May 19 2013
What do I see out there in our wide-wild- world?
It’s so easy to leisurely float along on the current of contemporary news coverage. Bangladesh too far away – poor people- but hockey is more exciting. Syria? After a two year stalemate, nobody takes Syria seriously anymore: too bad those Christians there. Oh yes, Greece and Spain: a real pain for the young people with sixty percent having no work, but we are OK so it really does not touch us. Some rumblings about a dangerous disease in China: chickens again, but there’s always something wrong there, so what else is new – suppressing a yawn.
Why worry. Should we be concerned that the New York Times, not just any paper, has a lead editorial on a possible pandemic, having started in Saudi Arabia, and warning us not to be complacent? Probably another alarm story that will pan out as bogus, so why worry.
God’s Word Today.
Among my readers – 5500 visitors in April – are a number of church-going people who recognize a Jesus’ quote: “like a thief in the night”. Also not foreign to them is “Woe! Woe, O great city, where all who became rich have hidden bank account overseas. Let the poor pay taxes. In one hour they have been brought to ruin!” Yes, that is a variation on a quote from Revelation 18. “Your multi-national companies were the leading forces behind the evil inflicted on the earth. By their magic spell all the nations were led astray.” That’s another quote, sort of, from that same Bible chapter. How about the Old Testament? Hosea anyone? Chapter 4? Because of what we do and keep on doing “the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying.” And a few texts further: “my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge, because you have rejected knowledge.”
Enough. Enough. What’s the use of citing all this? What’s the use of quoting the Holy Bible, God’s secondary Word, if only a relatively few really care about God’s primary world, his Holy Creation? I know that’s strong language, yet… I once sat down in a discussion group with the head of a denomination where the future of the church was the topic. I remarked that we call the Scriptures Holy even though its final version was determined by majority vote at the Council of Nicaea in 323 after much wrangling among the 300 people there. Creation however, called into being by God’s direct action- word is never called ‘holy’ by the church. Why not? My question was met with stony silence. It seems to me that failing to consider this option has brought the world to the edge of collapse. Don’t get me wrong. I love the Scriptures. For 27 years I have written a daily meditation on the weekly lectionary: 400 words on weekdays and 800 on Sundays, guided by a journal Journeying through the days. I have never missed one single day. I still insist that the church has failed to show the way to the Kingdom. The result is the type of Stephen Harper Christianity.
A few words on Canada’s PM Stephen Harper
I believe the church is in a mess because it shies away from the totality of God’s Word, which includes creation. Psalm 19 comes to mind. And it is not alone in committing sins of omission: the entire political world too is suffering from gigantic missteps. Canada itself is going in the wrong direction, thanks to its Prime Minister, Stephen Harper who confesses to be a protestant Christian of the ‘heaven-minded’ type. He has only one passion – apart from hockey: the economy: everything has to be subservient to economic growth. Take the tar sands, called ‘ethical’ by his administration even though they generate multiple pollution by: (1) removing the trees that cover the bitumen, eliminating a source of carbon absorption; (2) creating extra carbon as dead trees release CO2; (3) cooking or boiling the sands to extract the oil is tremendously energy intensive; (4) generating mountains of petroleum coke which according to the environmental group Oil Change International is “really the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth”; (5) burning the stuff in our gas tanks and so spreading pollution everywhere; (6) the transportation by pipelines and possible spills on the way to refineries; and (7) the refining process itself. Thus there are at least seven sources of pollution involved in the tar sand process. If that is ethical then I guess bad-mouthing opposition politicians is the Christian way to win elections.
No wonder that over the past few years Mr. Harper has engaged in a typical anti-science campaign, muzzling scientists who have criticized his views on Climate Change. Just lately the National Research Council has been ordered to engage in research that has only economic gain, claiming that scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value. Planning for Global Warming has no commercial value. Fighting poverty has no commercial value. Engaging in searching for suicide prevention among the native population has no commercial value. Any research on the decline of the bird and amphibian species has no commercial value. Testing the waters for possible contamination has no commercial value. Mr. Harper believes in being Homo Economicus, the one-goal human, created for a single purpose only: to go after money, to impose upon the earth for pure exploitable purposes. In Genesis 2: 9 it is related how God made trees: “pleasing to the eye and good for food.” The aesthetic is named before the economic feature. With God beauty and art, music and song, play and pleasure, genuine human emotions, always come before the monetary factor. Jesus despised money, knowing that he would be sold for thirty pieces of silver. Paul calls the lust for money – oil – the root of all evil. When God’s opponent approached the human pair in paradise, as related in Genesis 3: 6, the order is reversed: “the fruit of the tree was good for food – economics having priority – and pleasing to the eye – beauty being secondary.” Here Satan’s influence is at work, exactly in line with Stephen Harper’s reasoning. Frankly a Christian politician is a contradiction in terms.
This past week Harper was on a mission trip to the USA: selling ethics, in the form of ‘ethical oil”. Ethical oil is equivalent to ‘clean coal’ and just as much a euphemism as ‘sustainable growth.’ All this happened in a week when the magic number of 400 was reached in the carbon dioxide account that measure Green House Gases in the atmosphere, which used to be in ‘normal’ time, before the “Age of Abundance”, 280 part per million. The higher account guarantees that much more weather trouble is certain.
What do I see out there in the wide-wild-world?
This past week I read comments from two people whose insight I value. One was by Niall Ferguson- Harvard History professor – who recently remarked that, “[Europe] is a political experiment gone wrong. The experiment was to see if Europeans could be forced into an even closer union – despite their wishes – by economic means, because the political means failed.”
Some politicians there had a grandiose idea: to prevent such terrible events as the two World Wars – 1914-1918 and 1939–1945, actually one long-long war with an armistice of some 20 years – they set out to create a United States of Europe, with the United States of America as a blueprint. They forgot that America has one language while Europe has 23 different tongues, necessitating 23 interpreters retelling every sentence uttered wherever these nations meet. And language is not the only obstacle: eating habits, family structures, working ethos, savings patterns, you name it, all are different from one continental nation to another. One Europe: one big mess. Just imagine having Canada with not one Quebec but 22 of them, all different languages and traditions and histories. As a commercial appraiser in my working life, I often had to deal with asset distribution between two estranged spouses. Nothing is more vicious than love – passion perhaps – gone sour. When – not if – Europe breaks up, expect the world to feel the terrible after effects.
A similar warning came from Seier Christensen, co-CEO and co-founder of Saxo Bank. He told an audience at the Saxo #FXDebates in London that the Eurozone will eventually break up as Brussels claims even more power from nation states. He warned investors that Cyprus showed that nobody’s bank deposits were safe, as wealth could simply be taken from the accounts, disguised as solidarity payments to pay for the country’s debt. His words: “the governments of Europe need money, and the private sector has it. It is as simple as that. Be very paranoid.”
He warned investors that the mattress may be a safer place to deposit money than their bank accounts. Frankly, it is a complete mess. And it is a mess that gets worse and worse every day, anyone with a rational view of the world now sees the currency collaboration as a historic failure that can lead to even further fatal consequences for Europe and the continent’s competitiveness vis-à-vis the rest of the world.”
A possible new scenario
The current world-wide recession has created something new: no longer Peak Oil, but Peak Demand and Peak Debt.
In the 19th Century the West got the upper hand in the whole wide world by harnessing coal to its machinery, and later cheap oil. Now there is something new brewing: what we have today is not a lack of oil, but the inability of us in the West to compete in a global economy based on all kinds of types of energy, starting with cheap coal, now China’s secret and most dirty weapon. It used to be that cheap energy would foster a higher standard of living. Then the Oil Shock came in the 1970s which also gave the start to climate awareness – at least for me. Now we see something new: oil companies having used up all the cheap oil, must charge high prices to pay for the extra costs. But in a world economy suffering a depression, oil use is down, so oil companies are starting to fix prices, because the new situation is one of declining oil and energy prices to levels too low for the 20 to 30 major oil exporting nations and major energy corporations. They need high prices to warrant exploration and finance the high living standard in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East, and everywhere governments subsidize the standard of living thanks to high oil revenue.
Oil prices that are too high give importing nations headaches, while oil prices that are too low upset the budgets of the oil producing nations including Canada and its provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.
We are in an entirely new situation. In spite of trillions being pumped into the economy in an effort to generate inflation, deflation is looming. Cheap oil spells big-time trouble. Tar sand oil needs close to $80 per barrel to be profitable. Harper wants to sell the stuff in the USA, but the USA doesn’t need more oil: fracking, more renewables and the continuing and worsening recession have driven down the need for oil. The Middle East needs $100 oil to keep its people happy. Russia is in the same position. Cheap oil is a calamity for all. But it looks now that’s what is coming. Also everybody has debt, and debt can only be paid when oil is pricey. A return to cheap oil spells doom, resulting in Alberta going broke, resulting in Saudi Arabians going back on the bike or rather the camel, not very comfortable when being used to air-conditioned Rolls Royces. Also both the USA and Canada can easily manage on a lot less oil. Europe lives well at less than half the USA consumption and we are slowly adopting a European life style thanks to Hybrid cars, more renewables and especially a slowdown in the economies.
What do I see out there in the wide-wild-world? China will continue to manage with its cheap labour and ever- more dirty coal, stealing jobs and progress in the West. We need economic growth to save the system and high oil prices to keep the world happy. With continued less economic activity, less oil being used, the picture of Peak Oil is fading. Oil production peaked in or near 2005 and has fallen since, and so has demand. But all those in the international oil business are still banking on $100+ oil. That’s why Harper was in the USA this past week, selling expensive and extremely dirty oil for which there may not be a market. Companies have invested billions to produce this oil and have gone deep into debt to finance it. The entire oil world needs expensive oil. If the price goes down, so does the entire financial world.
Next week: why do I write these blogs anyway?