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APRIL 29 2017
IS IT LATER THAN YOU THINK?
The Good news.
We all know that we will die someday. For many of us, however, thanks to better medical care, a drastic reduction in smoking, greater awareness of diets and exercise, it’s actually earlier than we think because we live longer and healthier, so the day of death has been pushed back by many years.
I saw a startling statistic last week: for each hour of running – not walking or biking – our lives are lengthened by 7 hours. I have been running since 1961, and still run 3x per week. Since our bodies are holy – made in God’s image, resembling Jesus, the first-born of humanity – that’s one way well within our power, to prolong our lives. Somehow those who expect to live eternally – a promise given to God’s children – must already now try to do that. Or is that too presumptuous?
The bad news.
Nevertheless, while we have been successful in pushing back our personal timeclock, the same cannot be said for the planet we live in: there definitely it is later, much later, than we think which is both good and bad news. The good news is that it will advance the coming of the KINGDOM; the bad news is that it will entail tremendous suffering.
Jesus made “Seeking the Kingdom” a priority for his followers 2000 years ago. Peter in his letter (2 Peter 3: 12) tells us to speed its coming. How do we speed up the coming of the Day of the Lord?
One possibility: Support Donald Trump! I sincerely believe that he is God’s agent in speeding up the coming of the Kingdom just as Nebuchadnezzar long ago was used by God to teach God’s people a lesson. That Persian Old Testament king also was God’s agent to punish his chosen people Israel by destroying the temple, exiling the flower of that nation, for which he later was called on the carpet by God.
By the way, he was dethroned – impeached in today’s language – for acting erratically. Will history repeat itself?
Truly, TRUMP is God’s agent too. By promoting the polluting of the oceans, by failing to stall the felling of the forests, by proceeding with the poisoning of the atmosphere, and so collapse the already frail economies, he speeds up the Coming of the Kingdom, that glorious New Creation. But I don’t think that Peter had that in mind when he asked us to speed its coming. I believe he meant praying “Maranatha, Lord, come quickly.”
So what is our priority: is it urgent to prepare for the Kingdom, or do we have lots of time?
The church seems to think the latter, because it seldom touches upon the matter, and when it does, it’s pretty vague about it, never really spelling out what the Kingdom is all about, possibly because the church really has no clue what “The Coming of the Kingdom” entails.
Last week I stated that the church, by and large, has little use for the earth, making heaven the priority, while I, banking on Bonhoeffer and Bavinck, saw the kingdom as the New Garden of Eden, the New Paradise right here on Terra Firma, the very soil which feeds and sustains us.
If I read the times right, then I see that the pace of perilous events is increasing, with uncertainty and global destruction accelerating. We are speeding towards dissolution. Every day we read about some species disappearing. Every day we read about warmer temperatures, especially in the Arctic and Antarctic. That means that it is much later than people, especially church people, think.
I see glimpses of history being repeated: when Jesus was presented in the temple only 2 old people, Anna and Simeon, expected him, yet the church then was directly confronted with his birth when the three Wise Men came knocking at Herod’s palace door.
Events are speeding up. Thomas Homer-Dixon, in his THE UPSIDE OF DOWN, “Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization”, predicted in his now 10 year old book that the melting of the permafrost would not occur before the mid-2020s, 10 years from now: it’s already old news.
Face it: we are reaching the end of the line. The economy is getting very close to shrinking. When this happens, we are approaching economic collapse–the economic circus is starting to “leave town.”
Gail Tverberg, an actuary, in her blog THE FINITE EARTH writes: “People who think our only problem is “running out of oil” and “high oil prices” don’t see that the problems the economy is facing have a devastating effect. The Federal Reserve talks about inflation rates above 2% being too high, but inflation rates below 2% are at least equally problematic. Somehow, the debt system needs to keep operating for the whole system to work.
“We are now at the point where the economy is decidedly unstable. Little things can affect it, like the Affordable Care Act (Obama Care) requirement that uninsured people buy healthcare insurance, or pay a penalty. Low commodity prices make debt repayment more difficult in countries producing those commodities.”
She continues: “We should not be too surprised if the economic circus starts to leave town. There are simply too many pieces that are now unstable. The US Government is facing a shutdown in the near future, unless its debt ceiling can be raised and funding can be enacted. The world is depending on China for economic growth, but China’s debt is becoming unmanageably high. Japan’s debt is also unreasonably high. Oil exporters are becoming increasingly unstable, with the continued low prices. We can find problems in almost every country of the world. It looks like it is only a matter of time, until one of these problems starts a downward spiral.”
And she is not alone in predicting a dire outcome.
NAFEEZ MOSADDEQ AHMED writes that Donald Trump is not the problem – he’s the symptom. He writes, “Trump is what happens when you fail to understand our global problems in their interconnected, systemic context.”
This British investigative journalist has been connecting the dots on energy, climate change and globalization for years. The title of his latest book sums up our current predicament: FAILING STATES, COLLAPSING SYSTEMS: BIOPHYSICAL TRIGGERS OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE.
Net energy declines.
