Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

March 1 2011

Our World Today

OK. Call me a pessimist for seeing great dangers confronting us, of which perhaps the most serious one is our refusal to face reality. Research at the University of Michigan, found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, fundamental religious believers and those with a vested interest in the status quo, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. On the contrary, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs: the truth did not set them free.

That blindness concerns such events as Climate Change, Peak Oil, Food Scarcity, Over-population, and also Bible Abuse. Rather than seeing the Scriptures as the light to guide us through God’s creation, many stare into that light until it blinds them from seeing what’s happening in the world around them.

All this is real bad news for the next generation, because we are leaving our youth with an unimaginable mess, and for this we owe them our deepest possible apology.  We see the young rising up in the millions, mainly because those in North Africa and the Middle East are noticing their future is fading before their eyes thanks to rapidly disappearing oil and food stuffs.

Let me rehash something familiar by using as metaphor the well-known example of a tall apple tree with much low-hanging fruit.

My generation did the easy picking, wasting about one –third of the crop, after all there was so much it. Now when it is our youth’s turn to benefit, a strong wind has blown off the majority of the higher fruit while to harvest the few left will take life threatening effort.

In real life we did this with most minerals including soil – now eroding rapidly – and water- with many aquifers near depletion. The result is that we are faced with two mutually enforcing trends: ever higher energy costs and ever greater difficulties in reaching the needed commodities.

Take gold. It requires an enormous amount of processing. With the readily available ores dug up we are forced to go to remote points to secure the less pure deposits. To travel there requires not only a lot more energy, but if its gold content has dropped from 2% to 1%, then the amount to be processed to get the same quantity of precious metal also doubles, and so does the need for energy.

The same is true for most elements in modern life. The easy fuel is long gone, reason why Canada thrives on tar-sands. Australia can now readily export its secondary, even more polluting, coal resources to China with ominous consequences. A study by Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard Medical School finds that the full lifecycle expense of extracting and burning coal is more costly and damaging than previously known: an estimated $345 billion annually in health, environmental, and other costs in the United States alone. Double that for China. The direct financial outlay, the report reveals, adds close to 18¢ for every kilowatt hour of electricity generated from coal, still electricity’s main energy source. That too is a charge heaped on the shoulders of our youth, already carrying the immense burdens of deficits, pension-shortfalls and healthcare.

It is not the quantity of minerals, fuel, potash, nickel or gold that is important, it is the quality that matters. In other words, what we are seeing now is that the energy needed to maintain our way of life increases exponentially as distances are greater, as ore quality is less, as processing is more energy intensive, until the entire procedure reaches a point where it is no longer economical.

Of course, the crucial point is the amount of fossil fuels left. Thanks to Wikileaks, which obtained telegrams from the American embassy in Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh, we now know that Saudi oil reserves were overstated by as many as 300 billion barrels: that is 10 years of the entire world’s consumption!!

The Guardian, which published the memo wrote that: The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates.

In spite of these warnings many people have hung the “Do Not Disturb Us with the Facts” sign on their foreheads. Instead they pick and choose only the items that will serve in walling them off from uncomfortable truths. The future belongs to those who prepare for it. Not preparing means that the real victims are the world’s young people, who have been made to believe that their future will be rosy. It now dawns on them that we have failed to tell them the truth, because we found it too difficult to face it ourselves. No wonder they are rising up in protest.

Bert Hielema has written two new books, THE SHORTEST DAY (215 pages), based on Matthew 24:22, and its sequel DAY WITHOUT END (152 pages) envisioning the meaning of “I believe in the resurrection of the dead and theLife Everlasting.”  To order go to ‘bert@hielema.ca”

February 2011.
OUR WORLD TODAY

Where are we in OUR WORLD TODAY and where is the world heading?
In general we are somewhere between the time God created the world ‘in the beginning’, and the Last Day, also known as Judgment Day. My bet is that we are very close to the Day of Christ’s return, judging by the books with “End” in them, such as The End of History, The End of Oil, The End of Faith, The End of Nature, The End of Science, and The End of Growth. They all point to a growing awareness that OUR WORLD TODAY is running out of steam.

Take The End of Growth. Our world has an obsession with growth, with an ever bigger Gross Domestic Product. The aim of every government is to increase what the nation is producing, never mind that this means more pollution, more Climate Change, more harm to creation. But politicians want to be (re-)elected, and the absence of growth hampers this and harms the rich, the Wall Street financial types who really run OUR WORLD TODAY. No or negative growth means dissatisfied voters, means closed factories and stagnation. So, never mind the cost, growth must continue, by fair or foul means.

It’s easy to grow from a low base. China with a per capita income of $3000 with ten percent growth only generates an extra $300, while the USA with $33,000 income per person has trouble growing at only three percent growth, which still adds $1,000. But grow we must or the economy will collapse.

So we are boxed in. For the 2.7 billion people now living on less than $2 a day, economic growth is essential to provide their most basic needs. We, the wealthy, need growth to pay off our debts and prevent civil unrest. To produce growth takes vast amounts of energy, while our best source – fossil fuel – is both the main contributor to climate change, and comes with an ever rising price tag.

Here is our dilemma: we can’t live with growth, and we can’t live without it. This paradox is the biggest challenge in OUR WORLD TODAY. We are blind to this contradiction because, by and large, our quest for economic expansion is based on ‘religion’, not faith in God, but faith in progress, faith that science will redeem us.
The ultimate result is The End of Capitalism, and with it the end of our comfortable lives.

Does that mean inflation? Probably. The basic cost of doing business is increasingly burdened by extra security concerns, environmental hazards, pensions and health care costs, more older people, more costly commodities, all these are expenses passed on to the rest of us, but there is a limit to what we are able to pay as basic pay has not increased.

