Posted on September 29, 2013 by Bert Hielema

September 29 2013

 Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet: John B. Cobb, Jr.

 Quite the pretentious title.

 John B. Cobb Jr. (born February 9, 1925) is an American theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist and the author of more than fifty books. Recently the older of my two younger brothers in Holland sent me Cobb’s 30 page essay “Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet”.

These Ten Ideas are:

1. Reality is composed of interrelated events.

2. There are gradations of intrinsic value.

3. God aims at maximizing value.

4. Humans are uniquely (but by no means exclusively) valuable and      uniquely responsible.

5. Education is for wisdom.

6. The economy should be directed toward flourishing of the biosphere.

7. Agriculture should regenerate the soil.

8. Comfortable habitat should make minimal demands on resources.

9. Most manufacturing should be local.

10. Every community should be part of a community of communities.

My preliminary thoughts

There’s nothing really striking about these Ten Ideas. They simply reflect the way Cobb thinks, influenced, of course, by his theology, just as my comments are influenced by my theology.

When two people engage in a dialogue, they usually start with something positive, accordingly I start to state that we both agree that we must live as if it were possible to save the planet. In everything I do I try to keep that in mind, and pray for forgiveness when I am unable to do so, which is the case quite often.

I miss in Cobb, the theologian, a biblical approach. He is what is called a Process Theologian, people who teach that God has limited knowledge, lacks foresight of what is going to happen, and so God doesn’t know the future nor can he predict its outcome. Process theologians deny the truthfulness of Scripture which clearly declares that God’s purpose is “unchangeable” (Heb. 6:17) and that he himself is the only constant in creation. His name is Yahweh which means One Who Is and Was and Always will be.

I am fully with Cobb when, in his introduction, he writes that “I realized that theology must be eco-theology if it is to be helpful to how we live in the world. The world, after all, is not simply a human world. It is a web of life.”

Excellent, but then he fails to implement this approach. Unless theology takes into account the ‘oikos’ the entire ‘house’ we live in, the outcome tends to be mere words. “Faith without deeds is dead” writes the apostle James. I see these deeds primarily relating to love the ‘oikos’, our earthly abode. When we do that we automatically love all it contains, including our neighbours.

I also agree when he writes: “We must be honest. We live in a terrible time. We know that our actions are destroying the ability of the Earth to support us, but we seem incapable of changing direction. We plunge blindly ahead, either ignoring the reality of what is happening or hoping that some technological miracle will save us. It will not. The modern world has overshot the limits of what the Earth can bear, and our civilization will collapse.”

To me this sounds contradictory. How can we save something that will collapse anyway?

Ah, here comes his Process Theology! He writes: “But the powers of God are not absolute. God cannot reverse the past or manipulate the present like a puppeteer. God’s power is that of persuasion not coercion, of love not manipulation. In many ways it is too late. Too much has been lost. Too much is being lost. The poor are the first to suffer.”

I see God’s powers as absolute. I also believe that we will see a New Beginning, that our present polluting life will become pure living: our mourning turn into dancing.

Again something I like: “One reason we behave so badly is that the modern world has a misleading understanding of the nature of reality. What is mis-leading leads astray, and humanity collectively has been led far, far astray.”

I headed this section with the comment of “Quite the pretentious title”.  Cobb’s Ten Ideas remind me of the Ten Commandments, rules to live by if God gives us the grace to abide by them. God also laid down conditions that would have kept us from destroying the world. The Year of Jubilee comes to mind, where, in every 50th year all property sold would go back to the original owners, forever preventing people from becoming too rich.

It is true that we are incapable to save us from ourselves, and the paradox is that we don’t have to, for the simple reason that the world – and us – has been saved already. It was saved on Golgotha when Jesus gave his life as a ransom to buy the world back – redeem – from the Satan who had been able to lay hands on it.

I compare this act of salvation to a real estate transaction. (I was a real estate broker for a while). After all, our planet is essentially ‘real estate’. The price to buy it back has been paid – Jesus’ blood was the principal sum, his life was sacrificed – by which all the conditions of sale were completed and – as we say in Real Estate terms – the sale is final. The closing date, the transfer of the property, the planet and all it contains from Satan to the new owners – the followers of Christ – will take place when Christ returns.

Now to the meat of the matter: since I found the first four ideas too theoretical I will skip them and start with number 5 and give my comments only. 

Education is for wisdom.

Cobb claims to be an eco-theologian, so it is surprising that he nowhere mentions that “The fear of the Lord is the start of wisdom”. For an eco- theologian this is a gross oversight because wisdom can only come when we look at creation in awesome wonder and study its intricacy and marvelous composition. Then and there we are at the start of amazing discoveries. Wisdom begins with wonder in the double sense of the word.

6. The economy should be directed toward flourishing of the biosphere.

The biosphere includes the air we breathe, now being polluted because of energy use. Today the economic world is synonymous with energy: it takes energy to make anything, from a piece of steel to a loaf of bread. It takes energy to transport anything. Humans need energy in the form of food to continue to live. In general, the more external energy used, the more humans are able to control their environment.  We are now reaching energy limits on two fronts: we running low on external energy and we are damaging the environment with it.

We can’t save the earth and continue to use energy as we are doing. The only way to save the earth is to use human and renewable energy- sun, wind- only.

Today we have more than seven plus billion consumers in the world, all striving to better themselves by using more energy. The only way to do that is to exploit everything for a while, until the entire structure collapses. No way can we keep the economic system we have devised going at the current rate. This past week the IPCC report came out: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It recommends cutting back on energy use. Will you? Nobody I know is driving less or plans to become self-sufficient and attempts to live a carbon-free life. Fracking is postponing Peak Oil for a while, the most terrible way to delay the inevitable. Rather than cleaning the air, the hard-to-get fuels, including Alberta’s Tarsands, will accelerate cosmic collapse.

7. Agriculture should regenerate the soil.

To meet the need for greater food supply, humans began using agriculture about 10,000 years ago which increased the amount of human food available per acre, and also made population growth possible. The world did not reach one billion people until 1812. Then doubled it to two billion in one century and tripled it in my life time thanks to oil. It also meant that pesticides and fertilizer run-off and the use of heavy machinery added to erosion, all leading not to regenerating, but degeneration.

Frankly the only economy that is totally sustainable is the hunter-gatherer one. It had little need to “save for tomorrow,” because it was difficult to carry anything during travels. The amount of food an individual could eat was pretty much limited by appetite, so having “more food” for one individual wasn’t particularly helpful. The Garden of Eden comes to mind.

Today, even with water shortages looming, a major portion of agriculture comes from irrigation, which leads to salt deposits. If we really love the land – See John 3:16 – we must let land lay idle, use crop rotation, grow organically, which is much more labour intensive but will put a lot of people to work!

8. Comfortable habitat should make minimal demands on resources.

Europe was built with two legs in mind. North America was built for four wheels. No wonder Europe does well on 50% less energy than the USA.

Cobb recommends people moving to well insulated high rises. Toronto is going that way, except that these condominiums are mostly clad with glass, a very poor insulator, which brings me to energy use.

