Category Archives: crisis

40FP(6): Hosea 4.1-6

Posted on by

This needs to be from the RSV translation:

1 Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel; for the Lord has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land.
2 Swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed.
3 Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing.
4 Yet let no one contend, and let none accuse, for with you is my contention, O priest.
5 You shall stumble by day; the prophet also shall stumble with you by night, and I will destroy your mother.
6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.

Why is this a favourite passage?

I first discovered this text when I was an undergraduate, attending a lecture on Hosea, and I still use the Bible that I had that day where I marked the page ‘eco’! It has become a text laden with personal meaning for me, which sums up my vocation, in so far as I can perceive it accurately.

Verses 1&2: in Scripture, so far as I can tell, there is a direct link between believing in God and behaving well – the two are different descriptions of the same thing, the life of righteousness. This is the context for the Psalmist saying ‘The fool says in his heart there is no God’ – he goes on to explain what is meant by this when he says that there is nobody who does good, no not one. To believe in God simply IS to be righteous; conversely where there is a lack of righteousness – swearing, lying, adultery etc – then the real knowledge of God is absent.
Verse 3: this failure of relationship, this breaking apart from God, manifests itself in global symptoms of disorder, especially ecological ones, building upon the human violence of the previous verse. This is how I see the ecological crisis we are living in (and where I have something in common with the more barking fundamentalist elements of pre-trib rapture in the US) in that I see the world as being in God’s hands and not in ours. We are not able to put everything right with the world – but if we turn back to God, then God will put it right (the symptoms will be relieved).
Verse 4: the root of the problem lies with the religious class; they have failed in their duty to share the living faith, and have become distracted with the perks of the job (spelled out later on in Hosea 4). “With you is my contention O priest” – a totally different translation to the NIV and one that captures this intent. What the ‘right’ translation is I shall leave to those better qualified; from my point of view, though, this was the text as I originally discovered it, and it is this translation which sunk its claws into me.
Verses 5&6: the priestly class will share in the bad consequences that follow from falling away from God and living unrighteously. In particular they will be rejected as priests – presumably by God, but also, as I read it, by the people themselves. The people will turn away from the worldly priesthood, and will seek the living God wherever they can find him. This is how I interpret the decline in church attendance; Western Christianity in general, the Church of England in particular, has lost its way, has forgotten what it is here for, has been suborned by the worldly state, domesticated and castrated, kept on as a cute housepet that’s useful for ornamental functions.

Woe to you O Christian!

Woe to you who seek the living God! – for you shall find Him!

TBTM20090304

Posted on by


One of the reasons why I have become more sceptical about the ‘climate change consensus’ is that the IPCC overestimates the extent of fossil fuel reserves. This is another item confirming that the amount of coal available is less than previously assumed (95% less in this case!).

The financial crisis is irrelevant

Posted on by

Just a thought: however bad it gets, the financial crisis is solvable. Whether it takes five, ten, twenty years to sort through all the deleveraging there is nothing in this financial crisis that is going to seriously threaten industrial civilisation. After all, we’ve been through similar things before. There is no reason why, in 20 years time, the system can’t be doing exactly what it was before – chastened, no doubt, but not fundamentally reformed. There will be all sorts of suffering in the meantime – and we need to do all we can to address that, and support those who go to the wall – but it is not, in itself, civilisation-threatening.

In that respect it is very different to the crisis we face with respect to resource limits. These do seriously threaten industrial civilisation. In twenty years time, we will either have shifted to sustainable patterns of life, or we will have embarked upon die-off. Or, perhaps more likely, some will have chosen one way, some will have chosen the other.

The pointer that will tell you if someone ‘gets it’ is whether they continue to mouth the platitudes about restoring economic growth. Growth – in the sense of anything physical – will not be restored any time soon, certainly not this side of 2050, possibly not ever. Ritual invocations of growth are simply a manifestation of contemporary idolatry. It is a god that has toppled from its plinth.

I can’t help but be reminded of Brueggemann’s analysis in ‘The Prophetic Imagination’ when he describes the conflict between Moses and Pharaoh as one between two systems of Gods – the living God versus the gods of the status quo. Each of the plagues topples one of the Egyptian gods – and eventually they are all shown to be worthless.

“The Gods of Egypt could not! The Scientists of the regime could not! The imperial religion was dead! The politics of oppression had failed! That is the ultimate criticism that the assured and alleged power of the dominant culture is now shown to be fraudulent.” The powers have been named, and in being named, they have been dethroned. Now that the dominant system has been unmasked as temporary, that its claims to divine eternity have been exposed, its foundations begin to crumble. “By the middle of the plague cycle Israel has disengaged from the empire, cries no more to it, expects nothing of it, acknowledges it in no way, knows it cannot keep its promises, and knows that nothing is either owed to it or expected of it. That is the ultimate criticism that leads to dismantling.” (see my longer post on this topic here)

So: Obama as Pharaoh? That’s certainly what the appointment of people like Geithner would suggest.

Why I’m worried about Natural Gas supplies to the UK

Posted on by

Extracted from some notes for the PCC here in West Mersea. Our existing heating system has failed and we’re considering putting in a like-for-like replacement boiler – diesel at the moment, but we could shift to gas. (We remain committed to a greener system in the longer term, but the social costs of doing without heating, eg at weddings and funerals, are too much).

Peaking

 
The concerns I have centre around what is called ‘Peak Gas’, a variant of the ‘Peak Oil’ that I have frequently mentioned in meetings, talks and sermons. “Peaking” describes the moment of maximum flow of a resource, whether of oil or gas or any other non-renewable commodity. It tends to come at around the half-way point of extraction of the resource and so, by definition, there is as much of the resource left as has yet been exploited. In the case of both oil and gas this remaining resource is a vast quantity.. (I’ll use ‘billion cubic metres’, or bcm, as the units in this note.)

Given the inexorable decline of domestic production, not only will we be importing most of our natural gas needs in a very short period of time, so too will North America and the remainder of the EU.

Imports
So where will this imported Natural Gas come from? At the moment the EU imports its gas principally from Russia, and to a lesser extent from North Africa:

Through to 2020, however, there will be an increasing reliance upon newly established LNG imports, to the tune of over 200bcm.

This assumes some demand growth, however, which may not be quite so plausible in the current climate! Another way of considering this, for the EU, is through this chart, which shows OECD Europe needing to import over 400bcm, from all sources, by 2020:

So where will the gas come from?

Russia
Although there has been some concern about the strategic viability of depending on imports from Russia, due to the ‘crisis’ in the Ukraine, it is in Russia’s own interest to be a dependable partner to the EU, not least because it is such a huge source of income. With the development of new gas fields to replace the more mature declining fields, it looks likely that Russia will be able to sustain her production capacity.

However, there are two other considerations. The first is that Russian internal demand for natural gas will be increasing over time, so, given static production, the amount available for export will decrease. More significantly, as other supplies to the EU decrease the competition for Russian supplies will become more severe. So, although Russian supplies to the EU are likely to be comparatively stable, ie amounting to the same quantity in 2020 as in 2010, they will become increasingly expensive.

LNG 1: North Africa
The second principal source for Natural Gas imports to the EU is from North Africa. Here there is some better news, in that increased capacity should raise the amount importable from this region:

Let’s be generous and say that through to 2020 up to 50bcm of extra import capacity is available from North Africa. This leaves some 350bcm to find.

LNG 2: Middle East
Along with Russia, the nations with the largest resources of Natural Gas are in the Middle East, principally Iran and Qatar, with Saudi Arabia having a little more. However, these vast quantities of reserves do not translate simply into a readily available resource. According to the EIA the export capacity of LNG from the Middle East, (around 200bcm now and mainly exported to the Far East), will be around 340bcm by 2015, rising to around 640bcm by 2030. This is one potential source of LNG imports to the EU.

Realistically there are no other sources of Natural Gas supply that could be imported to the EU. Whilst there are other Natural Gas sources (eg Indonesia) their supplies are both subject to peaking and already tied up in export contracts (eg to China and Japan). There are essentially two main LNG export markets, the Atlantic Basin (EU and Eastern US) and the Pacific Basin (Asia and Western US). What we are facing is a bidding competition between all the advanced nations for the increased LNG capacity from the Middle East; and even if the EU were able to completely win that bidding competition then there would still be a shortfall of around 200bcm each year!

What does this mean for the UK in particular?
This image, from 2005, shows where our government expects our gas supply to come from:

This picture is more than a little misleading in that it shows the capacity to import, rather than anything more concrete (worldwide LNG import capacity is around double the export capacity). What I would point out is that it also assumes that the UK can access the extra gas supply from Norway/Russia/LNG without giving any consideration to how realistic it is. If, as I believe to be true, a) Russian production is static and b) EU demand is static, then the gas imported from Russia is going to have to be obtained over the heads of an existing customer, which, again, will be expensive even if it is possible at all.

If we assume a demand for gas equivalent to today then we are looking at importing around 60bcm of gas; if we accept the government’s figure then we are looking at importing around 90bcm of gas needing to be imported. It is not at all clear to me where that gas is going to come from – even if the LNG capacity is developed in the Middle East according to plan, we are going to be bidding against other, richer nations for access to that gas, and there is not enough to meet the total demand.

As I see it the gas supplies will first become more expensive, as we rely on Norwegian gas and are only competing with other Northern European countries, and then the supply will become not just increasingly expensive but also scarce, as we start competing with the rest of Europe, the United States and Asia for access to a restricted resource. If I had to hazard a guess as to when these problems will start to become manifest I would suggest the 2012-14 time frame, as that is when Norwegian production is expected to have passed its peak. This is why I am concerned about our natural gas situation and why I don’t think it’s a good idea to commit ourselves to a gas supply for the next ten years.