What is sure is that, in OUR WORLD TODAY, we are witnessing immense economic, political and socio-cultural upheavals, none of them easily controlled by the people in power. The result: ever greater uncertainty as doubt feeds on itself while trying to deal with the new problems posed by terrorism, dollar doldrums, climate and regime change, popular uprisings, peak oil, pandemics, food shortfalls, water scarcity and nuclear proliferation.

Governments everywhere appear paralyzed. Haiti still horrible, New Orleans still not repaired, Israel and Palestine still at odds, the Middle East a mess, Iraq and Afghanistan too costly to continue, deficits out of control, Spain, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, all US States basically broke, a US congress blind to reality.

The extraordinary expansion of the world economy in the postwar years – from 1945 to 1975 – was followed by a long period of economic stagnation, after which Western nations survived on playing with money, involving debt upon debt, both financial and environmental. According to Laurence Koftikoff, a Boston University professor, the USA financial debt alone amounts to $200 Trillion, or $700,000 for every one of the 300 million Americans. If this is true, the debt will never be repaid signalling The End of Money.

OUR WORLD TODAY is especially a more perilous place because we have not protected our planet which, essentially, is our parent. We live, as it were, between two trees, the ones depicted in Genesis 1 and in Revelation 22, suggesting that The Beginning and The End are closely linked. That’s why it is still our task to pick up the ball Adam dropped: our focus must always be on being fully human, on being Adam, on being ‘born of the earth’. The word Adamah means that each one of us is tied with every gene of our existence to the life-bearing earth.

Bert Hielema’s blog – hielema.ca – receives an average of 50 hits per day.

OUR WORLD TODAY

New Year Time. Prediction Time.

Here is my scatter shot, bound to hit something: 2011 will be good, bad, excellent, depressing. It will have inflation. It will have deflation, You take your pick, because your guess is probably better than mine.

Here’s a thought: Noah’s Ark was built by amateurs; the Titanic by professionals. Take the 2008 banking crisis, still in progress. The professional economic forecasters were so much off the mark, that even Queen Elizabeth, during a visit to the London School of Economics 2 years ago, wondered: “Why did no one see the banking crash coming?”

Good question. Although Her Majesty does not pay income tax, she too must have lost money which pains her because she is known to be a frugal lady. One of my younger brothers paid tens of thousands of euros to get a MBA in Geneva, Switzerland, but he too had no clue. So who did get it right? Apparently Pope Benedict XVI – then still Cardinal Ratzinger – was the first to foresee the crisis. His 1985 paper predicted “that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules”.

Even brainy Ben Bernanke, the top financial guru in the USA, was blind to the financial future. In his Senate nomination hearing of 2005 he said that the system had already benefited from a series of crises that had reinforced its ability to cope with difficult times: “The depths, the liquidity, the flexibility of the financial markets haves increased greatly.” There’s another Titanic victim.

So was Jean-Claude Trichet, European Central Bank president. He told four newspapers, “Our baseline scenario is that we will have a trough in the profile of growth in the euro area in the second and third quarters, and, following this, a progressive return to ongoing moderate growth.” Instead it now has been revealed that European banks are still on the hook for trillions of euros owed by the PIIGS, Portugal, Ireland, Iceland, Greece, Spain, all financial basket cases.

There was a time, some 30 years ago, when forecasters prescribed magic authority to computers, visualizing that they, with ever larger processing powers, would make it easier to see what’s coming. We now know better: somewhat more humble, and maybe a shade wiser, we start to grasp that economies are complex, dynamic, non-linear systems in which faintly fathomed facts can fatally influence final outcomes – the proverbial flapping of a butterfly’s wings that causes a hurricane.

These butterflies are still flapping out there. The after effects of cheap money, which begat liars’ loans, which begat colossal debt, which begat the market –and money meltdown, are still winging their way to more wreckage. The political people in the USA and Europe are still kicking that debt-can down the road, postponing the problem as politicians are apt to do, hoping, praying that by election time, the end of 2012, magic has done its work.

However it’s not the butterflies I worry about. There are dragons out there, creatures much more fearful. These violent animals are the offspring of us carbonizing our environment, giving birth to the unholy Trinity of Peak oil, Peak Heat and Peak Food. In addition all-pervasive ‘plastic’ is playing havoc with our collective immune system to the point where, when the inevitable pandemic appears, our natural body defenses are fatally weakened.

Is that me again, always the party pooper, the killjoy, the perennial pessimist? I know that to be popular, as John Maynard Keynes has observed, it is usually better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right. Yet, believe it or not, I am an optimist.

Here’s where we are at. Capitalism is sunk, just like the supposedly unsinkable Titanic. With the old system under water, and nothing new on the horizon, this is the time to build on our own modest Ark. There the dragons, although at our doorsteps, can still be stopped.

So here is my wish for 2011: having learned from the erroneous notions of yesteryear, such as our impossible quest for unlimited growth, equating happiness with the acquisition of goods, and, especially, our neglect in providing a viable future for our children, we must make our own small-scale beginnings and so avoid the mistakes of the past.

Our primary task is to restore nature to become liveable for our children. That is our foremost priority. Go green. Gear down. Relax. Economize. Grow your own. Bike. Walk. Shop local. Volunteer. Start now to build your own ark, a self-sufficient refuge for family and friends.

If I read the Scriptures correctly, then I must conclude that we are approaching the time when genuine renewal is at hand. God loves this world too much to let the Unholy Trinity of the three Dragons destroy this beautiful cosmos. It’s God’s world, after all, even though Evil has taken temporary possession of it.

I admit that a different direction – following Noah’s example – will not come about easily. But if we want to be part of a new world to come, we have to be the agents of change. The current vacuum offers a once in a life-time opening to start a better system in the coming year.

Have an advent-urous year.