Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

JANUARY 17 2016

REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH!

Last week I started to read Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I was struck by one sentence, “I entreat you, brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.” Another sentence stayed with me – also decades ahead of his time: “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence…”

Nietzsche`s rebellion against the church originated from the preaching of the Heaven Heresy, still particularly predominant in the church today. The much maligned Nietzsche was a genius. His father and both his grand fathers were Lutheran preachers, one even a bishop. He was also slated to join the ranks of clergy but, seeing that the church was dead and so concluding that God was dead as well, he changed course and at a very young age became a professor of classical languages.
“Remain true to the earth!” Certainly a timely reminder. Our downright cruelty to the earth is all too evident: in the natural world there are too many people who see the earth as something to be exploited for personal gain, resulting in shrinking soil fertility, disappearing potable water, and climate change, signalling immense future problems.

By the way: in response to my plea to discuss THE NEW PARADIGM article of late December, two people reacted: a land surveyor in British Columbia and my brother in the Netherlands. Thank you both. The request for discussion went to a variety of people, including a Christian periodical. I realize that my thesis is rather radical, so here follows more elaboration, because more discussion is needed, since the future of the church is at stake. That is no exaggeration.

My brother sent me an electronic copy of a Dutch Christian Journal, with the intriguing name: ONDERWEG, which means EN ROUTE, traveling from one point to another, in this case alluding to the journey we all make from Here to Eternity. That particular issue dealt with THE END TIME which the article says we are now experiencing, and I concur. It contained some biblical givens, pointing to the signs now so clearly evident. The articles were good orthodox Christianity. A retired professor did point out that Revelation is quite explicit on the coming of the New Creation, also mentioning the book by N. T. Wright: Surprised by Hope, its subtitle being Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church. A reader commented: “If this book is true, then my whole life has to change.”
Of course, I have been writing about this for as long as I can remember, starting in 1972 when I was ‘converted’ to this point of view. Later, by reading Johan Herman Bavinck and translating three of his books, all proclaiming this very truth, I became even more convinced of this point of view.
This past week I also read a lot of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who knew that his time was short: at the age of 39 he was killed by the Gestapo (Geheime Stats Polizei or Secret Police) weeks before the end of WWII. One statement really stayed with me:
“God cannot be understood without the world, nor the world without the God who has entered it in Jesus Christ.”
Here I hear an echo of Nietzsche’s words: Remain true to the earth!

Why did Bonhoeffer write that it takes creation to understand God? In his Creation and Fall, dealing with the first three chapters of the Bible, Genesis 1-3, he writes, “The human being is the human being who is taken from earth…. The earth is its mother…. It is God’s earth out of which humankind is taken….. Its bond with the earth belongs to its essential being. Human beings have their existence as existence on earth.

Johan Herman Bavinck says essentially the same. In his Between the Beginning and the End: a radical Kingdom Vision he writes,
“A long time ago, the Bible tells us, God fashioned the first human pair from the earth. The Hebrew word for soil is Adamah, from which Adam comes. The word adam reminded the Israelite immediately of the first Adam who was taken from the soil of the earth, hence the well-known saying: soil we are and to soil we shall return. Just as we have red clay and black soil, we too have people of different colors. The word ‘adam’ typifies the human race in its unbreakable unity. We all come from the earth and we all go back to the earth. Earth-bound we are, forever. We, the human beings, are adam, and belong to adamah, the life-bearing earth. With every sinew of our exis-tence we are tied to the earth, which bears us and feeds us.”

So far J. H. Bavinck.

Back to us humans who, by and large, regard soil as disposable. We trample on it, pave it wherever we can, and, stupidly build our cities on its most fertile sections, because that sort of earth is good for digging and drainage, so we abuse it: it’s only dirt after all.
Yes, soil is treated as dirt that’s why we regard it with contempt. Yet all human life depends on it. Ancient Sanskrit texts have warned us: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it will grow our food, our fuel, and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it and the soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it”. Yes, destroy the earth and we destroy ourselves, and that’s exactly what we are doing.”

Back to Bonhoeffer who wrote,
“God cannot be understood without the world, nor the world without the God who has entered it in Jesus Christ.”

That makes sense. We cannot understand Bach without his music or van Gogh without his paintings. That’s why we cannot understand God without his creation. The Scriptures have been given us to make that possible. In these LAST DAYS we have to implement the words of Psalm 119: 105: “Your word is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path (in creation)”. With the two divine words at the ready – Creation and the Scriptures – guided by the Living Word that came to us in Jesus Christ, we have to outline a life that reflects God’s will now and for eternity, meaning that the current format of the church service has to change from the exclusive elaboration of the written word to a meaningful integration of both the created and the written word, fully recognizing that the created word, God’s direct revelation, has priority over God’s revelation in Scripture, his indirect word.

For most people God means little or nothing at all. For the bulk of those who go to church their quest is centered on heaven, but since we are of the earth, and eternally bound to the earth, this could mean a life lived in denial. This is all too evident in the USA, the most ‘Christian’ of the Western world. There Christianity has become so distorted that people like me are almost ashamed to call myself Christian. Nowhere in the world is the ‘world’ more abused and more reviled than in the USA where the average person generates 15 tons of CO2 per year, while the world average is less than 5 tons.
Bonhoeffer’s words, stating that we cannot find the God who has entered into the world in the form of Jesus Christ, unless we see and treat the world as originating from God and thus holy, are today more true than ever. Even though there may be churches that proclaim that truth, hardly any hymns reflect that belief.

Can the churches still change? Or will they just disappear without people noticing?
Bonhoeffer talks about the churches in Germany during the Hitler regime how they meekly went along with the Nazi regime, even openly endorsed it. Nietzsche already saw the church’s ineffectiveness, so became an open critic, falsely labeled as an atheist. Why? Because he said: “I entreat you, brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.”

It more and more seems that churches will simply fade away. The Guardian reported last week that church attendance in the C of E, the Church of England (in Canada known as the Anglican Church) has decreased to less than 2 percent of the population. In Tweed, Ontario, where I live, the Anglican Church closed a few years ago, while church attendance in other churches is down drastically as well. Apparently we don’t need God anymore. Actually I don’t think that is true: in these days of general dissatisfaction, only the Christian Religion has the answer, but not in its present form.

“If this is true that we don’t go to heaven then my whole life has to change” remarked a reader of the N. T. Wright book.

And the change lies in fully recognizing that this earth is and remains for us our habitat into eternity. That implies that we must incorporate the essence of the earth into our lives: make it an integral part of our spiritual and material make-up by being “True to the Earth”. As the 2 B’s, Bavinck and Bonhoeffer have written: “God cannot be understood without the world, nor the world without the God who has entered it in Jesus Christ.”

Going about understanding this is a communal enterprise. Bavinck has stated that,

“There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved by him. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all-wise will of him who live and rules for ever.”

That is what I missed in the Dutch ONDERWEG piece. Our whole life has to change, and, that change has to start in the church, unlikely as it sounds in this day and age where the average age in many churches is well beyond 70 years of age. I deeply believe that if the church were to make this its primary objective – and it should because God cannot be understood without the world – it would draw in the younger generation which faces a very dire future without much hope. They too have to be “Surprised by Hope.”

Since that is so unique and so unusual, indeed requires a PARADIGM SHIFT, it needs a thorough explanation and a careful introduction, as well as eloquent elaboration, because it means that much of the theological education of the minister will have to be redirected from pure Bible explanation to practical ‘lessons’ that are geared to a total integration with the real world, using the know-how and the expertise readily available within the congregation or the community at large.

Today the ’sermon’ type service has proven to be outmoded and outdated, witness the steady decline in church attendance over the past decades. Also the lecture-type presentation is the least effective of all modes of communication. That too has become all too evident. It is time that churches update their message and the way the Good News is presented.

That way points to integrating the spoken word with the created word. “If this is true that we don’t go to heaven then my whole life has to change” remarked a reader of the N. T. Wright book.

That change starts in the church as the Communion of Saints. The Apostles Creed has a line which affirms that we believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting.

We must now prepare for that everlasting life. There is a saying that the future belongs to those who prepare for it. The same applies to eternal life: The Future in the renewed earth belongs to those who prepare for it. The success of the church stands and falls with that message.

Oh yes, last week’s blog completely disappeared from my computer. I was pretty philosophical about it, reasoning that it was not to become public. My main point was that the financial fiasco we are facing is something structural: too many older people receive pensions and medical care which must be financed by a much smaller and less prosperous work force: simply impossible.

Our Finite World
Exploring how oil limits affect the economy

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2016: Oil Limits and the End of the Debt Supercycle
Posted on January 7, 2016 by Gail Tverberg
What is ahead for 2016? Most people don’t realize how tightly the following are linked:
1. Growth in debt
2. Growth in the economy
3. Growth in cheap-to-extract energy supplies
4. Inflation in the cost of producing commodities
5. Growth in asset prices, such as the price of shares of stock and of farmland
6. Growth in wages of non-elite workers
7. Population growth
It looks to me as though this linkage is about to cause a very substantial disruption to the economy, as oil limits, as well as other energy limits, cause a rapid shift from the benevolent version of the economic supercycle to the portion of the economic supercycle reflecting contraction. Many people have talked about Peak Oil, the Limits to Growth, and the Debt Supercycle without realizing that the underlying problem is really the same–the fact the we are reaching the limits of a finite world.
There are actually a number of different kinds of limits to a finite world, all leading toward the rising cost of commodity production. I will discuss these in more detail later. In the past, the contraction phase of the supercycle seems to have been caused primarily by too high population relative to resources. This time, depleting fossil fuels–particularly oil–plays a major role. Other limits contributing to the end of the current debt supercycle include rising pollution and depletion of resources other than fossil fuels.
The problem of reaching limits in a finite world manifests itself in an unexpected way: slowing wage growth for non-elite workers. Lower wages mean that these workers become less able to afford the output of the system. These problems first lead to commodity oversupply and very low commodity prices. Eventually these problems lead to falling asset prices and widespread debt defaults. These problems are the opposite of what many expect, namely oil shortages and high prices. This strange situation exists because the economy is a networked system. Feedback loops in a networked system don’t necessarily work in the way people expect.
I expect that the particular problem we are likely to reach in 2016 is limits to oil storage. This may happen at different times for crude oil and the various types of refined products. As storage fills, prices can be expected to drop to a very low level–less than $10 per barrel for crude oil, and correspondingly low prices for the various types of oil products, such as gasoline, diesel, and asphalt. We can then expect to face a problem with debt defaults, failing banks, and failing governments (especially of oil exporters).
The idea of a bounce back to new higher oil prices seems exceedingly unlikely, in part because of the huge overhang of supply in storage, which owners will want to sell, keeping supply high for a long time. Furthermore, the underlying cause of the problem is the failure of wages of non-elite workers to rise rapidly enough to keep up with the rising cost of commodity production, particularly oil production. Because of falling inflation-adjusted wages, non-elite workers are becoming increasingly unable to afford the output of the economic system. As non-elite workers cut back on their purchases of goods, the economy tends to contract rather than expand. Efficiencies of scale are lost, and debt becomes increasingly difficult to repay with interest. The whole system tends to collapse.
How the Economic Growth Supercycle Works, in an Ideal Situation
In an ideal situation, growth in debt tends to stimulate the economy. The availability of debt makes the purchase of high-priced goods such as factories, homes, cars, and trucks more affordable. All of these high-priced goods require the use of commodities, including energy products and metals. Thus, growing debt tends to add to the demand for commodities, and helps keep their prices higher than the cost of production, making itprofitable to produce these commodities. The availability of profits encourages the extraction of an ever-greater quantity of energy supplies and other commodities.
The growing quantity of energy supplies made possible by this profitability can be used to leverage human labor to an ever-greater extent, so that workers become increasingly productive. For example, energy supplies help build roads, trucks, and machines used in factories, making workers more productive. As a result, wages tend to rise, reflecting the greater productivity of workers in the context of these new investments. Businesses find that demand for their goods and services grows because of the growing wages of workers, and governments find that they can collect increasing tax revenue. The arrangement of repaying debt with interest tends to work well in this situation. GDP grows sufficiently rapidly that the ratio of debt to GDP stays relatively flat.
Over time, the cost of commodity production tends to rise for several reasons:
1. Population tends to grow over time, so the quantity of agricultural land available per person tends to fall. Higher-priced techniques (such as irrigation, better seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides) are required to increase production per acre. Similarly, rising population gives rise to a need to produce fresh water using increasingly high-priced techniques, such as desalination.
2. Businesses tend to extract the least expensive fuels such as oil, coal, natural gas, and uranium first. They later move on to more expensive to extract fuels, when the less-expensive fuels are depleted. For example, Figure 1 shows the sharp increase in the cost of oil extraction that took place about 1999.

Figure 1. Figure by Steve Kopits of Westwood Douglas showing the trend in per-barrel capital expenditures for oil exploration and production. CAGR is “Compound Annual Growth Rate.”
3. Pollution tends to become an increasing problem because the least polluting commodity sources are used first. When mitigations such as substituting renewables for fossil fuels are used, they tend to be more expensive than the products they are replacing. The leads to the higher cost of final products.
4. Overuse of resources other than fuels becomes a problem, leading to problems such as the higher cost of producing metals, deforestation, depleted fish stocks, and eroded topsoil. Some workarounds are available, but these tend to add costs as well.
As long as the cost of commodity production is rising only slowly, its increasing cost is benevolent. This increase in cost adds to inflation in the price of goods and helps inflate away prior debt, so that debt is easier to pay. It also leads to asset inflation, making the use of debt seem to be a worthwhile approach to finance future economic growth, including the growth of energy supplies. The whole system seems to work as an economic growth pump, with the rising wages of non-elite workers pushing the growth pump along.
The Big “Oops” Comes when the Price of Commodities Starts Rising Fasterthan Wages of Non-Elite Workers
Clearly the wages of non-elite workers need to be rising faster than commodity prices in order to push the economic growth pump along. The economic pump effect is lost when the wages of non-elite workers start falling, relative to the price of commodities. This tends to happen when the cost of commodity production begins rising rapidly, as it did for oil after 1999 (Figure 1).
The loss of the economic pump effect occurs because the rising cost of oil (or electricity, or food, or other energy products) forces workers to cut back on discretionary expenditures. This is what happened in the 2003 to 2008 period as oil prices spiked and other energy prices rose sharply. (See my article Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis.) Non-elite workers found it increasingly difficult to afford expensive products such as homes, cars, and washing machines. Housing prices dropped. Debt growth slowed, leading to a sharp drop in oil prices and other commodity prices.

Figure 2. World oil supply and prices based on EIA data.
It was somewhat possible to “fix” low oil prices through the use of Quantitative Easing (QE) and the growth of debt at very low interest rates, after 2008. In fact, these very low interest rates are what encouraged the very rapid growth in the production of US crude oil, natural gas liquids, and biofuels.
Now, debt is reaching limits. Both the US and China have (in a sense) “taken their foot off the economic debt accelerator.” It doesn’t seem to make sense to encourage more use of debt, because recent very low interest rates have encouraged unwise investments. In China, more factories and homes have been built than the market can absorb. In the US, oil “liquids” production rose faster than it could be absorbed by the world market when prices were over $100 per barrel. This led to the big price drop. If it were possible to produce the additional oil for a very low price, say $20 per barrel, the world economy could probably absorb it. Such a low selling price doesn’t really “work” because of the high cost of production.
Debt is important because it can help an economy grow, as long as the total amount of debt does not become unmanageable. Thus, for a time, growing debt can offset the adverse impact of the rising cost of energy products. We know that oil prices began to rise sharply in the 1970s, and in fact other energy prices rose as well.

Figure 3. Historical World Energy Price in 2014$, from BP Statistical Review of World History 2015.
Looking at debt growth, we find that it rose rapidly, starting about the time oil prices started spiking. Former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman, talks about “The Distastrous 40-Year Debt Supercycle,” which he believes is now ending.

Figure 4. Worldwide average inflation-adjusted annual growth rates in debt and GDP, for selected time periods. Seepost on debt for explanation of methodology.
In recent years, we have been reaching a situation where commodity prices have been rising faster than the wages of non-elite workers. Jobs that are available tend to be low-paid service jobs. Young people find it necessary to stay in school longer. They also find it necessary to delay marriage and postpone buying a car and home. All of these issues contribute to the falling wages of non-elite workers. Some of these individuals are, in fact, getting zero wages, because they are in school longer. Individuals who retire or voluntarily leave the work force further add to the problem of wages no longer rising sufficiently to afford the output of the system.
The US government has recently decided to raise interest rates. This further reduces the buying power of non-elite workers. We have a situation where the “economic growth pump,” created through the use of a rising quantity of cheap energy products plus rising debt, is disappearing. While homes, cars, and vacation travel are available, an increasing share of the population cannot afford them. This tends to lead to a situation where commodity prices fall below the cost of production for a wide range of types of commodities, making the production of commodities unprofitable. In such a situation, a person expects companies to cut back on production. Many defaults may occur.
China has acted as a major growth pump for the world for the last 15 years, since it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. China’s growth is now slowing, and can be expected to slow further. Its growth was financed by a huge increase in debt. Paying back this debt is likely to be a problem.

Figure 5. Author’s illustration of problem we are now encountering.
Thus, we seem to be coming to the contraction portion of the debt supercycle. This is frightening, because if debt is contracting, asset prices (such as stock prices and the price of land) are likely to fall. Banks are likely to fail, unless they can transfer their problems to others–owners of the bank or even those with bank deposits. Governments will be affected as well, because it will become more expensive to borrow money, and because it becomes more difficult to obtain revenue through taxation. Many governments may fail as well for that reason.
The U. S. Oil Storage Problem
Oil prices began falling in the middle of 2014, so we might expect oil storage problems to start about that time, but this is not exactly the case. Supplies of US crude oil in storage didn’t start rising until about the end of 2014.

Figure 6. US crude oil in storage, excluding Strategic Petroleum Reserve, based on EIA data.
Once crude oil supplies started rising rapidly, they increased by about 90 million barrels between December 2014 and April 2015. After April 2015, supplies dipped again, suggesting that there is some seasonality to the growing crude oil supply. The most “dangerous” time for rapidly rising amounts added to storage would seem to be between December 31 and April 30. According to the EIA, maximum crude oil storage is 551 million barrels of crude oil (considering all storage facilities). Adding another 90 million barrels of oil (similar to the run-up between Dec. 2014 and April 2015) would put the total over the 551 million barrel crude oil capacity.
Cushing, Oklahoma, is the largest storage area for crude oil. According to the EIA, maximum working storage for the facility is 73 million barrels. Oil storage at Cushing since oil prices started declining is shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7. Quantity of crude oil stored at Cushing between June 27, 2014, and June 1, 2016, based on EIA data.
Clearly the same kind of run up in oil storage that occurred between December and April one year ago cannot all be stored at Cushing, if maximum working capacity is only 73 million barrels, and the amount currently in storage is 64 million barrels.
Another way of storing oil is as finished products. Here, the run-up in storage began earlier (starting in mid-2014) and stabilized at about 65 million barrels per day above the prior year, by January 2015. Clearly, if companies can do some pre-planning, they would prefer not to refine products for which there is little market. They would rather store unneeded oil as crude, rather than as refined products.

Figure 8. Total Oil Products in Storage, based on EIA data.
EIA indicates that the total capacity for oil products is 1,549 million barrels. Thus, in theory, the amount of oil products stored can be increased by as much as 700 million barrels, assuming that the products needing to be stored and the locations where storage are available match up exactly. In practice, the amount of additional storage available is probably quite a bit less than 700 million barrels because of mismatch problems.
In theory, if companies can be persuaded to refine more products than they can sell, the amount of products that can be stored can rise significantly. Even in this case, the amount of storage is not unlimited. Even if the full 700 million barrels of storage for crude oil products is available, this corresponds to less than one million barrels a day for two years, or two million barrels a day for one year. Thus, products storage could easily be filled as well, if demand remains low.
At this point, we don’t have the mismatch between oil production and consumption fixed. In fact, both Iraq and Iran would like to increase their production, adding to the production/consumption mismatch. China’s economy seems to be stalling, keeping its oil consumption from rising as quickly as in the past, and further adding to the supply/demand mismatch problem. Figure 9 shows an approximation to our mismatch problem. As far as I can tell, the problem is still getting worse, not better.

Figure 9. Total liquids oil production and consumption, based on a combination of BP and EIA data.
There has been a lot of talk about the United States reducing its production, but the impact so far has been small, based on data from EIA’s International Energy Statistics and its December 2015 Monthly Energy Review.

Figure 10. US quarterly oil liquids production data, based on EIA’s International Energy Statistics and Monthly Energy Review.
Based on information through November from EIA’s Monthly Energy Review, total liquids production for the US for the year 2015 will be over 800,000 barrels per day higher than it was for 2014. This increase is likely greater than the increase in production by either Saudi Arabia or Iraq. Perhaps in 2016, oil production of the US will start decreasing, but so far, increases in biofuels and natural gas liquids are partly offsetting recent reductions in crude oil production. Also, even when companies are forced into bankruptcy, oil production does not necessarily stop because of the potential value of the oil to new owners.
Figure 11 shows that very high stocks of oil were a problem, way back in the 1920s. There were other similarities to today’s problems as well, including a deflating debt bubble and low commodity prices. Thus, we should not be too surprised by high oil stocks now, when oil prices are low.

Figure 11. US ending stock of crude oil, excluding the strategic petroleum reserve. Figure by EIA.
Many people overlook the problems today because the US economy tends to be doing better than that of the rest of the world. The oil storage problem is really a world problem, however, reflecting a combination of low demand growth (caused by low wage growth and lack of debt growth, as the world economy hits limits) continuing supply growth (related to very low interest rates making all kinds of investment appear profitable and new production from Iraq and, in the near future, Iran). Storage on ships is increasingly being filled up and storage in Western Europe is 97% filled. Thus, the US is quite likely to see a growing need for oil storage in the year ahead, partly because there are few other places to put the oil, and partly because the gap between supply and demand has not yet been fixed.
What is Ahead for 2016?
1. Problems with a slowing world economy are likely to become more pronounced, as China’s growth problems continue, and as other commodity-producing countries such as Brazil, South Africa, and Australia experience recession. There may be rapid shifts in currencies, as countries attempt to devalue their currencies, to try to gain an advantage in world markets. Saudi Arabia may decide to devalue its currency, to get more benefit from the oil it sells.
2. Oil storage seems likely to become a problem sometime in 2016. In fact, if the run-up in oil supply is heavily front-ended to the December to April period, similar to what happened a year ago, lack of crude oil storage space could become a problem within the next three months. Oil prices could fall to $10 or below. We know that for natural gas and electricity, prices often fall below zero when the ability of the system to absorb more supply disappears. It is not clear the oil prices can fall below zero, but they can certainly fall very low. Even if we can somehow manage to escape the problem of running out of crude oil storage capacity in 2016, we could encounter storage problems of some type in 2017 or 2018.
3. Falling oil prices are likely to cause numerous problems. One is debt defaults, both for oil companies and for companies making products used by the oil industry. Another is layoffs in the oil industry. Another problem is negative inflation rates, making debt harder to repay. Still another issue is falling asset prices, such as stock prices and prices of land used to produce commodities. Part of the reason for the fall in price has to do with the falling price of the commodities produced. Also, sovereign wealth funds will need to sell securities, to have money to keep their economies going. The sale of these securities will put downward pressure on stock and bond prices.
4. Debt defaults are likely to cause major problems in 2016. As noted in the introduction, we seem to be approaching the unwinding of a debt supercycle. We can expect one company after another to fail because of low commodity prices. The problems of these failing companies can be expected to spread to the economy as a whole. Failing companies will lay off workers, reducing the quantity of wages available to buy goods made with commodities. Debt will not be fully repaid, causing problems for banks, insurance companies, and pension funds. Even electricity companies may be affected, if their suppliers go bankrupt and their customers become less able to pay their bills.
5. Governments of some oil exporters may collapse or be overthrown, if prices fall to a low level. The resulting disruption of oil exports may be welcomed, if storage is becoming an increased problem.
6. It is not clear that the complete unwind will take place in 2016, but a major piece of this unwind could take place in 2016, especially if crude oil storage fills up, pushing oil prices to less than $10 per barrel.
7. Whether or not oil storage fills up, oil prices are likely to remain very low, as the result of rising supply, barely rising demand, and no one willing to take steps to try to fix the problem. Everyone seems to think that someone else (Saudi Arabia?) can or should fix the problem. In fact, the problem is too large for Saudi Arabia to fix. The United States could in theory fix the current oil supply problem by taxing its own oil production at a confiscatory tax rate, but this seems exceedingly unlikely. Closing existing oil production before it is forced to close would guarantee future dependency on oil imports. A more likely approach would be to tax imported oil, to keep the amount imported down to a manageable level. This approach would likely cause the ire of oil exporters.
8. The many problems of 2016 (including rapid moves in currencies, falling commodity prices, and loan defaults) are likely to cause large payouts of derivatives, potentially leading to the bankruptcies of financial institutions, as they did in 2008. To prevent such bankruptcies, most governments plan to move as much of the losses related to derivatives and debt defaults to private parties as possible. It is possible that this approach will lead to depositors losing what appear to be insured bank deposits. At first, any such losses will likely be limited to amounts in excess of FDIC insurance limits. As the crisis spreads, losses could spread to other deposits. Deposits of employers may be affected as well, leading to difficulty in paying employees.
9. All in all, 2016 looks likely to be a much worse year than 2008 from a financial perspective. The problems will look similar to those that might have happened in 2008, but didn’t thanks to government intervention. This time, governments appear to be mostly out of approaches to fix the problems.
10. Two years ago, I put together the chart shown as Figure 12. It shows the production of all energy products declining rapidly after 2015. I see no reason why this forecast should be changed. Once the debt supercycle starts its contraction phase, we can expect a major reduction in both the demand and supply of all kinds of energy products.

Figure 12. Estimate of future energy production by author. Historical data based on BP adjusted to IEA groupings.
Conclusion
We are certainly entering a worrying period. We have not really understood how the economy works, so we have tended to assume we could fix one or another part of the problem. The underlying problem seems to be a problem of physics. The economy is adissipative structure, a type of self-organizing system that forms in thermodynamically open systems. As such, it requires energy to grow. Ultimately, diminishing returns with respect to human labor–what some of us would call falling inflation-adjusted wages of non-elite workers–tends to bring economies down. Thus all economies have finite lifetimes, just as humans, animals, plants, and hurricanes do. We are in the unfortunate position of observing the end of our economy’s lifetime.
Most energy research to date has focused on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. While this is a contributing problem, this is really not the proximate cause of the impending collapse. The Second Law of Thermodynamics operates in thermodynamically closed systems, which is not precisely the issue here.
We know that historically collapses have tended to take many years. This collapse may take place more rapidly because today’s economy is dependent on international supply chains, electricity, and liquid fuels–things that previous economies were not dependent on.
I have written many articles on related subjects (unfortunately, no book). These are a few of them:
Low Oil Prices – Why Worry?
How Economic Growth Fails
Deflationary Collapse Ahead?
Oops! Low oil prices are related to a debt bubble
Why “supply and demand” doesn’t work for oil
Economic growth: How it works; how it fails; why wealth disparity occurs
We are at Peak Oil now; we need very low-cost energy to fix it

January 3 2016

2016 Anno Domini –in the year of the Lord

Horae, dies, menses, anni, sicut umbrae fugiunt.

That is Latin. It means: hours, days, months, years, are as fleeting as shadows.

A new year. A Dutch song plays through my head, which, translated, goes: “Whatever the future holds, God’s hand will guide me.” I believe that. That line is especially relevant for the time we live in.
Last week I read a quote by Karl Barth, a great Protestant theologian and contemporary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Barth wrote, “Theology is done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” When Barth and Bonhoeffer first met in 1931 at an informal gathering at Barth’s residence, Bonhoeffer said, “There is a passage from Luther which says, ‘the godless man’s curse can be more pleasing to God than the hallelujahs of the pious.’ According to an eyewitness Barth shot out of his chair: “That’s wonderful! Where is that passage?”

Years later, in 1942, the two met again at Lake Geneva, where Bonhoeffer asked Barth whether or not he believed that all creation will one day come back again: “Will it be – like Lake Geneva”, to which Barth replied, “Yes! Like Lake Geneva!” Quotes like that bring tears to my eyes. There in one sentence is the core of my belief.

Back to the first quote: “Theology is done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” That’s exactly what I am doing all the time in my blogs: we must see all of life in the light of Scriptures and all of Scripture in the light of today. That does not mean that the Bible is a book that predicts certain specific events, even though, in broad outlines it does that. It tells us that God created, that he gave this creation for us to develop, that we surrendered it to the Evil one who now is in charge, that Christ bought it back at the expense of his life, and that soon creation will be restored to its full glory. Then, finally, we will be able to do what Adam and Eve were mandated to do: develop creation to its full potential.

I do believe that all signs point to an imminent return of Christ, which will be preceded by tremendous turmoil, the likes of which humanity have never experienced.
Today we experience the initial tremors, which, in the year 2016, will intensify. So brace yourself.
Ahead lies another year. Climate change combined with the most powerful El Nino will make matters everywhere more risky, so follow Jesus’ advice: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” as recorded in the King James version. My NIV (Matthew 6: 34) simply says, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

I also know that Jesus said, “look at the birds, the heavenly father feeds them, so why worry”. That was good for his time when nature was still in balance, but now matters have changed: the bird population is way down, even as the number of humans has increased exponentially. Jesus always tells us to look at what’s happening around us in nature: when trees and seas fare well, so do we. The opposite is true as well. In Matthew 24 Jesus advises us (verse 32) “Learn the lesson from the fig tree which tells us when the seasons change,” from which I conclude that, when birds disappear and human multiply and disasters become more frequent, the Day of the Lord is approaching fast, at a time we least expect it.

At the beginning of a new year there always are lots of forecasts. One, supposedly reliable source, a Harry Kent who runs his own consulting firm is quite specific: “My forecast today: the stock market will start to crash by early February, if not sooner”. That’s pretty daring, because that’s only a few weeks away. Fact is that institutional money has been fleeing the stock market for months, while the Moms and Pops, the common folk, have kept the shares.
Making prediction is foolishness, especially about the future, someone once said. Almost four years ago, at the time of the Olympics in London in August 2012, I did make a prediction in my Christian Courier column. Here what I wrote in September 2012.

“I don’t like mega churches, but I loved it when 400 million people world-wide heard an old-fashioned sermon at the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics. It happened at the end of the show recalling the sinking of the Titanic, then exactly 100 years ago. The Titanic now is a name synonymous with disaster. The ‘lesson’ was delivered by a regal-looking Emeli Sandé who sang all five verses of Abide with me, the hymn supposedly played while the ship slowly sank into the icy seas. (By the way American TV refused to broadcast this, it being too disheartening). She projected into the planet such biblical truths as: “Change and decay in all around I see,” but also beamed across the globe the glorious gospel of “I need your presence every passing hour. What but your grace can foil the tempter’s power?”

The Titanic reference couldn’t have been more up-to-date. In 2012, one hundred years after its sinking the entire world is in a Titanic mode: drowning in an ocean of debt. The phrase “fast falls the eventide” reminded me of Oswald Spengler`s famous book Der Untergang des Abendlandes, the Demise of the Evening Empire: our Western world, yet few, if any, of the 400 million viewers realized that then and there they may have witnessed “the global swan song”, when she intoned “Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day, earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away”. It may seem farfetched but to me it meant that Brazil’s preparations, already underway for 2016, may well come to nought, because the 2012 London Olympics could well have been the final one.

“Do I today really think that the 2012 Olympics could be the last of the global games?

“Here’s what could very well happen. Today a four year term is like a century, that’s how fast events are happening. Just look at the speed of Climate Change. Next year millions will starve as harvests are down everywhere, with worse to come. The most e-mailed article in a recent New York Times issue was: “Hundred – Year Forecast: Drought.” Imagine no rain year after year!“

That’s what I wrote almost four years in the Christian Courier. The editor did not like it at all: too pessimistic!

Today Brazil is in a lot of trouble. If Harry Kent’s prediction is true – and we will soon find out – and the stock market falls as much as he predicts, then the entire world economy is at risk, heralding times as bad as the 1930-40 depression which was only cured when the 1939-45 war called for millions of soldiers to fight and die and untold material war production of tanks and ships and airplanes revved up job growth and put a stop to high unemployment. That may well mean no 2016 Olympics.

So what are the trends?

Usually what lies ahead is a continuation of the past. 2015 was the year when deflation started. It seems to me that deflation – a fall in prices of commodities, such as steel, coal, oil – will continue, due to overbuilt capacity, especially in China. Also the refugee problem will be with us for a long time, made worse by low oil prices which mean that no money is available to bribe the people in the Middle East, which will fuel the unrest and public dissatisfaction. Angry people kill, meaning millions more refugees.

Here at home, in Tweed, Ontario, I am a member of a board – head the finance committee – to sponsor a refugee family. We only have seen the beginning of this effort to help those displaced by war. It seems to me that this trend will not only continue but intensify. In times of stress, people fight. And stress will be with us, including environmental stress which, at this point is displacing millions of people everywhere: Australia, the Philippines, South America, the Southern USA, and also in Great Britain. In the years to come rising sea levels will force many more millions from their homes.

What is happening in the Middle East is the result of political decisions made 100 years ago when Victorious France and Great Britain divided the defeated Ottoman Empire between themselves and tore up the cohesion maintained by the Turks. Of course Climate Change is something that has been going on since the early 1800s with the start of the Industrial Revolution. We now are facing the consequences of the “sins of the fathers.”
What 2015 should have made clear, and did in a way but not nearly clear enough, is that the world economy is falling apart due to a Ponzi bubble of over-production, over-capacity, over-investment, over-borrowing, all of which was grossly overleveraged: there simply is too much debt out there, and that debt especially applies to our physical world: water, air, soil. Add to this the fact that most of the investments are highly leveraged, which means that typically a loss of just a few percent can wipe out the principal, and a notion of the risks becomes clear.

Janet Yellen’s rate hike in the USA will mean some extra profits for those same banks at the cost of the rest of the financial world, but with growth not going to return for a very long time, and with deflation hitting everything in sight and then some, matters do not look good for 2016 and beyond.

David Stockman, Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget now seems to have firmly caught up with the deflation theme. Stockman too says that we are entering an epic deflationary era with the result that the world economy is actually going to shrink for the first time since the 1930s.
He writes:
“There has been so much over-investment in energy, mining, materials processing, manufacturing and warehousing that nothing new will be built for years to come. [..] .. there will be a severe curtailment in the production of mining and construction equipment, oilfield drilling rigs, heavy trucks and rail cars, bulk carriers and container ships, materials handling machinery and warehouse rigging, machine tools and chemical processing equipment and much, much more.”
You won’t find this in the general newspapers, but here and there people are finally acknowledging that all is not well. Deflation is much more dangerous than modest inflation. Deflation means that the value of an office building that once sold for $100 million is suddenly worth only $60million. Money goes POOF, it disappears: money that appears to be real and present just vanishes, goes up in smoke.
2016 could well be the year when a lot of ‘underlying wealth’ evaporates. Trillions of dollars already have disappeared in the commodities markets, but, again, our media don’t tell us about it, or at least they frame it in different terms. They use deflation to mean falling consumer prices, but then insist on calling lower oil prices at the pump a positive thing, without recognizing that those falling prices eat away at the entire economy, and at society at large.
Trends are all important. Falling prices of oil – disastrous for Canada – and the lowest steel prices in the last decade will create trouble on the employment picture not only at home but also in China and everywhere, because China has been the growth engine for the world economy. The downturn will continue in 2016. Combine that with the “weirding of the weather” and we have a recipe for retrenchment.

If history is any guide then governments, seeing their country slide down into a deep enough pit, may consider going to war. That’s the last thing we need: our fragile cosmos can no longer afford a peace-time economy, let alone all-consuming warfare.

On a parting note:

This year EERDMANS in Grand Rapids will publish two books by Dr. J. H. Bavinck I have translated

In May THE RIDDLE OF LIFE, described as follows:

In the spirit of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, eminent Calvinist
thinker J. H. Bavinck’s Riddle of Life offers a compact and com-
pelling treatise on Christian belief, starting with the eternal
questions that haunt every conscious human being: Why are we
here? Where do we come from? What is our destiny? How should
we live? He goes on to explore essential topics including sin, salvation,
and Jesus the Redeemer; faith and idolatry; God’s great plan
for creation; and the ultimate purpose behind our lives.
This lucid new translation of a classic text will make Bavinck’s
profound reflections on faith and the meaning of human life
accessible to a new generation of seekers.

Later in the year a book on REVELATION by the same author will be published. I will keep you posted.

DECEMBER 27 2015

DOES CHRISTIANITY NEED ANOTHER PARADIGM SHIFT?

(I am struggling with this idea: comments are appreciated.)

2000 years ago there was indeed a paradigm shift in the concept of what was seen as the true religion, one from being saved by adhering to the laws of Moses, the Torah, to Paul’s message of being saved ‘by grace alone through faith’. There were significant outward changes as well: the Saturday Sabbath became the Sunday Day of Rest, honoring Jesus’ Resurrection. Circumcision was replaced by Baptism: deed was combined with word.
Are similar changes needed today? The ‘being saved by grace alone’ is just as true as before, but is Sola Scripture still valid now after 2000 years? Is “Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus”, no salvation outside the church, a Roman Catholic doctrine, also outdated? Has being saved based on the preaching of Scriptures alone become the equivalent of what used to be the adherence to the law?

All these are controversial questions, perhaps highly inconvenient for the ministers of the gospel, whose stock in trade is being questioned here, putting their job at risk.

Let me throw a good Reformed slogan into the mix: Ecclesia Reformata, semper Reformanda, meaning that “The church is reformed and always is in the process of Reforming.

I’d wish this were really true, because Christianity desperately needs a different Reformation, a total change in direction, witness the exodus of many, especially the youth.
Why now? The naked truth is that we are entering a time of alarming and bewildering change — the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a totally new employment scene, while simultaneously coping with multispecies mass extinction and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Yes, the end of the world is now openly discussed. That’s why the church, which I love, also needs a total different approach.
Fact is we do experience the end of civilization as we know it because we all, Christian and non-Christian, have been sucked in a way of life that destroys God’s Holy Creation. A number of focused studies — by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for instance — have warned us that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a ‘perfect storm’ within about fifteen years.
Church people by and large refuse to see this, thanks to the Heaven Heresy: why bother with the earth if we go to heaven anyway? That the world groans under the weight of seven plus billion humans, while every new birth adds another mouth hungry for food, another life greedy for energy, is not seen as important by them.
We forget that God has removed himself from the earth. 1 John 5: 19 explicitly tells us that the Evil one rules. God has left us to our devices and we are on our own. Deuteronomy comes to mind: “I shall hide my face from them; I will see what their end will be.” (Deut. 32:20). We are on our own. The world has become Satan’s domain. Nietzsche has written somewhere that when God is dead – and we have declared him as such – then everything is permitted. Just imagine: Right-wing denialists – usually the church-going crowd – insist that climate change isn’t happening, or that it’s not caused by humans, or that the real problem is terrorism or refugees, while left-wing denialists – usually the liberal Democrats, Canada’s Justin Trudeau included – insist that the problems are fixable, under our control, merely a matter of political will.

Perhaps it is dawning on people that since nothing is fixable anymore, we might as well kill as many people as possible, before we kill ourselves, as now happens all too frequently. Meanwhile, as the gap between the future we’re entering and the future we once imagined grows ever wider, nihilism takes root in the shadow of our fear: if all is already lost, nothing matters anyway.
Signs that nothing matters anymore are everywhere: in TV shows, I am told, because I never watch TV except for news programs, and these newscasts now are called ‘shows’ too because they have to be entertaining. What is so entertaining about tornadoes and Trump and his nonsensical tirades, or about drowning refugees and the rush to war, sectarianism and racial hatred?

At the core is the total absence of religion: what is missing is the belief that ultimately God is in charge and that his Kingdom is on the way. The concept of the kingdom, the new earth to come, is totally absent in the ecclesiastical scene, so nihilism, religious nihilism has taken over. The heaven-heresy simply encourages this.

The greatest failure in our times has been the churches, just as they were in Germany in the time of Hitler. When Bonhoeffer argued this point he was killed. Yes, there are still voices that argue against ‘the spirit of this age’, Pope Francis among them. But is there true reform in the Roman Church? No. Where are the women in the Roman Church? Why that destructive celibacy ordinance? And then all these elaborate vestments and a strictly enforced hierarchy, from cardinal down, an organizational form more Old Testament than the freedom Christ proclaimed.
Perhaps churches today are as outdated as the synagogues in the time after Pentecost. Of course churches are still needed, because the new birth has to start there, just as Christianity is a child of Jewry.

Friedrich Nietzsche, one of Western philosophy’s most incisive diagnosticians of religion, wrote near the end of the 19th century: “Man will sooner will nothingness than not will.” That to me suggests that we prefer ‘nothing’ over something: the entire entertainment enterprise basically consists of nothing, including the fanatic attachment to a certain sports team, or the Jihad movement in the Middle East, both totally nihilistic – Satan inspired concepts. When Nietzsche wrote “Man will sooner will nothingness than not will,” he offered an explanation for today: we, on the precipice of nihilism, would rather choose self-annihilation over a simply structured life.

The Nazi movement was a good example of that. Today we see it in every new suicide attack by jihadi terrorists. As nihilism becomes more ingrained, we just might stumble toward another thoughtless war, asking young men and women to throw their lives away so we might continue believing the Western way of life means something. In essence war is active nihilism supplanting a passive one because war reduces everything to ‘nothing’, to nihil.
Nietzsche wasn’t himself a nihilist: he loved creation. When he saw a horse whipped to death by a cruel owner, he literally lost his mind. As a son of a Lutheran clergyman, and a grandson of one as well, and early in life slated to follow in their footsteps, he knew the Bible as no other. He also saw the church accommodating to the world and so became a severe critic of religion as was practiced in Germany in his day. With the church dead, he wrote that for all practical purposes God is dead as well.

Today, as every hour brings new alarms of war and climate disaster, we might wish we could take Nietzsche’s place. He had to cope only with the death of God, while we must come to terms with the death of our world. Peril lurks on every side, from the delusions of hope to the fury of reaction, from the despondency of hopelessness to the promise of destruction.

We stand today on a precipice of a total annihilation that Nietzsche could not have even imagined. There is no reason to hope that we’ll be able to slow down global warming before we pass a tipping point. We’re already one degree Celsius above preindustrial temperatures and there’s at least another half a degree baked in. The West Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, Greenland is melting, permafrost across the world is liquefying, and methane has been detected leaking from sea floors and Siberian craters: it’s already too late to stop these feedbacks, which means it’s already too late to stop apocalyptic planetary warming.
Yet the church refuses to see the signs of the times. Business as usual: pious sermons every Sunday to the chosen few. Or are they the frozen few? Unable to dislodge themselves from our Satanic way of life?

Meanwhile the world slides into hate-filled, bloody havoc, as foretold in the last book of the Bible, Revelation.
Yes, in a world founded on hope, built with “can do” grit, and bedazzled by its own technological wizardry, the very idea that something might be beyond our power or that humans have intrinsic limits verges on blasphemy.

I repeatedly am called a ‘pessimist’. Basically people believe that every problem has a solution; suggesting otherwise stirs a deep and often hostile resistance. It’s not so much that accepting the truth of our situation means thinking the wrong thought, but rather thinking the unthinkable. The church is at the forefront of this denial, totally forgetting the core of Bible teaching and the reason why Christ died: he died to save the world, the cosmos, now in the power of Satan and nihilism.
It seems to me that often the church has no message anymore for the world. Its function has been reduced to ceremonial and preaching to the converted. Converted to what? Its very existence in beautiful buildings, accessible only by automobiles, means that it must cling to a progressivist, profit-seeking, technology-can-fix-it ideology of fossil-fueled capitalism. The youth sees through this and is abandoning the church in droves.

So what must happen?

Instead the church and especially Christian Education from bottom to top, need to learn to let our current civilization die and gear up for the New World to come, a world as envisioned in the last chapters of Revelation. Christians need to work together to transform a global order of meaning focused on accumulation into a new order of meaning that knows the value of limits, knows the meaning of eternity, knows the truth of the holiness of creation.
We also need to learn to see the world not just with Western eyes but with Buddhist and Hebrew eyes and Inuit eyes, not just with human eyes but with golden-cheeked warbler eyes, with pacific-salmon eyes, and Arctic polar bear eyes, and not even just with eyes at all but with the wild, barely articulate being of clouds and seas and rocks and trees and stars.

The Bible tells us in 1 John 5: 19 that today the Evil one rules. That’s why Jesus told us that we don’t belong to that world (John 17: 14), a world dominated by evil. We belong to the world to come, God’s new world. That is the shift we have to make. Truly a paradigm shift. We all are like the proverbial frog, being boiled to death. Can we still extract ourselves from the death-trap we live in?
Today we are on the eve of what will be the human world’s greatest catastrophe. None of us chose this, not deliberately. None of us can choose to avoid it either.
As Christians we today have a different calling. The old way of life is gone. The new way of life is upon us. No longer can the old endure; no longer is it business as usual. Yes, the old ways have been good for us.

And here I address myself to my generation of Dutch immigrants and their offspring. They have done well in the new country, myself included: they have always been at the forefront of Christian action. Apart from a few tiny instances, these people and their offspring still act as if nothing has changed and will change. They, we all, have to accept that we live in the last days: all signs point to this. This means that we live in drastically different times. The church has to switch, make a radical change from exclusively regarding the Scriptures as the sole source of inspiration to concentrating effectively on God’s Primary Word, his Direct Revelation: God’s Holy creation: the world we will inherit!

Scripture and the church will disappear in the New Creation, where God’s Cosmos is All and in All. This is already happening! If Romans 1: 20 condemns those who have failed to see creation as God’s, then, indeed, John 3: 16 stands out as the center of the Gospel: Loving God’s Holy Earth and living so that it remains holy and we with it.

We have to abandon the ruinous way of life that’s destroying us today, and that has to start in the Christian education system, inculcating the youth and young adults. The Reformed Churches have been pioneers in “all things Christian”. Now it must lead in seeing all of creation as holy as well. Can they make these changes?
That means they have to prepare for a totally different life, a life of permanence, a life of permaculture, a life of eternal perpetuity in open defiance of the Evil one, in open obedience to God the Creator.
That is the new and final Christian message: none other is relevant anymore.

Is a paradigm shift still possible? Deed must be combined with word.

December 20 2015

ARE WE ABLE TO MANAGE THE EARTH?

The world is old, very old. The most prolific species on earth were and still are trees. In early days these trees gave the earth perfect health in the form of massive doses of oxygen, abundant rain, while strong storms battered their branches, wrenching out the dead wood, and so seeding the soil.
This beginning reminds me of a small volume of poems, Naked Trees, written by John Terpstra, an upright Frisian, now living in Ontario. Here is one of his poems:

Achievement

A tree will grow to the furthest limits of its gradually acquired strength. Leading a life of pure sensation, or rather, response: a life of pure response to its vegetable senses. And it is a major achievement of Creation to have prompted such various, unbroken replies. The earth and air, sun and water are all required: the response each time appears singularly inspired.
And yet, as it grows and spreads, budging and crimping the nether inches and taking more space from the sky, the tree will not move in the least from its original stand. Will end where it began. The sight is almost too familiar, and open to interpretation: rigid limbs extend the solid, uncompromising shaft: paralysis. Or, incomparable aspiration.
The tree grows, furthering only itself, to which end achieves this blatant majesty.

While typing in these lines I am reminded of my Father’s prayer. In the household on my youth my father prayed aloud before each meal. One phrase always was: “As the tree falls, there it remains,” hinting that when we die all chance for redemption is past: we better turn to the Lord before it is too late.

In the beginning there was the tree: the Tree of Life because the Tree personifies life. The world today will surely perish because we are mercilessly eradicating the tree. We have no regard for its blatant majesty. The Bible starts with the Tree; it ends with the Tree and in the center there is the Golgotha Tree. In the last book of the Bible, the very last chapter, it says: “The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” Just as we killed Christ, who, in that act, saved us, so we destroy the trees, and these trees too will do the opposite: their final act is healing the harm we do and have done to creation. It is so fitting that Jesus died on a tree. His flesh was first embedded into the tree. His blood first penetrated into the tree. When we kill the tree we kill ourselves.
While our violence towards each other has diminished somewhat (no large-scale wars since 1945), our violence towards the living planet is intensifying. The megafauna – trees from shore to shore, animals everywhere – that once dominated most parts of the world is now confined to small and shrinking pockets, from which trees are also disappearing at stupendous speed. In this year’s fire season, much of the Indonesian rainforest has been fragmented and drastically reduced. The marine ecosystem too is collapsing in front of our eyes, with food webs unraveling by overfishing and pollution. Soil, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Association, is being lost so fast that the world has, on average, just another 60 years of crop production.

Are we able to turn the corner? Can we really rectify this situation?

Professor Dr. Jan Tinbergen, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics wrote in 1987 a small volume, entitled: “Are we able to manage the Earth?” (Kunnen wij de AARDE beheren?).

That question came up in me when I followed the Paris conference on Climate Change. There 195 heads of states hammered out an agreement supposedly making it possible for the earth to exist a bit longer. In essence there too the unspoken question was: “Are we really capable to create a healing, healthy environment for LIFE? I write LIFE in capital letters because we cannot exist on the earth in isolation. Dying trees, uprooted trees, trees perishing in persistent conflagration, mean dying human, dying animals, dying species.

Tinbergen starts at the earth’s beginning, writing how for a very long time the earth existed without human beings: but there were trees, trillions of them. Had I existed then breathing in the rich atmosphere, saturated with oxygen, inhaling pure air, undiluted, free of any contamination, my whole being would be almost geared to live forever, just as the people in the beginning of Genesis who lived well into their tenth century.
Tinbergen traces the roots of civilization, telling us how our Western culture owes much to the ancient Greeks and Romans. To the Greeks we owe art and science, democracy and religion; to the Romans our legal system. To Christianity we owe the love for our world-wide neighbors, still evident today in the way we in Canada, in Germany and Sweden, welcome the refugees, the lost and homeless.

Tinbergen cites a book by a Finnish scientist and politician, translated in 1987 – before inclusive language – as: “The World of Man”, wherein Pekka Kuusi starts with something we all need: food. In the beginning food came exclusively from trees and plants, and from hunting and fishing. Gradually this nomadic lifestyle changed to more settled life, when agriculture became the norm.

Kuusi estimates that some 40,000 years ago there were only between half to one million people in the entire world, growing to some 5 million 8,000 years before Christ, and some 250 million people at the time of Christ, concentrated around the Mediterranean, which literally means “The middle of the earth”. Then Primary Productivity was 100 percent, which basically meant that all animals could live unencumbered by human danger, except for hunting, of course. . And trees were everywhere, so the air was pure, the water was pristine, the soil uncontaminated. Primary productivity is now reduced to 50 percent.
Of course, all people were religious, not necessarily Christian, but all believing in a god or gods. There simply was no other explanation for what people observed and experienced.

It is remarkable that every 500 years there emerges a new type of worship. Starting in the year 1000 before Christ, the Yahweh temple was erected in Jerusalem, about 500 years later Buddhism was born. We start our calendar from the date of the birth of Christ and the rise of Christianity. In the year 500 Islam came into being and quickly conquered the Middle East world because Christianity, so successfully replacing paganism by means of the Apostle Paul, had become fossilized so they quickly embraced the new gospel of the prophet Mohammed.
Europe, after the Fall of Rome in 460 AD, was traumatized, while the Crusades, the Viking invasions, the terrible plagues, then constant wars, meant that for close to 1000 years, until 1500, development stagnated, and the population remained stuck at some 250 million, too preoccupied to break the hold of Roman Catholic Christianity.

All this finally changed with Martin Luther in 1517, and the start of the Protestant Reformation.

That event is now 500 years ago, time for another major new Religion to emerge. Is the Anthropocene Epoch the new religion: the age when Humanity totally lives without God? Or the wrong God? I think so.

On July 1 2001 I bought a book in Stratford, Ontario, nothing special, since even now I keep on buying them. “Something new under the sun” was the title. The author, a historian from the University of Chicago – Canadian born – J. R. McNeill, gave it the subtitle “An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World.” Most people today have little Bible knowledge, so its title probably means little to them because in Ecclesiastes 1 the Bible tells us, “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
McNeill starts his book with that quotation and says that these words today are out of date: “There is something new under the sun….. The place of humankind within the natural world is not what it was. In this respect at least, modern times are different, and we do well to remember that…………..In the 20th century humankind has begun to play dice with the planet, without knowing all the rules.”

Of course, without God there are no rules.

McNeill starts with the development of Economic Growth, still the leading measure for every finance minister in the world, because without it taxable income stagnates and the Welfare Society collapses.

He provides a table with date and GDP (Gross Domestic Product). In 1500 the world’s GDP was $100 billion, expanding to $250billion in 1820, $825 billion in 1900, $12,000 billion in 2,000, while today, I might add, it is about $15,000 billion or $15 trillion. In other words the world economy today is about 150 times bigger than in 1500, while the population has grown by a factor of perhaps 30 times, from some 250 million to the present 7.2 billion. We know that consumption is not evenly distributed, with us Westerners consuming the lion share, while a third of the world’s people suffer.
Paris COP 21 was an attempt to help the poor nations at the expense of the rich. That will be difficult because we have become addicted to growth. I had a good friend who was an alcoholic, who followed us when we moved to Tweed thinking that having a good friend would save him from the consequences of drinking. It didn’t work: he died in a car accident (DUI). Being addicted to carbon is worse than to alcohol because our entire economy depends on growth.
Addiction always starts slowly. First trees were used to save us from freezing in the dark. When Europe’s forests were at the edge of exhaustion and Europe became too crowded, America’s rich shores came begging. Then coal came to the rescue, and after that dirty fuel, OIL became the Savior of Mankind: Middle East Oil especially. Now we are hooked.

In their hearts all delegates to that powwow in Paris knew that all their talk and resolutions to reduce oil use would be useless. They knew that in our ‘Anthropocene Era’ the strong lord it over the weak, the rich build dikes, the poor drown. They knew that there’d be walls everywhere: around Europe, around the USA. They knew that we live in nation-states that are only theoretically accountable to universal moral and legal standards, that global capitalism doesn’t take into account the lives of poor people or the health of the ecosphere. Our political and economic systems are designed to discourage actions necessary to prevent catastrophe: so disaster is the obvious outcome.

Can we really manage the earth?

The European Union was an attempt to make sure that the calamities of the 20th Century would never be repeated there. Today this union is on the verge of disintegration. The same is true in the USA where the political spectrum is fraying, witness the rise of a Trump, an egomaniac par excellence. The Middle East now spells mayhem. Even the weather has gone weird, thanks to our insatiable hunger for more.
Can we manage the EARTH? In 1987 Tinbergen had his doubts. Today, almost 30 years later, it looks more unmanageable than ever.
In Revelation, the last Bible book, the end of the world is spelled out in gruesome detail. There people, frustrated at their utter impotence, fully aware that their own gods no longer function, rise up against the Prince of this world, as Jesus calls him. He, the Ultimate Evil one, then uses his ultimate weapon.

Here’s how J. H. Bavinck, in a soon to be published book on Revelation, sees it:

“There is only one solution, one radical and total cure: a nuclear bomb. For the sake of preserving the realm, the capital city must be sacrificed. All these grand buildings and its beautiful squares, all its magnificence has to go. It takes a while before they dare to make that decision, but in the end the world ruler, in consultation with his ten governors, is not afraid to execute this extreme edict. During the night one single plane from a remote airport flies high in the sky over the sleeping city, never to wake again. A bomb is released, slowly a mushroom cloud ensues, and….a rebellious Babylon is abolished forever.”

Since we are unable to manage the earth, we, by our own actions, will destroy it.

December 13 2015

Is there still a Christian Life Style?

Many a moon ago Francis Schaeffer wrote a book entitled “How then shall we live?” concentrating on Bible reading and prayer, not unlike the way the orthodox Jews and the conservative Muslims use their holy book. At the time I basically agreed with him, but no longer. I have graduated to people such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and J. H. Bavinck, and, I guess, have developed my own way of thinking, stimulated by these great men. Bonhoeffer, so extremely ahead of his time, labeled the life of most of the church-going public as ‘pious secularism’, an apt articulation because his description points to combining our creation destroying life – as secular as it comes – with what is generally understood to be Christian morality.

