August 2014
HEADING FOR DISASTER?
The simple answer to this question is: Yes, we are on the path of unparalleled, unprecedented perils, worse than anything ever experienced, even in the entire second millennium, the previous 1,000 year period, which saw such enormous events as the Black Death, when as much as a third of the European population died, and world-wide wars that killed as many as 100 million people in the last century alone.
Two hundred years ago – 1815 – the Napoleonic Age ending with the battle of Waterloo, signaled the conclusion of the first European World War. This was followed by a century of peace briefly broken by skirmishes such as the Crimean War and some colonial conflicts – the Boer War comes to mind around 1900.
This all changed in 1914 when, for reasons still debated, Europe erupted not unlike a volatile volcano dispatching sudden death and destruction. Perhaps, who knows, the economy played a role, because just prior to the onset of the first cataclysmic event of the 20th Century, the so-called World War I, financial turmoil was just as bad as it is now. This war was welcomed because, in 1914, with high unemployment and no government aid, the unemployed flocked to the recruiting centres to enlist, as joining the armies meant payment of a dollar a day – when one single dollar still had substantial buying power – three square meals a day and free clothing. Historians do agree that commercial competition between England and Germany played a role, while France still smarted from Germany decisively defeating La Belle France in 1871. Whatever the reason, fact is that this war was the most tragic conflict in modern history, that it was totally unnecessary madness, and that its unintended consequences wrecked Europe’s illustrious and indeed idyllic civilization, spawned a Stalin, a Hitler and its continuation in 1939. The victorious politicians, after Germany’s defeat in 1918, cut up the Middle East without regard to tribal and religious factions, creating numerous problems which only now, 100 years later, are screaming for solution.
The Final Reckoning: the Four Horsemen
The entire world is preparing for a final reckoning as all simmering strives and unsolved issues are coming out in the open. Apocalypse the Greek name of the Bible Book Revelation, its last chapter, means ‘coming out in the open.’ The bad decisions and political resolutions of this long 41 year War, from 1914 till 1945, are being exposed and are screaming for rectification, including long suppressed colonial injustices. To aggravate matters even more, cosmic conditions are being bared, of which Climate Change, energy shortages, clean water availability, soil erosion, and overpopulation are the most prominent, all affecting the entire human race. Fighting in the Middle East, Israel, Iraq, Yemen, Eastern Europe, and an Ebola pestilence in Africa, are eerie examples of the four horsemen of pestilence, famine, war, and death, now evident everywhere. We are caught in an impossible bind. On the one hand energy availability is waning and the global economic system is beginning to turn down, on the other hand our political structure and Capitalism can only function with expanding growth.
This all looks like the Beginning of the End.
Our slaves have enslaved us
Am I unduly pessimistic? No. For me, an older man, it pays to have such a frame of mind. A study published last year in the journal Psychology and Aging found that older people with pessimistic views of the future were more likely to live longer and healthier lives than those with a rosier outlook. The researchers used data from a nationally representative survey in Germany of about 11,000 people. When looking at respondents older than 65, a total of about 1,300 people, the researchers found that the likelihood of surviving or remaining healthy increased by about 10% for those who were more pessimistic. Pessimists prepare themselves for the worst and so are better equipped to face the future.
And there is a lot to be pessimistic about. Everywhere we look pressures of all sorts are pushing against us, threatening our well-being. The main reason is our comfortable condition, with each of us in the West, having 200+ energy slaves at our disposal night and day, provided by coal, oil and gas. That very situation is now under attack, because, in human history, this is an enormous anomaly. It has caused the earth itself to become our enemy, the very source on which our life depends: the hand that was created to feed us has become the fist that fights us. The struggle for the remaining energy slaves has placed the planet in mortal peril, thanks to oil, which is a finite product, and also highly polluting.
The Arctic Region and Shale are about the only ‘new’ sources of oil and gas we have, but Shale is a rapidly depleting source and the Arctic is too expensive to exploit, reason why immensely powerful and rich oil companies, such as Shell and Exxon, have sold their shale holdings and abandoned their leases in the forbidden Beaufort Sea. But don’t the Saudis have lots of oil? No. They won’t be able to make up for the difference. Not even close. The only possible way to go from here is to lower our energy demand, and our reliance on the energy demand of our society, by as much as 90 percent. If we don’t – and we won’t, for the simple reason that we no longer can’t – the West will face a sudden and merciless demise, probably preceded by the collapse of the financial system. The single reason why world population has tripled in my life time is the use of carbon fuels. Once this supply stream slows, so will life expectancy. A sudden stop will cause the death of billions within a very short time.
Wars and rumors of War.
I am writing this in August 2014, the exact month when 100 years ago the 20th Century First World War started, the very reason why this war is so much in the news now. Historians have been busy trying to trace who were primarily responsible for starting this conflict. On one side of the debate is historian Margaret MacMillan, whose new book “The War That Ended Peace,” lays primary blame on Germany’s military and commercial ambitions. On the other is “The Sleepwalkers – How Europe Went to War in 1914” by Cambridge professor Christopher Clark who disagrees with MacMillan and shows that Germany’s role in the conflict was no greater than the other belligerents, and perhaps less than commonly believed. He writes that starved into submission by Britain’s naval blockade, Germany was unfairly and foolishly saddled with total war guilt, and saw 10% of its territory and 7 million of its people torn away at Versailles by the victors, primarily France and England.