Soon after agriculture began, humans began to use resources of other types, such as wood from forests and metals such as iron and bronze. With any of these resources, there is a tendency to use the “cheapest” (easiest to extract, closest at hand, highest ore concentration) first. If extraction is to continue, increasing amounts of energy per unit extracted are likely to be required for later extraction. Take Europe. By 1500 Europe was on the edge of a fuel and nutritional disaster. It was saved in the sixteenth century only by the burning of soft coal and the cultivation of potatoes and maize. The use of coal allowed more energy per person, and took pressure off of limited forest resources. After coal came oil and natural gas. Once these sources are exhausted, we have nothing to fall back on except sun and wind, and thus we are back to Square One, the hunter-gathering society and a greatly reduced population. The world today can never support 7 billion, let alone the projected 10 billion in 2050.

9. Most manufacturing should be local.

The availability of fossil fuels, starting around 1800, has allowed much of what we now call “technology.” Without fossil fuels, our ability to make materials such as metals and glass is severely restricted. Without fossil fuels, we are also lacking for the basic building blocks for plastics, synthetic fabrics, and even modern medicines. Technology provided ways to use fossil fuel resources in ways that helped overcome many human limits. The desire to use more technology led to increasing use of fossil fuels in the 19th and 20th centuries. Cobb’s point to keep manufacturing local, rather than use China, is well taken.

10. Every community should be part of a community of communities.

We have created a society where it is exceedingly difficult to be part of a viable community. We live far too spread out, in subdivisions away from the core and in exurban homes far from work and recreation. The long drive to work, the two-jobs to make ends meet, makes life so busy that there is little or no time for anything else but eat-sleep-work.

Look at the churches, the prime example of community: “I believe in the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints,” the only article in the Apostles’ Creed that needed a qualifying statement. Almost all churches are suffering, perhaps, with the exception of mega-churches, so big that community is hardly possible.

General remarks.

Looking back I have noticed that when civilizations collapse, it was generally for financial reasons. Here’s a possible scenario – evident today. Shortages of resources lead to falling wages for the common worker. The government must provide more and more services such as welfare, unemployment insurance and medical service, leading to a need for higher taxes. The increasingly impoverished workers cannot pay these taxes and this clash between needed taxes and ability to pay these taxes brings about the collapse. We already see many resource wars and revolutions, leading to deaths of workers. Egypt, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Kenya, all recent examples of desperate people. The coming financial turmoil in the USA is another symptom of decline.

There’s no way that we can save the world as it is today: not a John R. Cobb, not an Obama, not the United Nations. The world is hell-bent to destruct itself. We know our society and economy must soon change. We will not do anything seriously to prepare for that change. So it will be even more damaging when it comes.

And that’s the way it was ordained to be from the day when humanity in a paradise setting decided that going without God was the way to go.

Posted in Co-owning the Earth | Leave a comment

Our World Today

Posted on September 22, 2013 by Bert Hielema
September 22 2013

FUKUSHIMA :

A fuku-shame

 
 Nuclear power was supposed to free us forever from fossil fuels: “too cheap to metre” was the dream. It reminds me of Dick Cheney and his deputy who sold the Iraq war with the promise that the people would welcome the US army with open arms and that the invasion would pay a dividend. Never believe political promises, certainly not in this age of decline. You’re counting on a good pension? Forget it. All pension funds are in trouble. They are assuming 8 percent return on their money. How about 2-3 percent! And people live longer as well. At 8 percent return one dollar doubles in less than 10 years. At 3 percent it takes more than 20 years.

Back to the scourge of the season: nuclear power. I remember when, in 1977, the people in Chalk River, where Canada has its Atomic Energy Headquarters, wanted to bury Ontario’s nuclear waste on a site just north of us. At the community discussion in the auditorium of the Centre Hastings High School in Madoc some 1,000 people gathered to protest with banners and placards and chants. The experts soon abandoned the burial. Even now, 35 years later, no solution has been found for nuclear waste disposal. And the toxic waste accumulates. It takes a million years to de-activate the radiation. With the Lord a million years is as one day, but we, in human time, we have to safeguard the poison forever. Poor next generations: another burden on their already over-burdened shopping list. One of the banners at that gathering suggested an alternative site: “Bury it on Parliament Hill!”

True, the world was shocked following the 1973/1974 oil price increase. After that France and Japan covered their respective territories with new reactors. These countries have a history of high-handed policies where the voice of the ‘experts’ prevail, while in other countries, Germany, Finland, Italy the “Greens” were able to block the development of any new nuclear power project. In the United States, despite the accident at Three Mile Island it was the oil lobby, not the “Greens”, who organized the shutdown of nuclear power development.
Now with constant high fossil fuel prices, courtesy of China, India, Brazil and other emerging countries, and the desire to limit CO2 emissions we saw a return to nuclear power. All the countries that had frozen their programmes were beginning to dust them off, planning the construction of dozens of new plants. The world’s stock of nuclear plants was getting ready to double in a decade, until……

Japan has no oil or gas, so it went nuclear in a big way, quite ironic because Japan is the only country in the world where, in 1945, two atom bombs obliterated Nagasaki and Hiroshima. No wonder the people there vouched never to pursue a nuclear arsenal.

Now another Japanese tragedy is in the making, a frightful Fuku-shame, thanks to an earthquake on a scale rarely experienced, accompanied by a tsunami of unimaginable height, and the shocking discovery that the FUKUSHIMA nuclear plants were unable to cope with these two highly improbable events. This happened not in India, where one would expect it, or in Russia, which saw its Chernobyl disaster, but in Japan, over-regulated, hyper cautious, terribly afraid of nuclear incidents.

Coming to a location near you.

Nowadays the impossible has become the probable and the unimaginable a reality. A month ago our entire family spent a week in Colorado near the Rocky Mountain National Park. Today that entire area has been flooded, a year’s rain in a few hours. Too often the 1 in a 1000 year event is now commonplace. It used to be that a waterfront location sold at a premium. The premium now is the extra insurance cost. Look what happened in Calgary this past summer. Nothing is safe anymore. Prepare for the unexpected. Yes, disaster, weather related or connected to the environment, can come anywhere, anytime. It is prudent, I believe, to be ready for any emergency.

I don’t know whether it has anything to do with it, but Japan has always resisted Christianity. Only one percent is affiliated with one of the scores of Christian expressions. I remember reading that in the 17th century Japanese authorities sent a delegation to the Netherlands to explore religion there. Then the Netherlands was a leader in all fields: highly successful in commerce, arts, medicine, science and tolerant in religion. These delegates were not impressed apparently. Blame those dour Dutchmen. Perhaps the absence of the love commandment has given the Japanese overconfidence in technological prowess, because this very faith in technology has terribly misfired. Even though the Western world is now totally secular, yet there is a basis of Christianity there, evident in their monetary support for disadvantaged countries, something Japan does not have.

Are disasters a punishment?