“How then shall we live” is not easily answered. I am sure that I am at odds with the major segment of church-going people in believing that there is no heaven to which we go upon death. I do believe that God created us to dwell on earth now and in our eternal state. That emphasis totally colors my view of “How then shall we live?” That notion implies that the manner in which I live today has to resemble the conditions I expect to see in eternity, a perpetually stable state. That is a tremendous challenge, because our entire way of life today is dominated by two factors: a wasteful existence totally dependent on carbon energy and a spiritual view of life that has an escape- to – heaven – orientation. It is nigh impossible to free ourselves from these conditions, both seen as the gospel truth.
Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t what you know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure, that just ain’t so.” This is especially true as far as ‘the heaven-thing’ is concerned. We are so convinced that Christian people go to heaven, that we never question that assumption. And this is the teaching the church has sold to its public. That’s also the reason why we simply have difficulty changing our creation-destroying habits.

So, what must we change in order to somewhat resemble a creation-friendly life?

I believe there is only a piece-meal approach. Just one example: meat-eating. I know I have talked about this before. Again and again I read how devastating the livestock industry is for the increase in global warming. It is barely mentioned in climate summits. Yet livestock and their byproducts, as Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn point out in their book, “The Sustainability Secret,” account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Methane and nitrous oxide are rarely mentioned in climate talks, although those two greenhouse gases are, as the authors point out, respectively, 86 times and 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Cattle, worldwide, they write, produce 150 billion gallons of methane daily. And 65 percent of the nitrous oxide produced by human-related activities is caused by the animal agriculture industry. Water used in fracking, they write, ranges from 70 billion to 140 billion gallons annually. Animal agriculture water consumption, the book notes, ranges from 34 trillion to 76 trillion gallons annually. Raising animals for human consumption takes up to 45 percent of the planet’s land. Ninety-one percent of the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest and up to 80 percent of global rain forest loss is caused by clearing land for the grazing of livestock and growing feed crops for meat and dairy animals. As more and more rain forest disappears, the planet loses one of its primary means to safely sequester carbon dioxide. The animal agriculture industry is, as Andersen and Kuhn write, also a principal cause of species extinction and the creation of more than 95,000 square miles of nitrogen-flooded dead zones in the oceans. Yes, the COP 21 agreement, just concluded in Paris, has no provision for this at all, assuring that Climate Change will go well beyond the 2 degree C. mark.

In order to do your tiny bit, try becoming a vegetarian.

A person who eats a vegan diet, they point out, a diet free of meat, dairy and eggs, saves 1,100 gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 30 square feet of forested land, 20 pounds CO2 equivalent, and one animal’s life every day.
Therefore, it seems to me that today, given the dangerous circumstances we have created, to the point where the viability of modern life is at stake, part of the Christian – read responsible- life style ought to be the vegetarian one. Not necessarily vegan, that means no milk and eggs, but at least a meatless diet. My wife and I have had this diet for many decades and we have done well with it.

And that brings me to agriculture in general.

When Adam and Eve were in Paradise, they had a healthy diet by eating from the trees and plants that were there in abundance. Michael Pollan, in an article in the New York Times a few years ago, wrote: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”
That’s what my wife and I do, mostly home-grown. And that’s what Adam and Eve did in Paradise. When they were expelled from there and trees and plants suddenly were no longer cooperating, they were forced to starts growing their own food: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.” (Gen. 3: 17). That’s true even now, in spite of pesticides and Monsanto.

I am city-born and raised but my grandparents were country folk, low tech, down-to-earth farmers. At that time- before World War II and, of course, also during the war – they practiced agriculture the way their parents and grandparents had done with horses and simple tools and hard work: lots of time to think as they milked the cows by hand and spread the manure over the land.
They did not see the change to mechanized farming, requiring elaborate machinery and expensive tools. They were true environmentalists, loving the earth, preserving it, enriching it. Farming was, well, just something farmers did, not an ecological question.

Today, being environmentalist is expressing concern over pollution in human communities and the need for wilderness preservation, while farming today has become just another arm of industrialization, which really means that there is no solution to environmental problems without facing the problem of agriculture. It has changed from a benefactor of humanity to one of the most destructive practices of the modern age.
Wes Jackson has been a modern-day critic of factory farming. He points out that our species’ fundamental break with nature came roughly 10,000 years ago when Adam and Eve, the humanity then, started farming. While gathering-hunting humans were capable of damaging a local ecosystem in limited ways, the shift to agriculture and the domestication of animals meant humans for the first time could dramatically alter ecosystems, typically with negative consequences. While there have been better and worse farming practices in history, soil erosion has been a consistent feature of agriculture, making agriculture the first step in the entrenchment of an unsustainable human economy based on extraction.

Agriculture’s destructive capacity was ramped up by the industrial revolution that began in the last half of the 18th century intensifying the magnitude of our assault on ecosystems. This revolution unleashed the concentrated energy of coal, oil and natural gas to run the new economy that dramatically increased productivity, transforming all manufacturing, transportation, and communication, also radically changing all social relations. People were pushed off the land and into cities that grew rapidly, often without planning. World population soared from about 1 billion in 1800 to the current 7 billion, which was made possible by the application of those industrial processes to agriculture. Vaclav Smil estimates that 45 percent of the world’s population—more than 3 billion people—would not be here without the Haber-Bosch process, creating fertilizer from natural gas, which in the early 20th century made possible the industrial production of ammonia-based fertilizers from atmospheric nitrogen, which greatly expanded food production.

We are trained to think that new technologies mean progress, but the “advances” in oil/gas-based industrial agriculture have accelerated ecological destruction. Now soil from immense monoculture fields drenched in petrochemicals not only continues to erode but also threatens groundwater supplies and creates dead zones in bodies of water such as the Gulf of Mexico. Also modern farming is a primary contributor to reductions in biodiversity and declines in ecosystem health.

The fact that agriculture is failing takes many by surprise, given the dramatic increase in yields made possible by that industrialization of farming and the use of those fossil-fuel based fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. But this is what Jackson has called “the failure of success”: Production remains high while the health of the soil continues to decline dramatically, and so short-term success masks the long-term unsustainability of the system. The Germans have a beautiful word for that process: Schlimmbesserung, an improvement that makes matters worse. We have less soil that is more degraded, and there are no technological substitutes for healthy soil; we are exhausting and contaminating groundwater; and contemporary agriculture is dependent on a finite fuel source.

More and more people recognize these problems, which has meant more produce coming from home gardening, urban farms, and community-supported agriculture. But Jackson points out that about 70 percent of the world’s calories come from annual grains that take up about 70 percent of the world’s cultivated land. That’s why The Land Institute’s research into “natural systems agriculture” investigates ways that monoculture annual grains (primarily wheat, rice, and corn) can be replaced by perennial grains grown in polycultures (mixtures of plants that don’t require new planting every season)—farming that mimics nature instead of trying to subdue it. Jackson points out that when left alone, a natural ecosystem such as a prairie recycles materials, sponsors its own fertility, runs on contemporary sunlight, and increases biodiversity. Natural systems agriculture is one attempt to produce enough food while adding to ecological capital rather than degrading it.

The industrial economy treats the world as either a mine from which we extract what we need or a landfill into which we dump our waste. While there’s no telling whether perennial polycultures are going to be the key to sustainable agriculture, it’s clear that intensifying the industrialization of agriculture is a losing bet. The modern worldview ignores the fact that everything that supports life on the planet operates in cycles. Jackson offers a powerful image of what has gone wrong: The best symbol for nature is a circle; agriculture is a human attempt to square the circle; industrial agriculture flattens the circle into a straight line on the model of a factory’s mass production.

Is there still a Christian life style?

Frankly I am afraid that this is no longer possible. No matter what we do somehow we ‘sin against creation.’
My ‘earth-oriented’ vision has changed my total faith-life. Yes, I still immensely value the Bible and prayer, but I am becoming ever more conscious that – as Revelation 21: 22 clearly indicates – both Bible and prayer no longer have a place in the New Creation. I increasingly see Creation as God’s Primary word, his direct revelation, and the Bible as God’s Secondary word, his indirect revelation. Creation therefore is more holy than the Scriptures.
In my faith-life the most important Bible text is John 3: 16 where it says that God loved the world – everything created everywhere – so much that he sacrificed the life of his dear son to buy it back from the Evil One.
There’s something else I want to emphasize: 1 John 5: 19 explicitly says that “We know we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”

That’s the situation we live in now: That’s why it is so difficult to live a truly Christian life style. The entire world is under the control of the evil one, who has promoted the Heaven Heresy as proclaimed in most Christian hymns, at most funerals, and as Mark Twain so aptly put it: “It ain’t what you know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure, that just ain’t so.”