Both authors agree that the cruel conditions imposed on Germany led to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power on his vow to return Germany’s lost lands and peoples who had been given to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Most of today’s Mideast’s problems flowed directly from the diplomatic lynching of Germany at Versailles led by France and Britain.
In one report I read Prof. Clark shows that both of these imperial powers feared Germany’s growing commercial and military power (just as the US today fears China’s rise). Germany’s vibrant social democracy with its worker’s rights and concern for the poor posed a threat to the capitalists of Britain and France. Britain’s imperialists were deeply worried by the creation of a feeble little German Empire based in Africa. At the time they controlled a quarter of the globe and all of its oceans.
Whoever is correct, we now know only too well that almost 40 years of petty European rivalries, intrigues and power games finally ran disastrously together in 1914.
We see the same dangers today in the growing conflict over Ukraine between the US and its European allies and Russia. Every week seems to bring the US and Russia closer to a collision as the Washington seeks to dominate Ukraine and use it as a weapon against Russia. At this point no one in the West is ready to die for Luhansk or Donetsk, but then, in 1914, few in Europe were ready to die for Verdun or Ypres – but millions did. Will history repeat itself? Often when politicians are powerless to prevent recessions or depressions, war seems to be the best alternative. History tells us that, if all else fails, making war diverts the attention of the electorate. However, the last thing our fragile environment needs is more destruction and violent deaths.
We are sleep-walking into oblivion
The title of Christopher Clark’s book The Sleepwalkers is eminently fitting for our time as well. Just as Europe, as in a trance, got closer and closer to the fatal step from which there was no retreat – optimistically proclaiming that any conflict would be short-lived – our war against nature is very similar , also a war with no winners.
The average person in the Western World is blind to what’s really happening and consequently our ‘carbon footprint’ is still increasing – and mine as well. In July my share of the world’s pollution was bigger than usual: I flew to Europe to visit a sick sister and brother, and later my wife and I flew, also from Toronto, to Minneapolis for a grandson’s wedding. I observed that both in Europe and in the USA there is little or no awareness that Time with a capital T is running out. It reminds me of Revelation 22:11, the last chapter in the Bible. There is says that “Let they who do wrong keep on doing so… let they who do right continue to act that way.” In other words, the time for conversion is past. People are too set in their ways to change direction. We no longer can change our life style, and so the dome of bubbles just keeps blowing bigger and bigger into an unstable explosive critical mass. Limited resources are rapidly vanishing under our global canopy; extreme drought in China, in West USA, in South America means that food scarcity is increasing worldwide; political, religious, business leaders all are silent about the taboo topic of controlling the world’s out-of-control population growth and unable to stop Climate Change, and so the real clock keeps ticking.
Yes, silence on long-term big-bubble issues is deafening, stifled by our relentless quest for more, by the endless drive for earnings by big banks, big oil, big lobbying, big government and blinded, crowd-pleasing, small-minded politicians who tried to be re-elected by promising a better future, with nothing to back up their empty slogans.
The military men, the real power in Washington, are planning for more wars, austerity, massive population losses, as pandemics lurk in the shadows, emerging without warning.
What’s ahead? What is the West’s future? What sort of world is emerging where a hundred billionaires own more than half of the world’s resources and want more? Where are we headed when billions go to bed hungry every night? Can we really say that matters will improve when soil erosion, Global Warming, polluted waters, a looming pandemic, increasing unemployment and a still rapidly expanding world population are the only growth industries?
So what’s ahead? Wars, wars and more wars fought by desperate people for vanishing resources, because failure to deal with the big issues will fulfill the Pentagon’s 2020 prediction: “As the planet’s carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would emerge … warfare is defining human life.”
That’s also the clear message of Michael Klare’s “The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources,” preceded by Klare’s earlier book, “Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict.”
Klare’s prophecy is unambiguous: “No matter how much corporate or government officials wish to deny it, there are not nearly enough nonrenewable resources on this planet to perpetually satisfy the growing needs of a ballooning world population.”
In today’s world run by Big Oil and climate-denying billionaires like the Koch Bros, Klare warns “existing modes of production are causing unacceptable damage to the global environment……continuing with current industrial practices will simply prove impossible.”
The truth is our planet is at a historic turning point. A critical mass is near its flash point, bringing with it a perfect storm of regional wars, mass starvation, pandemics and global-warming catastrophes, the perfect Apocalypse situation. And yet most conservative politicians, Wall Street CEOs and billionaires minimize the warnings of men like environmentalist Bill McKibben, money manager Jeremy Grantham, anthropologist Jared Diamond, and global security expert Michael Klare, all warning us to wake-up before it’s too late to save our planet.
The Four Horses of the Apocalypse are out in the open. The world is facing an unprecedented crisis of resource depletion, a crisis that goes beyond ‘peak oil’ to encompass shortages of coal and uranium, copper and lithium, water and arable land. With all of the planet’s easily assessable resource deposits rapidly approaching exhaustion, the desperate hunt for supplies has become a frenzy of extreme exploration, as governments and corporations rush to stake their claims in areas previously considered too dangerous or remote, such as the melting polar regions, where now exploding methane gases – 23 times more deadly than our exhaust-spewing Green-House-Gases – cause mysterious craters in the Arctic ice, accelerating Climate Change beyond the most pessimistic projections.
All this will “Prepare the Way of the Lord,” when he returns to ‘judge the living and the dead.’
In September I will start a weekly series on
PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE