy and the envy of the world, can be traced to some fortunate circumstances: where Europe and the rest of the world suffered ruinous wars, North American industrial hinterlands were not only spared destruction, but benefited immensely as producers of war materials and the providers of the black gold in Texas and elsewhere in its territory: the United States at the mid 20^th century produced more petroleum than all the other countries on Earth put together. The oceans of oil on which the US floated to victory in two world wars made it the economic super power of the by-gone era. That domestic oil-flow has now been reduced to a trickle, while global supplies too are shrinking, at exactly the same time when expectations of billions of destitute people are rising, thanks to ubiquitous television.

With the coming of Peak Oil and the first slow slippages in worldwide conventional petroleum production, it is not difficult to predict for those who have ears to hear, eyes to see and minds to embrace, that the big challenge facing today’s industrial societies is managing the end of abundance, rather than the onset of greater wealth for the Rest of the World.

It is foolish to believe otherwise: the brief period of cheap and plentiful energy, now ending, which, for an all too short a period was in itself a exceptional occurrence in historical terms, has been nothing else but a tremendous acceleration of human history- of which the more than tripling of the number of humans in my life time is just one example – so that the Coming of Christ would be sooner.

A realistic look at what’s happening makes plain that the period of unprecedented prosperity, extraordinary extravagance and gigantic growth, is ending, perhaps even suddenly. That means that society has to relearn the lessons of more normal and less unusual times, times where we have the opportunity to again truly and purposely honor creation. That’s what Peter alluded to in 2 Peter 3: 11-12 when he asked us “to live holy and godly lives as we look forward to the Day of God and speed its coming.” In this connection I’d like to draw your attention to a line in the Lord’s Prayer, the one immediately following our request “Your Kingdom Come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That is a direct appeal for the speedy coming of The New Creation. The next line which many of us also repeat almost every week is “Give us this day our daily bread.” In the March 25 2010 issue of the London Review of Books, a new book is discussed, A History of Christianity, The first 3000 years. There it says that “The Greek word epiousios, translated as ‘daily’ does not mean ‘daily.’… the most likely learned guess seems to be that it refers to a special bread that will be needed the next day if the kingdom should happen to come overnight.  Professor Dr Herman Ridderbos, in his marvelous work The Coming of the Kingdom, also says that ‘daily’ is most likely incorrect, and leans to “belonging to the coming kingdom.” This, in my totally layman’s opinion, fits in with the preceding line and thus the request to Give us this day our daily bread, could read “Give us the wherewithal to prepare ourselves for the Coming of the Kingdom.”

In June Toronto has the dubious honor to host the G20 meeting, which will, as usual, focus on the economy. You can be assured that these politicians and economists will do everything in their power to enhance economic growth, even though perpetual growth is an impossibility, and when it does happen, as in cancer, it ends in death. Politicians look to yesterday for answer to cope with tomorrow’s problems. Attempt after attempt to cure economic stagnation by expanding access to credit have only generated a series of destructive speculative bubbles and crashes while destroying creation. Efforts to maintain an inflated standard of living in the face of a contracting real economy have only caused mountains of debts. Today’s policy makers are driven by a two-pronged faith commitment: (1) that policies that failed last year will succeed next year, and (2) that the pursuit of ever newer and ever more expensive technological tools will assure an even grander future.

A new course should be taken, based on simple technologies, locally based, more resilient, sustainable and creation friendly, but that will not happen, and so the warnings in the Bible and by the modern-day Cassandras will be ignored. People will go there merry way till the End, when the Lord will come back to rectify the situation once and for all. Be part of that in-Spired restoration process.

CO-OWNING THE EARTH

April 10 2010

I always have a number of books on the go, from easily- digested detective to philosophical-religious stuff. I sometimes read the latter 3 or 4 times, for the simple reason that I am a slow learner. One of my repeat-reads is The Hidden Face of God, by Dr Richard Elliot Friedman, an expert in Old Testament language but equally at home in the New Testament.

In the book Prof Friedman traces the disappearance of God, and mentions that Jesus Christ always describes Himself as “son of man,” a term that appears in the Hebrew Bible 109 times as ‘ben adam’ which, he writes, simply means ‘human being. It literally says ‘son of the earth’.

Dr Friedman also devotes a lot of space to Friedrich Nietzsche, the author of Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus spake Zarathustra), from which he quotes a very peculiar passage: “To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing.” Nietzsche’s call to “be true to the earth” also had a decisive influence on Bonhoeffer’s spiritual development as well. In his Creation and Fall he writes, “God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together. This means that sinning against the earth is the same as sinning against one’s neighbor.

Think about that for a minute: “To sin against the earth is the most dreadful thing!” It reminds me of Psalm 51:4 “O wash me more and more from my guilt and cleanse me from my sin,” and (6) “Against you, you alone have I sinned”.

The passage makes eminent sense to me. We confess that God made the earth. That makes the earth holy. This earth, says Romans 8, is now deeply suffering from the sins we commit against it. Especially we Westerners sin against the earth continuously. I see it as a classical case of ‘lese majesty’, an offense against “The Sovereign Power.”  It is doubly curious that, although a majority of North Americans still believes Global Warming is real, that percentage is falling, with the lowest number among conservative Christians. Global Warming, or perhaps more accurately Global Weirding, is a direct consequence of ‘sinning against the earth.’

If I am correct in my reasoning, then the churches should be in the forefront of advocating measures that stop or at least lessen the dangers of Climate Change and forcefully agitate against pollution, and practice all means of conservation, perhaps even promote house churches to cut back on driving and maintaining a large building used only a few hours per week.

I know I am powerless to make people change their minds about anything, including environmental issues: no level of evidence can shake the growing belief that climate science is a giant conspiracy cooked up by fanatics like me and governments to tax and control us. I cannot change people’s views. Even Jesus, in spite of all his miracles, was killed because He did not buy into the one thing that people wanted: a Davidic-like Israel and deliverance from the Roman oppressor.

Today I see a striking paradox: now that Jesus is soon to establish His earthly Kingdom, the New Creation, for which we pray every time we recite “Thy Kingdom Come,” the overwhelming belief in the larger church is that Heaven is our destination, and not this earth. To believe otherwise would entail treating this earth as God’s domain, and an admission that we effectively co-own this earth. That would rob us of our temporary easy life, made possible by abundant fuel supplies, now on the verge to disappear.

Yes, Peak Oil peeks around the corner. New studies show that peak oil is due in 2014. Kuwaiti scientists have updated oil predictions previously based on the famous Hubbert model, which had correctly predicted in 1956 that U.S. oil reserves would peak within 20 years. The new multi-cycle Hubbert Model, used by the Kuwaiti scientists evaluated oil production trends of 47 major oil-producing countries, showing how many countries have already hit their peak including Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Russia, Norway, the U.K., China, Iran, and Indonesia. Another report was published last month by the UK Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security. Britain of course will have parliamentary elections in May and the authors noted that the next government is likely to be dealing with declining oil production, to start by 2014. Peak oil, by the way, is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline.

In future columns I will try to picture what life would be like with an ever shrinking oil supply.

Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) had a successful maple-syrup season: a lot of work, but the result was sweet. His blog is ‘hielema.ca’