Last week I read Psalm 107 at breakfast time and was struck by verse 34: “(He changes) fruitful land into a salty waste for the wickedness of those who live there.” There is a definite connection between faith in the Creator and the way we treat his work of art. When we regard creation as holy, then the land- and humamnity – benefits. Substitute salty waste – a result of irrigation or overgrazing (greed in other words) – for Monsanto seeds or monoculture or, yes, nuclear power, all the result of the wickedness of the people, and disaster is waiting in the wings. Actually there are numerous bible passages that confirm that: “they will eat the fruit of their ways” (Proverbs 1:31); and “the evil deeds of the wicked ensnare them; the cords of their sins hold them fast” (Proverbs 5: 22); “Your wickedness will punish you; your backsliding will rebuke you.”(Jeremiah 2: 19). Climate change world-wide and Japan’s plight are of our own making.

Yes, Japan is in a real fix. The damage to the 4 nuclear reactors is a threat not only to the land of the rising sun, but to the entire world. The country has an insurmountable problem: they don’t know how to fix the nuclear damage. Fact is that the Fukushima reactors have been leaking huge amounts of radioactive water ever since the earthquake 2 years ago. Some 330,000 metric tons of contaminated water has been pumped into storage pits and above-ground tanks. If one of these above-ground tanks collapses or catches fire, it could have severe adverse impacts not only on Japan, but also for the rest of the world, including North America. These storage bins offer no protection against another earthquake or the onset of a severe hurricane.

Fukushima’s extensive leakage spreads highly radioactive water not only into the surrounding soil but also into the Pacific ocean on the way to the shores of Korea, China, and the West Coast of North America. Water contaminated with nuclear radiation is a source of cancers and causes birth malfunctions. Since the engineers cannot approach the damaged buildings, they have no idea where the cores of the nuclear reactors are.

Last week Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, told workers at the Fukushima nuclear power plant that “the future of Japan” depends on their ongoing struggle to contain leaks of highly radioactive water at the site. Fat chance: they, the owners of TEPCO, which stands for Tokyo Electric Power Corporation, have been fumbling the issue from Day 1. The utility needs to keep pouring water over the reactors to keep fuel in the cores from overheating. But that has been complicated by the estimated 400 metric tons of groundwater that seeps into the area from higher ground each day.

The looming danger

Here is what the new fuzz is all about. The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is preparing to remove 400 tons of highly irradiated spent fuel from a damaged reactor building, a dangerous operation that has never been attempted before on this scale. This spent fuel contains radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima 68 years ago. There are more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly together. They need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to collapse, should another large earthquake hit the area. Each fuel rod assembly weighs about 300 kilograms (660 pounds) and is 4.5 meters (15 feet) long. There are 1,331 of the spent fuel assemblies and a further 202 unused assemblies are also stored in the pool. These rods also contain plutonium, one of the most toxic substances in the universe. Plutonium gets formed during the later stages of a reactor core’s operation. There is a high risk of accidents if these bundles get too close to each other. The real danger comes when TEPCO tries to de-commission the fuel pools.

In November the ‘experts’ who caused the accident in the first place, are going to start doing this very difficult operation on their own. Former U.N. adviser Akio Matsumura calls removing the radioactive materials from the Fukushima fuel pools “an issue of human survival.”

Of course this has caught the attention of the world’s media.

The New York Times notes: “Thousands of workers and a small fleet of cranes are preparing for one of the latest efforts to avoid a deepening environmental disaster that has China and other neighbors increasingly worried: removing spent fuel rods from the damaged No. 4 reactor building and storing them in a safer place.”

The Telegraph reports: “Tom Snitch, a senior professor at the University of Maryland and with more than 30 years’ experience in nuclear issues, said: “[Japan officials] need to address the real problems, the spent fuel rods in Unit 4 and the leaking pressure vessels. There has been too much work done wiping down walls and duct work in the reactors for any other reason than to do something….  This is a critical global issue and Japan must step up.”

The Japan Times writes: “In November, TEPCO plans to begin the delicate operation of removing spent fuel from Reactor No. 4 [with] radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. …. It remains vulnerable to any further shocks, and is also at risk from ground liquefaction. Removing its spent fuel, which contains deadly plutonium, is an urgent task…. The consequences could be far more severe than any nuclear accident the world has ever seen. If a fuel rod is dropped, breaks or becomes entangled while being removed, possible worst case scenarios include a big explosion, a meltdown in the pool, or a large fire. Any of these situations could lead to massive releases of deadly radionuclides into the atmosphere, putting much of Japan — including Tokyo and Yokohama — and even neighboring countries at serious risk.”

TEPCO is already in a losing battle to stop radioactive water overflowing from another part of the facility, and experts question whether it will be able to pull off the removal of all the assemblies successfully. “They are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods,” said Arnie Gunderson, a veteran U.S. nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, who used to build fuel assemblies. The operation, beginning this November at the plant’s Reactor No. 4, is fraught with danger, including the possibility of a large release of radiation if a fuel assembly breaks, gets stuck or gets too close to an adjacent bundle, said Gunderson and other nuclear experts.  That could lead to a worse disaster than the March 2011 nuclear crisis at the Fukushima plant, the world’s most serious since Chernobyl in 1986.

No one knows how bad it can get, but independent consultants Mycle Schneider and Antony Froggatt said recently in their World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2013: “Full release from the Unit-4 spent fuel pool, without any containment or control, could cause by far the most serious radiological disaster to date.” The utility says it recognizes the operation will be difficult but believes it can carry it out safely.

And if before the fuel is fully removed another strong earthquake strikes that topples the building or punctures the pool and allow the water to drain, a spent fuel fire is possible releasing more radiation than during the initial disaster. That will threaten Tokyo about 200 kilometers (125 miles) away. The 2020 Olympics are supposed to be held there.

What is certain is that we live in a dangerous and unpredictable world. Be prepared for all eventualities.

 

Posted in Our World Today | Leave a comment

Our World Today

Posted on September 14, 2013 by Bert Hielema

September 15 2013

Our Fatal Addiction to Oil

We all know that we live in a volatile world. It looks that, for now, the Syrian situation is going back to the pre- chemical gas stalemate, where neither side can win, but which has created a refugee nightmare which is becoming a burden for you and me because somebody-those who live in the rich countries- has to pay to keep these people alive.

All this will end badly. Assad is still in power, his opposition is still strong, Iran is still developing its nuclear whatever, Sunnis and Shiites still hate each other, the after Gaddafi Libya is still in shambles and Egypt is back to a Mubarak-like regime. The sad truth is that stalemates seldom stay stale.

All this bickering has an economic component because today’s economy, no matter where, totally depends on a steady supply of oil: no oil means death, simple and sure, therefore today oil or the lack thereof is always at the centre of every dispute everywhere. The Bible says that ‘the lust for money is the root of all evil’, today the craving for crude is the cradle of all corruption, including climate change, the world-wide weather weakness.

Yes precious oil is always poking its ugly finger into each global scenario: in Yemen the insurrection there periodically halts oil exports; in Algeria Al Qaeda is slowing foreign investment on the oil patch; the House of Saudi with its 10,000 princes and its prime-grade oil must keep on bribing its spoiled citizens who are soaking up more and more of its own production. Of course the mess started with Iraq, a war that was supposed to pay a dividend and ended up costing trillions. The resulting chaos in MENA – Middle East North Africa- has already taken a million or two barrels of oil off the world markets.

At the fringes of the core, on the edges of Europe, Australia and North America, real problems are crawling upward and are affecting the heartbeat of the mighty nations.  At the periphery climate change and excessive population growth are cutting into the food and water supply, while medieval cultural practices are increasingly out of tune with the rest of the world. The temporary presence of easy oil from 1950-2000 has allowed populations to grow far beyond the earth’s carrying capacity.

Gail Tverberg, an actuary, writes an interesting blog. In her latest she writes: “Take Egypt as a prime example. Here we have a civilization that has survived for thousands of years. Their underlying problem today, however, is that there are now about 84 million Egyptians, up from the 2 million or less that got along so well for all those millennia. The Nile simply can’t support a population of this size and the country is already dependent on imported food while continuing to grow at a breakneck pace. This was OK for a while, except that Egypt can no longer afford to pay for their imported wheat, or their oil for that matter, and are dependent on the richer Gulf Arabs for handouts.”

Egypt used to export oil, but now its population consumes the 700,000 b/d the country produces. No export means no income. No income means being dependent on Saudi charity to keep the lights on and the tractors traveling. The Suez Canal brings in some tolls, but the unrest in the country has kept tourists away.

Internal troubles in the OPEC countries and mushrooming domestic consumption there are slowly taking a toll on the world’s oil supply. True, the USA has its growing domestic production – see my column on ‘fracking’ – but it still amounts to less than half the unplanned drop in Middle Eastern production, which means that Peaking Oil Prices are still with us. Last time I looked world oil was well above $110 per barrel.

Why is it so high? Some of this is due to concerns about what will happen if the growing unrest in Syria keeps going, but the rest is due to slowly tightening supply/demand situation around the world. The Chinese are still consuming oil at an increasing pace and the world is still adding about 70 million new “oil consumers” to its population each year. As I pointed out a few weeks ago fracking in North Dakota and Texas is not nearly enough to offset the waning supplies available outside the oil-producing countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Syria, even if there were no civil war there, would still be in deep economic trouble. All was fine as long as oil production was increasing. By exporting oil the money earned could be used to fund food subsidies, education, and building highways. In 1980 Syria had 8.8 million peaceful citizens and plenty of oil to spare. Now it has 22.8 million rebellious skeptics and decreasing supplies of oil, not enough to keep up the standard of living. Due to the unrest in Egypt, Syria and Libya the production of this precious commodity combined with normal depletion has dropped dramatically.  

There is no reason for the West to be complacent. What is happening at the edges of the empire – our Western world is a capitalist empire – will soon happen to all of us as well. That’s how the Roman Empire started to crumble. When its legions no longer could protect its far flung borders, its fall was not far away. In 1980 Kenneth Boulding, himself an economist, wrote: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” Yet growth must be continued at all cost, even if the cost is war which proves that we live in a mad world. Eventually an all-out war will be the only avenue left. And that war will be about oil. That makes our addiction to oil fatal.

War may not happen in this round with Syria, but the situation is far from stable. Syria cannot solve its problems by itself. The only solution is to have a strong peacekeeping mission with the USA leading the rescue. In other words the very thing that the USA wants to avoid: no boots on the ground. This step depends on Iran which has its own agenda including nuclear ambitions something the USA and Israel will not allow even though Israel has this destructive capability. If ever the Royal House of Saudi will see an internal revolt threatening the export of eight million barrels per day, there is no doubt that the USA will intervene.

Oil is the new currency. It takes millions of years to form, while money can be created out of nothing. The past 5 years, ever since the Lehman Bros demise, the USA treasury has created as much as 5 trillion dollars by simply typing in some figures on a computer screen. This means that money has become something delusional. It can be created ex nihilo, but once it is magically called into being it is a debt which must be repaid: easy come, hard to repay. Oil, on the other hand is real and embodies everything that is bad. It is highly addictive, much more so than money. Oil is the ultimate danger: we are hooked on oil because each one of us has at our disposal 100 slaves 24/7/365. We simply can no longer live without them. We have heat or cooling at the flick of a finger; we can call upon hundreds of horsepower by merely stepping on the gas pedal; we travel anywhere in the world in total ease within 24 hours. A world without oil is no longer feasible.

The USA Department of Energy in a recent report predicts that global energy use will continue to rise rapidly, with total world consumption jumping from 524 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) in 2010 to an estimated 820 quadrillion in 2040, a net increase of 56%.  (A BTU is the amount of energy needed to heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit.)  China, which only recently overtook the United States as the world’s leading energy consumer, will account for the largest share — 40% — of the growth in global consumption over the next 30 years. We know that this means: coal consumption will skyrocket.

The consequences for the global economy, world politics, and the health and well-being of the planetary environment will be staggering.  To meet ever expanding world requirements, energy producers will be compelled to ramp up production of every kind of fossil fuel at a time of mounting concern about the ultra-dangerous role those carbon fuels play in fostering runaway climate change.  Meanwhile, the shift in the center of gravity of energy consumption from the older industrial powers to the developing world will lead to intense competition for access to available supplies. Apparently, just as economists believe in perpetual growth, bureaucrats believe that the planet can absorb infinite amounts of pollutants without any repercussions.

This simply means that the world is in the grip of evil. We are hooked on sin – because anything that harms creation is sin. Writes Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus spoke Zarathustra: “Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing.” Sinning against the earth carries its own punishment, as we are rapidly discovering. We are setting ourselves up for the ultimate cataclysm, which will come without warning once there is a tipping point.

Lack of love for God, expressed in lack of love for his creation, is a sin against the first and greatest commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” In Matthew 22: 37 Jesus quotes this text as recorded Deuteronomy 6:4. This all-important statement there – which touches upon the heart of the gospel – is preceded by these revealing words: “The Lord our God is One”. That simply means that God is what he says and what he does. Creation is God’s visible part. We express our love for God by loving his creation. We love great artists and show this by admiring and cherishing their masterpieces. Creation is God’s masterpiece: nothing remotely can be compared to the world and what it contains, including us, the human species – which we have to love as ourselves. Since God is invisible and a spirit, the best way to love God is to love his creation: it trumps all other means to love God. (Romans 1:20)

Jacques Ellul, professor of law at Bordeaux France, picks up on that. In his book Money and Power (l’Homme et l’Argent) he writes that “In the Bible love is utterly totalitarian. It comes from the entire person; it involves the whole person and binds the whole person without distinction. Love reaches down into the roots of human beings and does not leave them intact. It leads to identification and assimilation between the lover and the beloved (in this case creation). Love for money is not a lesser relationship. By this love, we join ourselves to money’s fate. “For where your treasure is, there will be your heart as well (Matt. 6:21).” Our treasure is oil. Substitute oil for money, and, writes Ellul, ‘this attachment pushes us headlong into nothingness.’