The whole mess begins with net energy declines. Here is what’s happening: the world is running out of cheap fossil fuels, so the oil industry has switched to earthquake-making shale gas fracking, Alberta’s messy oil sands projects and deep offshore oil.
But these extreme fuels require complex technologies to extract, and are poor substitutes for cheap oil. They not only return less energy but also require more capital, water and energy to extract.
Our current economy is shaped by the high-energy returns of cheap fossil fuels – 100 calories return on 1 calorie invested. Now it doesn’t know how to transform costly fuels 11 calories return on 1 calorie invested. Also we can no longer hide the side-effects: melting ice, fostering extreme weather and acidifying oceans.
Polar bears and oil.
To visualize the great energy decline, think for a moment about the predicament of polar bears.
Transpose yourself to the Far North. It used to be that the Arctic was all frozen, making life easy for this large white animals whose diet was mainly eating seals. Catching seals at ice holes — a largely sit and wait game — netted high energy returns and made the polar bear empire fat and healthy. But something happened to the ice.
It is disappearing, making catching seals much more difficult. The bears now have to expand more energy to get less. As it gets more “expensive” and complicated for the world’s 26,000 polar bears to survive, some starve, some fail to reproduce, some mate with grizzly bears, some try to replace the declines in protein by foraging for goose eggs and blueberries.
But all that kind of long-distance hunting takes more energy while the returns decline. So polar bears suffer and die. Exactly that same phenomenon is happening to our oil industry today.
Ahmed writes that “The human economy, which still depends on rich diet of fossil fuels (80 per cent of our energy sources), grew as fat as the polar bear on cheap 100 to 1 energy.” The result was the adding of an extra ever more greedy 6 billion people in 200 years.
Said he: “When oil prices were low, human economies gobbled oil and expanded like clownish balloons, but when prices rose and oil demand slackened, and the economy shrank.”
We now are in the sparse ‘Polar Bear” diet stage, and the economy is having trouble digesting a new food regime: unconventional fuels and in some cases, renewables, all delivering diminished returns and funded by easy credit and wild debt.
As the quality of fuels decline, the global economy, a highly engineered tree fertilized by cheap oil, has registered the change as “economic stagnation” and stopped growing. Yet the Trump regime banks on GROWTH to fuel the job market. No such luck.
Writes Ahmed, ”The shape of the descent will not resemble the shape of the ascent — a smooth bell curve — because of the Seneca trap.”
I never heard of the Seneca trap. So I looked it up. “Seneca effect” or the “Seneca cliff,” from Lucius Annaeus Seneca tells us that the more you employ artificial means to extend the peak, (as Trump is trying to do with tax cuts) the steeper the downslide that inevitably comes.
With the crash of fossil fuel production, already well along and scraping the barrel for the dirty, tarry scraps, greenhouse gas emissions may decline much faster than they grew up, which is good news. The bad news is that the world’s food supply, consumer goods and, yes, its population will decline even faster, causing tremendous hardship.
Two terrible events will happen: we will arrive at both the collapse of the global economy and runaway climate change, the two of them feeding off each other the way crumbling empires eat their seed corn.
In a number of historic collapse events, rapid-onset climate change was the triggering event.
Take Syria for example: its oil production dropped by half due to depletion. In the process, the government lost a key source of revenue that used to subsidize wheat prices. Then climate change amplified drought cycles in Syria, killing crops and depleting water resources. Hundreds of thousands of climate refugees poured into the cities while food prices triggered protests. The nation’s bloody civil war now threatens to unhinge Europe with millions of refugees.
Or consider the mayhem in Nigeria. Its population will rise from 160 million to 250 million by 2025 just as the nation’s key revenue earner, oil, experiences a serious drop in production due to depleted reserves and rampant corruption.
Meanwhile, the terrorist group Boko Haram recruits from areas ravaged by drought and food shortages. The forecast: an escalation of political violence.
Oil production peaked in the region in 2000, and the union’s dependency on foreign oil imports hit 87 per cent in 2014 — the highest level recorded in 25 years.
Unrelenting economic stagnation coupled by high unemployment has revived nationalistic movements while climate change could overwhelm the continent with more refugees from North Africa and the Middle East by 2030.
The greatest danger is CLIMATE CHANGE.
With forest fires almost everywhere, the CO2 count is jumping. With Arctic Ice disappearing there is a negative feedback loop occurring: less ice means more heat absorption there. Arctic News monitors temperatures everywhere on the globe. It keeps on pointing out that METHANE is the real threat. Last week I saw a scientist poke a hole in the permafrost and then held a match over it: a high flame showed the escaping methane, up to 100 times more dangerous than CO2.
Here’s what ARCTIC NEWS reported last week:
“When taking into account the many elements that are contributing to warming, a potential warming of 10°C (18°F) could take place, leading to rapid mass extinction of many species, INCLUDING HUMANS. So, how fast could such warming take place? It could happen as fast as within the next four years!!”
Do we only have FOUR YEARS?
Back to my original question: IS IT LATER THAN YOU THINK?
Yes, yes, yes, it is much, much later than we think.
Brace yourself. Live more simply. Relocate to rural areas where you can attain a degree of self-sufficiency. Join a church community where you find kindred people.