Faith In A Changing Climate. Chapter 1, Part 1. The Parable of the Inheritance
We have completed the manuscript of the book Faith In A Changing Climate. We are releasing sections of the book in a series of posts at this site. The sections for the first chapter are as follows:
Oil the Magic Fuel and Green Energy,
A New World, and
Oil ― The Magic Fuel.
We are now releasing sections of Chapter 2 ― An Opportunity for Leadership. The first section is shown below.
The Parable of the Inheritance
A lady had a low-paying job. Nevertheless, she kept her expenses under control and was able to live happily within her income.
Then one day she received a large inheritance. It was party time. She quit her job, bought a large home and a late model car, and took expensive international vacations. But the day came when she had spent all the inheritance money. But now her expenses had increased. She had taxes and maintenance to pay on the new home, insurance for the new car and credit card bills from the vacations. She did not even have her modest salary to fall back on.
She was forced into bankruptcy.
This parable about the lady’s inheritance has an obvious interpretation. We humans were living a sustainable life style for thousands of years. Energy from sunlight was captured by plants. We ate those plants (or the animals that fed on the plants). Like the lady in the parable, our lifestyle was not abundant, but it we were able to live successfully. Then, about 300 years ago, we learned to exploit the fantastic reserves of energy provided by coal, oil and natural gas. Our lifestyle, just like the lady’s, is not sustainable. But, just as the lady ran out of money, so we are running out of fossil fuel resources. There are partial substitutions, such as solar and wind. But none of these substitutions provide the abundant, concentrated energy found in fossil fuels, particularly oil. Our inheritance is almost spent. Like it or not, we will be forced to return to a sustainable lifestyle. But that lifestyle will not support the extravagant habits that we now take for granted — we cannot return to our earlier lifestyle.
Parables are open to different interpretations. For example, is the well-known Parable of the Prodigal Son just to do with the spend-thrift son? After all, the behavior of the forgiving father and the resentful elder brother also provide valuable insights. So it is with our parable. In the story we read that the lady gave up her day job, so she could not go back to the life she used to live. That is our situation also. We no longer know how to live as people did before the start of the industrial revolution. We cannot revert to the good old days.
You cannot swim in the same river twice.
Even if we have retained some pre-industrial skills, such as growing our own food, we may still find that we cannot revert to that earlier lifestyle. For example, we buy seeds in packets from a store. That store obtains those seed packets via highly complex supply chains that may or may not work in the coming years. How many people know how to save and store seeds for next year’s planting? Indeed, how many people know how to differentiate seeds that breed true, i.e., that produce plants that that have the same characteristics as the parent plant, from hybrid seeds that do not?