Oil is today’s currency. We can live without money for a while. We can’t live without oil. Our fatal addiction to oil will do our undoing.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

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Our World Today

Posted on September 8, 2013 by Bert Hielema

September 8 2013

The Mess in the Middle East

Civilization started there. Will it also end there?

 

Last week I started to brush up on the Syria question. In the New York Times in just one day I found 29 articles dealing with the problem, the huge problem of which Syria is but a symptom. I read most of them, but found no magic key.

To fathom the basis of the situation we have to go back a few years. This week, re-reading Johan Huizinga’s classic The Waning of the Middle Ages I came across an interesting passage. In the last paragraph of the first chapter, summarizing the 14th century with its Black Death, its 100 year war (1337-1453) Huizinga wrote – and I translate- “The world is an evil place. The flames of hate and violence burn high and injustice rules the day; the devil with his black wings overshadows a darkened planet. Humanity, constantly on edge, expects the end of everything. Yet people refuse to turn from their evil ways; the church fights back but her preachers and poets cajole and admonish in vain.”

In that same period, seven centuries ago, the Middle East was the place to be: Jews, Arabs, Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, all were one happy family, so unlike Europe. Science flourished, art thrived. It truly was a “Golden Age”: in contrast with Europe the Middle East was incredibly advanced.

When we look even further back 2-4,000 years ago, at ancient Mesopotamia, the Garden of Eden, Persia, Greece, Rome all located around the Mediterranean Sea, then we see that recorded history started there. The name Mediterranean indicates this: ‘the centre of the earth’. Today, in the 21st century,  by a quirk of providence, the focus is again on the Middle East because there’s where the bulk of the crude oil is buried, the stuff needed to grease the technological system we have designed.

There’s something about oil that is more than mere inflammatory. Cursed are the countries rich in crude. Where there is oil the few benefit and the masses miss out: Nigeria, Venezuela, Russia, Guinea, Saudi Arabia, all are prime examples of plutocracies, lands where the rich rule thanks to the soil being carbon-saturated.

Why did the Middle East Golden Age disappear? Calcified religion. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”, Karl Marx wrote some 150 years ago. Stagnated religion, religion that has lost its soul breeds fanaticism. Fanatics are people who have lost direction but are redoubling their efforts.

Stale religion was not the only reason for their cultural collapse. With the demise of the Ottoman Empire, after World War I, the victors, France and England, arbitrarily redrew the boundaries of the Middle East without taking into account the situation and religion of the various tribes. Over the years only dictatorial regimes were capable to maintain a semblance of normality. Now, with Climate Change devastating agriculture in Syria, throwing people off the land and robbing a generation of honourable labour, tempers are flaring. Constant hot weather does that to people. No agriculture means no food, no work, lots of unemployed young bodies, anger, resulting in uprisings and revolt. Climate Change is also stoking religious fires, as tiny differences in Koran interpretations lead to murder and vendettas.

I experienced something similar while attending a small Christian college. There I witnessed such hatred as well. The sons and daughters of ministers who had left the Reformed Church because of a dispute involving some facet of children’s baptism refused to be present when teachers, not of their persuasion, opened the school day with prayer. I believe that the tensions of being occupied then by a foreign power, was a contributing factor. These religious schisms, coming to full play during the war 1940-45, have never been solved. Actually the differences have grown, more splits have occurred and most people in the Netherlands sick of the sectarian strife simply abandoned the church.

The entire Middle East too is under extreme tension not only due to the religious divisions, but also because of the daily struggle for food and the rising cost thereof, the impossibility to provide work for its restless army of young people and the oppression by dictators who favour their own tribal allies.

It seems to me that the Middle East religious divisions are intractable. There is no solution when there is an unwillingness to be tolerant. Johan Huizinga, the author of In de Schaduwen van Morgen (In the Shadows of To-morrow) writes somewhere that Onderwijs maakt onder-wijs. The play of words cannot be duplicated in English. It literally means that a little knowledge- failing to see the entire picture- is dangerous. The Lord himself, addressing Job (Job 38:2) said “Who is he that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge.” T.S. Eliot famous question comes to mind: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” That certainly applies to religion which has become pietistic, supplanting genuine biblical insight. Bonhoeffer calls it pious secularism.

In the Middle East life is religion, religion is life. One’s existence is defined by a certain view of the Koran. Of course the West is no different. Canada’s Prime Minister’s religion is Economic Growth, which he has in common with all of the G20 leaders, whose official doctrine is Capitalism, a system that cannot function without cheap oil, and it so happens that the cheapest and best of the crude lies in the deserts of the Middle East, now occupied by warring factions.

In Syria the opposition is dangerously divided making it impossible to form a stable government in the place of the Bashar al-Assad regime which itself favours its own tribe of supporters, the Alawites.

Meanwhile, the strife appears to be spreading. Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq is spiking upward. Reports in The Times and elsewhere have said that many Iraqis fear their country is sliding back to the worst of the chaos experienced in the last decade. Even Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain and Kuwait could be infected. It could become a regional religious war similar to that witnessed in Iraq 2006-2008, but far wider and without the moderating influence of American forces.

All this reminds me of the Thirty Years’ War from 1618-1648, a series of wars principally fought in Central Europe, involving most of the countries of Europe. It was one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history.

Initially, it was fought largely as a religious war between Protestants and Catholics. Over time it developed into a more general conflict involving most of the great powers of the time. When that happened the war became less  religious and more a rivalry for political domination degenerating to further warfare between France and the Austria- Prussia powers, the old Habsburg Regime. The war saw the devastation of entire regions. Famine and disease not only greatly decreased the population of the central Europe, it also bankrupted most countries.

It could well be that the Sunni-Shiite conflict will follow that same pattern, starting out as a dispute between two or more tribes and then involving Turkey, Iran, Israel, and perhaps eventually the USA, Russia and China.

Back to Syria. I don’t believe that Assad is to blame for the poisoned attack. He was gaining the upper hand and the opposition was being pushed back. Cui bono: who benefits from such a chemical event? Certainly not Assad because such a monstrous act would lose him whatever goodwill he still possesses. Who benefits?  The opposition does. By blaming the regime in Damascus it aims to involve the USA. It is a plus for Israel as well. Its motto is the old Roman one: Divide et Impera – divide and rule. The weaker Assad is the better for Israel; a feeble Syrian leader poses no threat. Who else benefits? The American military, whose budget faces drastic cuts. Who else? The American government under the threat of a debt ceiling.

The entire episode reminds me of Henry Kissinger, adviser to numerous governments. He probably whispered this scenario to the Israeli secret service, the execution to coincide with the meeting of the G20 in Russia.

Never forget that there is oil and gas here. Qatar wants to sell its natural gas to the world. So does Russia. Russia and China want to undermine the US petro dollar, which gives the USA licence to print money ad infinitum. This is about hard core geopolitics, resource wars and monetary control, period.  The USA is dead set to defend the Petrodollar hegemony at all costs, and above all else. Without it, its financial system collapses. The powers in Washington are starting to realize that the entire western world’s monetary banking system, which has dominated global trade and finance over the past 100 years, is rapidly coming to a critical point.

Here’s what Jim Willie writes, somewhat bombastically: “The massive, unsustainable and decidedly unhealthy debt loads, carried both publicly and privately by all our seriously sick western societies (+Japan), will soon metastasize the malignant experiment of free flowing money induced by the carcinogen of incessant debt financing, which we all boorishly feasted and overindulged on, into a colossal carnivorous cancer on mankind, causing a caustic calamity of epidemic proportions.   Make no mistake.  One thing you can count on is that the grand masters playing this global chess game are very well aware of this unequivocal and salient fact.  They are well prepared and setting up to make their geopolitical counter moves. The pending tomahawk missile strike at Syria is the most telling, overt and obvious move to date.  Why else would they be prepared to take such an inane, insane and absolutely absurd risk over a couple of opened canisters of bad gas, ask yourselves deep in your psyche.  When things make zero sense with this much at stake, you can be sure something else is afoot.”

Just as there is no solution to the Middle East Mess, neither is there a solution to the debt debacle the West faces or Climate Change. Of course there are solutions. For the debt problem the simple solution is to become frugal, to save money, to lower our standard of living, and pay off the balance. Politically that is unsalable. The same is true of reducing Green House Gases. Go back to a simple life style and live environmentally within our means. That too cannot be sold to a spoiled electorate.

So we are stuck. Given our unwillingness to do the right thing, given our political system that is always promising and can no longer deliver, the real danger is war: when all else fails, fight.

In 1914, June 28, just about 100 years ago, a few bullets from a pistol killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian heir to the throne, and his wife Sophie Chotek. Thirty-seven days later the world was at war, which lasted four year, killed 15 million young men and injured 20 million more, many permanently disabled.

Today the world is again at a threshold just as in 1914 the year, according to Eric Hobsbawm, the 19th Century ended. Then the old rulers had become tired; all empires were in decline. Today’s state of affairs resembles that pre-World War I situation. Now too everything is up for grabs. Nothing is sure anymore: jobs, working conditions, pensions, the weather. In 1914 a radical student, an anarchist, lit the fuse that engulfed the world. In the aftermath Russia collapsed, emperors were exiled or killed, Germany saw hyperinflation, the world experienced the Dirty Thirties during which Hitler rose to power, ending the armistice of 20 years -1918-1938 – and concluding the war that had started in 1914, and that, before it ended in 1945 with the atom bomb, also gave us the Holocaust and another 60 million casualties.

Civilization started in the ancient Middle East. Will a guided missile, the equivalent of the bullets fired in Sarajevo, aimed at the powder keg that is the Middle East, where the enemy of my enemy is another enemy, have identical consequences for Our World Today and unleash the war to end us all?

Pray for peace. Support efforts to help the refugees.

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Our World Today

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Bert Hielema

Our World Today

Will Fracking free us from fuel famine forever?

September 1 2013

“We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy.”
President Barack Obama in his 2012 State of the Union speech

Costica Bradatan in a recent article in the New York Times starts his article as follows:

In her exploration of the Catholic religion, “Letter to a Priest,” written the year before her death in 1943, Simone Weil noticed at some point that “for any man a change of religion is as dangerous a thing as a change of language is for a writer. It may turn out a success, but it can also have disastrous consequences.” The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, who was one such writer, talks of the change of language as a catastrophic event in any author’s biography. And rightly so.”

This definitely fits my profile. My writing in a language different than my original tongue has been a life-altering experience: it has changed my entire personality, my outlook, my way of life. I believe that this applies only when a person is an adult and is basically fully formed when making such a switch. At least in my mind this accounts for me being different from most others, and explains my inner urge, bordering on obsession perhaps, to broadcast my views with the zeal of a new convert. The article states that “This is why to abandon your native tongue and to adopt another is to dismantle yourself, piece by piece, and then to put yourself together again, in a different form.”

I do believe that all immigrants are affected by moving from one language to another. Many remain intellectually and spiritually at the level where they were when they emigrated: that is the safest way to cope with a new country and a new language.

With me it is different. I question all the time. In a sense nothing is sacred. By that I don’t mean that I hold nothing sacred: I do. I have become convinced that our planet is sacred, that loving God is best expressed by loving his creation and all it contains, just as we show our love for J. S. Bach by listening to his music.

I certainly question Obama’s boast that America has a 100 year supply of natural gas, if by gas he means the burnable stuff. Gas also means ‘empty talk’ and of that, indeed, politicians have an infinite supply. Obama bases his claim on the new/old method of ‘fracking’. There’s a new word for you. Just as ‘to fax’ comes from ‘to make a facsimile’, a copy, in the same way ‘fracking’ is derived from ‘hydraulic fracturing’. Hydraulic indicates that there is water involved, and, indeed, it needs lots of it. This fluid, laced with chemicals, is pumped into a well under high pressure in order to release the tight natural gas or shale oil. This process was well-known, but was not used before because it’s highly expensive, so it became ‘new’ again when $100 per barrel made it feasible.

A barrel of oil sells at a premium, while natural gas is cheap, so cheap that it is simply burned off on site. The reason is transport: oil can easily be shipped anywhere in the world. Natural gas takes a lot of volume, and, before it can make the trip overseas, it needs to be compressed into liquid form (LNG – Liquid Natural Gas) which is an expensive process. Then at the port of entry it needs decompressing, another money-intensive transaction. Thus natural gas, unless transported by pipeline- only possible overland- tends to stay close to home where there is an abundance of supply. Thus the supposed 100 year supply in Obama’s grand oratory is only valid when natural gas is high-priced.

The current saying is that ‘water is the new gold’. I recently noticed a news item, tucked away in the back pages, how in Texas, which has suffered from a 3 year long drought, entire villages are without water because ‘fracking’ nearby had sucked away whatever was left. I imagine that these people now use an adjective that sounds the same as ‘fracking’ but has a rather derogatory meaning. They will not be the only ones to use that description of ‘fracking.’

Criticizing ‘fracking’ is all the rage now. Richard Heinberg, an author of some 10 books on peak oil and related resource depletion topics, is one of them. The title of his book says it all: Snake Oil, with as subtitle “How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future”.

Fracking- frankly I hate the sound of the term – is simply an outcome of Peak Oil. Its real beneficiaries are the financial institutions who have sold this concept to gullible buyers, no different from the Mortgage Backed Bonds prior to 2008 which precipitated the money crisis then. Today money earns only 1-2% which has given rise to a lot of gambling. (A million bucks only earns $10,000 at 1 percent.) So people invest in Fracking. Oil companies basically are after oil. They know that production from the world’s existing oil fields is declining by 4-5 percent annually while demand is increasing by about a million barrels per day (b/d) each year. This simply means that the world will have to come up with 5 million barrels per day of new oil production each year for the foreseeable future no matter what the cost. We, you, I, are hooked on crude oil: we demand an infinite supply which each day comes at a higher price, both in climatic consequences and in hard dollars because it takes more and more energy to produce energy.  It’s simple. The easy oil has long gone which has given birth to a new acronym: EOEI, which stands for Energy Obtained by Energy Invested.  Fracking is high in EOEI, and its depletion rate is outrageous with per-well production decline rates of between 81 and 90 percent in the first 24 months, which means that new wells must be drilled constantly to keep production up. If environmental cost were counted, fracking would have long been abandoned. In spite of Obama’s pledge to develop this safely, the industry sees only one thing: oil at all cost, and that cost is enormous.

