March 1 2011
Our World Today
OK. Call me a pessimist for seeing great dangers confronting us, of which perhaps the most serious one is our refusal to face reality. Research at the University of Michigan, found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, fundamental religious believers and those with a vested interest in the status quo, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. On the contrary, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs: the truth did not set them free.
That blindness concerns such events as Climate Change, Peak Oil, Food Scarcity, Over-population, and also Bible Abuse. Rather than seeing the Scriptures as the light to guide us through God’s creation, many stare into that light until it blinds them from seeing what’s happening in the world around them.
All this is real bad news for the next generation, because we are leaving our youth with an unimaginable mess, and for this we owe them our deepest possible apology. We see the young rising up in the millions, mainly because those in North Africa and the Middle East are noticing their future is fading before their eyes thanks to rapidly disappearing oil and food stuffs.
Let me rehash something familiar by using as metaphor the well-known example of a tall apple tree with much low-hanging fruit.
My generation did the easy picking, wasting about one –third of the crop, after all there was so much it. Now when it is our youth’s turn to benefit, a strong wind has blown off the majority of the higher fruit while to harvest the few left will take life threatening effort.
In real life we did this with most minerals including soil – now eroding rapidly – and water- with many aquifers near depletion. The result is that we are faced with two mutually enforcing trends: ever higher energy costs and ever greater difficulties in reaching the needed commodities.
Take gold. It requires an enormous amount of processing. With the readily available ores dug up we are forced to go to remote points to secure the less pure deposits. To travel there requires not only a lot more energy, but if its gold content has dropped from 2% to 1%, then the amount to be processed to get the same quantity of precious metal also doubles, and so does the need for energy.
The same is true for most elements in modern life. The easy fuel is long gone, reason why Canada thrives on tar-sands. Australia can now readily export its secondary, even more polluting, coal resources to China with ominous consequences. A study by Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard Medical School finds that the full lifecycle expense of extracting and burning coal is more costly and damaging than previously known: an estimated $345 billion annually in health, environmental, and other costs in the United States alone. Double that for China. The direct financial outlay, the report reveals, adds close to 18¢ for every kilowatt hour of electricity generated from coal, still electricity’s main energy source. That too is a charge heaped on the shoulders of our youth, already carrying the immense burdens of deficits, pension-shortfalls and healthcare.
It is not the quantity of minerals, fuel, potash, nickel or gold that is important, it is the quality that matters. In other words, what we are seeing now is that the energy needed to maintain our way of life increases exponentially as distances are greater, as ore quality is less, as processing is more energy intensive, until the entire procedure reaches a point where it is no longer economical.
Of course, the crucial point is the amount of fossil fuels left. Thanks to Wikileaks, which obtained telegrams from the American embassy in Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh, we now know that Saudi oil reserves were overstated by as many as 300 billion barrels: that is 10 years of the entire world’s consumption!!
The Guardian, which published the memo wrote that: The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates.
In spite of these warnings many people have hung the “Do Not Disturb Us with the Facts” sign on their foreheads. Instead they pick and choose only the items that will serve in walling them off from uncomfortable truths. The future belongs to those who prepare for it. Not preparing means that the real victims are the world’s young people, who have been made to believe that their future will be rosy. It now dawns on them that we have failed to tell them the truth, because we found it too difficult to face it ourselves. No wonder they are rising up in protest.
Bert Hielema has written two new books, THE SHORTEST DAY (215 pages), based on Matthew 24:22, and its sequel DAY WITHOUT END (152 pages) envisioning the meaning of “I believe in the resurrection of the dead and theLife Everlasting.” To order go to ‘bert@hielema.ca”