What is the cost? The oil and natural gas pumped out floats on the water pumped in, water that is totally polluted. Whatever poisonous substances are left in the ground tend to penetrate into neighboring wells. The unsettling of the underground structures, due to the unusual pressure exercised there, is causing minor earthquakes as well. Also a lot of much more potent methane escapes when the oil and gas surfaces.

Heinberg in his book Snake Oil makes four points.

First. He refutes the claims that fracking promises a new age of limitless cheap energy for Americans. They are based on a patchwork of unjustifiable assumptions and outright fabrications that wildly overstate potential production and tacitly ignore all the downsides of a far from flawless technology.

Second. Fracking piles up short term profits for a few by loading immense long term costs on local communities, natural systems, and future generations.

Third. A major portion of what Obama paints as a century supply has been fabricated by those same folks on Wall Street who brought us last decade’s housing bubble and bust, and the financial footwork that nearly torpedoed the global economy in 2008 and 2009.

Fourth. This fracking phenomenon prevents us from facing the real crisis of our time, that of saying good bye to our current dependence on fossil fuels. As Heinberg points out, there aren’t enough economically recoverable fossil fuels left in the planet’s crust to keep the world chugging ahead on a business-as-usual track of economic growth for much longer, but there’s more than enough to finish the job of destabilizing the Earth’s climate and pitching us face first into a very difficult future.

I found some revealing calculations of the true cost of fracking. Raoul Meijer of the Automatic Earth concluded the following: based on 840 new wells, which added 52,828 barrels per day, or an increase of 62.89 barrels per day per well ( 52,828: 840). Given a cost of $8 million per well, the capital cost works out to $127,205 per barrel/day. If their profit margin – just for the sake of argument – is $30/barrel, this suggests that it takes $11.6 of investment to make $1/year of return. No wonder big oil names Shell and BHP Billiton are writing down the value of their shale assets by billions of dollars.

Out in shale country reality is sinking in. The pace of drilling in the Fayetteville shale has dropped dramatically this year; in Texas, meanwhile, gas production from the Barnett Shale has dropped more than a billion cubic feet a day, to levels last seen in 2009; while in the Marcellus Shale country of Pennsylvania, insurance companies are starting to cancel homeowners insurance and home mortgages are becoming unavailable as the health and environmental toll of reckless shale development piles up.

Writes Meijer: “Still, you won’t hear that from the media, not until long after the boom has gone bust, the hardware has been sold to the Chinese for scrap, and the sole remaining legacy of the shale bubble consists of county-sized areas where the groundwater is too toxic to drink.”

To me there are no longer holy cows. Every institution is in the deceiving game, with banks, oil companies and governments leading the pack.

In the utterly cruel world we live in we better start realizing that the absurd abundance of energy and resources that we all enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century was nothing else but a flash in the pan, a brief period of abandonment of all common sense. Where in Europe cities were built with 2 legs in mind, an avalanche of cheap fuel caused America’s cities, suburbs and ex-urban developments to be founded on four wheels. Now the wheels are coming off the economy. Cheap fuel fueled extravagance and waste that will have to be unlearnt painfully as the last of the surplus fades away.

I am the old-fashioned type, reared on thrift and preservation, on make-do and economy, grown up on buying the best and wearing it out.

We are returning to war-time conditions, to depression-dominated days, so brush up on what that really means. Learn the trades of the forefathers: to make things by hand; to re-use and wear out or even do without. Become self-sufficient and a contrarian. The people in power will keep on lying about the future.

In Ontario where I live the year 2013 has been a fabulous growing year, in direct contrast with 2012 when nothing grew. Apples galore; raspberries aplenty; potatoes prodigious; glorious cabbages: I even made sauerkraut this year for the first time; carrots and red beets in abundance: we had to buy an extra freezer to accommodate our blessings. It makes me wonder whether this year encapsulated the ‘seven fat years’ all in one brief season. Who knows what next year will bring.

An era is coming to a close: the age of abundance is fading. This unprecedented period also saw the rise of antibiotics and the onset of the Green revolution, guaranteeing long life with plenty of food. Anti-biotic resistance is on the increase: too much of the drug has made it ineffective with dangerous implications, as a simple infection may become deadly. A growing world population, higher expectations, expanding deserts, too much rain or not enough is imperiling global food supply.

Will fracking free us of from fuel famine forever? No. Fracking is as cruel to the earth as crucifixion is to us. Fracking is fulfilling the Isaiah prophecy “The earth is defiled by the people; they have disobeyed my laws…therefore a curse consumes the earth.” (Is.24: 5-6).

However, it will speed up the coming of the Kingdom.

 

Next week:

The mess in the Middle East. Civilization started in the Middle East. Will it end there too?

In August my blog hielema.ca/blog had almost 7000 visitors: 6,988 to be exact.

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Our World Today

Posted on August 25, 2013 by Bert Hielema

August 25 2013

77 + 77

At the time I never gave it a thought. When my grandparents’ farm, after the war, got electricity, their beautiful oil lamps were discarded as useless, thrown into the garbage. The age of energy via a magic wire originating from somewhere in the provincial capital would forever ban that smelling kerosene and eliminate fire hazards, but it also meant that something natural had vanished and a piece of the ‘world’ had been imported, the first small step on the path to complete mechanization and surrender to the money god.

My maternal Opa and Oma had two of these colorfully crafted lights, one in the living room and the other in the “pronk kamer”, the ‘show-off room’, the place only used when important people came visiting such as their church minister, or, on Sundays after church when relatives came for coffee. There, in the most spacious room of the farmhouse, the best furniture, the heirlooms, were located, all in immaculate condition, gleaming from the wax and polish.

I remember also that after the church Sunday coffee hour I would get a sugar crystal, a transparent candy rock that made cracking sounds when hot liquid was poured over it. This was before the war, of course, in the Dirty Thirties, during the deep depression, supposedly never to return.

What if?

The then new electric grid is now the Achilles heel of society. The ancient Greek hero had only one vulnerable spot on his body: his heel, and that’s how his enemy slayed him. We can cope for one hour without that miraculous power source – short interruptions happen all the time; we can cope without it for a day perhaps, as long as the weather is not too hot or cold; but weeks on end? Yet that happened not too far from where we live when freezing rain buckled the arms of the hydro transmission towers from which the hydro lines were suspended. It took weeks to repair this damage.

Everything now runs on electricity-powered computers, which are beautiful tools but also extremely vulnerable. They can run a few hours on battery power, but that’s it. Without electricity nothing works and everybody who is anybody realizes that without that magic current that is delivered to our home 24/7/365, everything stops. Without “hydro” as we call it in Ontario, no gas pump works, no refrigeration is possible, no meals are cooked, no groceries available, no water on tap, no heat in the house. In Canada we simply freeze in the dark. In the USA we fry in the summer without air conditioning.

People are realizing that we have a problem. Here is what the New York Times reports:

“The electric grid, as government and private experts describe it, is the glass jaw of American industry. If an adversary lands a knockout blow, they fear, it could black out vast areas of the continent for weeks; interrupt supplies of water, gasoline, diesel fuel and fresh food; shut down communications; and create disruptions of a scale that was only hinted at by Hurricane Sandy and the attacks of Sept. 11.

This is why thousands of utility workers, business executives, National Guard officers, F.B.I. antiterrorism experts and officials from government agencies in the United States, Canada and Mexico are preparing for an emergency drill in November that will simulate physical – and cyber attacks that could take down large sections of the power grid. They will practice for a crisis unlike anything the real grid has ever seen, and more than 150 companies and organizations have signed up to participate.

77+77

On September 1 1859 – exactly 77+77 years ago – Richard Carrington, an amateur astronomer from England, observed sunspot activity: next he noticed two brilliant spots of light twice as bright as the sun lasting about 5 minutes. Early the next morning much of the world witnessed a massively bright display of the aurora. At the same time telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, spraying out sparks from telegraph poles and causing widespread fires. Then the telegraph was the only high technology of that day, archaic by today’s standards. It was brought to a complete standstill by the invisible force of the sun.

What if?

Today in North America there are some 6000 major power plants and some 500,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, controlled by a staggering mix of devices installed over decades. A solar storm as occurred early September 1859 would completely destroy all that. What if this happens next week, 77 + 77 years after it happened before? Does that number indicate the fullness of time? A solar storm would melt all transformers. Worse all wires would fry to a crisp, causing a universal conflagration. Imagine a world without electricity, a world that depends for every action on hydro-electric or coal-generated or nuclear- power induced current. Is that how our world will end? A recent movie “The World’s End” mocks this prospect, yet it is another indication that the End is near. When? Only God knows. It will come totally unexpected, but the countdown has started.

Even if a melt-down does not occur, computer security experts say they believe that there is software- known as malware – that can disable the electrical systems or destroy their ability to communicate, leaving the operators blind about the positions of switches, the flows of current and other critical factors.

Of course it is good that people start realizing the tremendously vulnerable system we have devised. Given a solar storm of the magnitude experienced in 1859, nothing can protect us from such an event. Life could be extended by a few weeks with diesel generators, given that these people or institutions also have a large cache of food and water, but in essence it would be the End. Period.

A few books have been written depicting such scenarios. One is the 2009 novel “One Second After”, by William Forstchen. The author describes an attack on a quaint North Carolina mountain town, where a retired Colonel is living a peaceful life as a widowed professor with children when one day the lights go out and don’t come back on.  Food deliveries cease and so does water supply. Through the next few days people there start to realize that something much larger has happened.  What they eventually learn is that multiple solar storms have gone off over the US and over other strategic countries around the globe and everything immediately stops. Fortunately local leadership and a good community bring a small town together.

Another more recent publication, also a novel, with the apt title of “Gridlock,” describes an attack initiated by a rogue Russian agent working for Venezuela and Iran in which he helps hackers to disable the grid.

Authorities realize that such an attack could cause 10,000 times more devastation than the terrorists’ strike on September 11 2001.

I believe that’s the reason why neither Israel nor the USA has dared to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities is the fear that Iran might retaliate with just such a countermeasure.

There are also other threats, perhaps minor compared to the paralyzing of the grid but also more immediate. A recent article in TIME Magazine describes “A World without Bees” which would imperil a wide range of our favourite foods. Here are some quotes from that TIME article: “If the bee disappears from the surface of the globe, man would have no more than four years to live………What is really scary is the fear that bees may be a sign of what is to come, a symbol that something is deeply wrong with the world around is….. “If we don’t make some changes soon, we’re going to see disaster,” says Tom Theobald, a beekeeper in Colorado. “The bees are just the beginning.”

 Why are people not worried?

There certainly is no reason for complacency, yet that is the general atmosphere out there. People carry on as if there is nothing to fear, and that too is understandable. We are like the proverbial frog who, when dumped in hot water, immediately jumps out but who, when sitting comfortably in water that is slowly heated, blithely boils to death. This is exactly what is happening to us: we fail to perceive gradual changes as opposed to rapid shifts. Climate change is a case in point: it is occurring so slowly that our minds do not adjust to it which makes it a deadly threat: it fails to trip the brain’s alarm, leaving us inertly passive in front of the TV set.

The first step is to acknowledge that there is a problem which is not easy since half of the US population even denies the fact of Climate Change. Canadians are a bit smarter in that regard, though very few either here or in the USA are cutting down on airplane trips or eating less red meat or walk and bike rather than drive. Yet we say we do care for God’s earth. So it’s not a lack of compassion for the planet: I think we find the conflict too painful to bear. Our apparent apathy, writes one psychiatrist, is just a defense mechanism in the face of this psychic pain. Still we have to come to terms with the reality that this planet of ours has an expiry date, which is rapidly approaching. We must make it socially acceptable to discuss this and prepare ourselves, probably more mentally than physically, even though the two are interlinked. It is God’s creation after all, and anything that affects God’s beloved earth also affects our spiritual status.

The world is waking up to this. Somehow the church is loath to alarm its declining membership. They have enough problems already, or so they reason, erroneously I believe. After all creation is God’s Primary Word. We conveniently ignore that whatever harm we do to the cosmos is a direct trespass of the third commandment, which says Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

We are paying the price of taking God’s name in vain. The changes we see in Our World Today are its direct consequences. God’s signature is evident throughout creation; his name is written on each species, especially on our own body, created in his image.

 

What must we do?

 

We must take the warnings seriously. We must urge our church fellowship to prepare for the return of the Lord.

One of my favourite sayings is that “we can’t do anything without God, and God won’t do anything without us.” We have a total partnership with God. That also means that we can’t be idle when these matters appear imminent. Jesus urges the people of his day to ‘flee to the mountains’ (Matthew 24:16). You do well to read that entire chapter because much of what Jesus mentions there is taking place right now.

What can we do? We can’t be passive. We must at all times be ready to help ourselves and others: love your neighbours and yourselves.

If you have a rural property and are on a well, buy a hand pump. In Tobermory, the most northerly town of the Bruce Peninsula, is a firm which ships frost-free hand pumps all over North America. They are priced in US dollars. Those who are on city water, and living in a single family dwelling, get a few rain barrels. Water is just as essential as food. Also have a thousand or so dollars in small bills tucked away and a supply of emergency food. Also keep your gas tank topped up. If you are ready for retirement, sell your city home and settle in the country with some land and woods. Seek a supporting community.

The dangers I have outlined are not imaginary. For our very eyes we see the conditions Jesus outlined in Matthew 24. For the churches to ignore these issues is irresponsible.

 

Next week: Will ‘fracking’ free us from trouble?

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