Business Ecology: The Fossil Fuel - Leadership Fiasco
25/April/2007 12:25 Filed in: Weekly Column
25 April 2007; Volume 9, Issue 16
PDF copy
The full title of this week’s message is: The Fossil Fuel Fiasco = The Fossilized Failure of Leadership.
The first line of the Top Secret Intelligence Summary that I was forced to read in my spy days in Europe usually began as follows, “Eminent hostilities by Soviet and Warsaw Pact nations against Allied NATO forces is not expected in the coming week.” The summary then went on to detail troop movements and exercises by all of the above, as deterrents to thermonuclear war.
The Soviet Union as been pretty much replaced by the Russian Federation and much of the Warsaw Pact is now part of NATO. Someplace in that stream of intelligence still being generated, there are probably still more complex intelligence summaries using the terms Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations, and perhaps some references to Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
In my last article I made reference to the icon Pogo cartoon from Earth Day 1971 by Walt Kelly featuring Pogo and his friend PorkyPine. The cartoon is also available: http://www.planetwaves.net/pogo.web.jpg
Fast forward 36 years to this last Sunday and Pogo and PorkyPine enter into the current genre, Porkypine would begin by stating something about the reality of Global Warming, but the final line would still be the same. “Yep, Son, we have met the enemy and he is us.”
So why has nothing changed? I would submit total fossilization as a failure to confront the reality of the limits of fossil fuels. However, who says it takes millions and billions of years to make a fossil, all you need to do is become totally self indulgent in your present forest of trees, then reality will bury you.
The reality of the last forty years is that we have burned our future on the altar of self indulgence, and we ran out of gas. One of the Principles of Business Ecology is “Everything eventually runs out of gas.” We still haven’t accepted that reality, but it is about to bury the economy really any of us have ever known.”
Locally gasoline is now well over $3.00 a gallon. The real market price of what gas should cost is not that high, but oil is no longer a free market commodity. The price of gasoline is now controlled by oil cartels and speculators. However, the reality is that prices are going to continue to escalate rapidly because of demand and worldwide shrinking production, known as Peak Oil. All the while fossilized leadership in this nation debates a pullout from Viet Nam, excuse me Iraq, and what happened to some emails about some legally fired lawyers who work for the Attorney General and the President.
“Yep, Porkypine we have solved global warming, by just doing nothing. Now it is too late and the stuff of the last half of the 20th century will soon be nothing but fossils of folly. Fossils of folly is really a euphemism, for rocks of cancerous indulgences.”
One thing you can say for rocks, they by themselves have no free energy. They are pretty low on the entropy scale.
There is an old Christian “4 gees” principle when it comes to surviving a stupendous change happening. Those four gees are: Groceries, Guns, Gold, and God. To bring this principle up to date for the 21st century, we must add two more gees, gas and gumption.
The reality however is that you probably won’t always be able to go to the grocery store or mega-mart to buy your vitals, and if you can you may not be able to afford what you used to take for granted cuisine. When from ten to fifty times more energy is consumed in bringing a food calorie to your store, perhaps groceries will make way for grub, like in grub stake, beans and biscuits.
Guns and bullets are mainly used as a deterrent in urban areas to control gangs of thugs. One of the interesting thoughts that appeared on the internet in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings is, contrary to gun control interests, there is less gun violence in areas where the constitutional right to bear arms is not infringed but encouraged. Could it actually be true the old NRA bumper sticker that says: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”
Gold is gold, swiping your Debit MasterCard might still be worthwhile to purchase your priceless memories, for everything else you will need hard currency. Over the history of human civilizations, gold, if not the prime means of financial transactions, has been the means of maintaining wealth in turbulent times. We recently published our first installment of “Thirst No More,” the Wonder Springs ministry newsletter which is available on the web site. This will give you a basic concept of how you might be able to exchange some of those electronic bits and bytes, for some real hard currency, real gold.
God is the last provision on the original list, probably because we normally call on Him only after we have reached our own end. Actually, God is both the first and the last and the in between also. Business Ecology is based upon the premise of the unity and diversity represented in all aspects of creation. It is more than just a coincidence that unity in diversity is also one of the best theological descriptions of the Christian Godhead personality. As we move forward with this theme in subsequent articles, those who still can function mentally in what can be considered a rational manner, should take note that the stupendous change increases we are now seeing on planet earth are positively directly proportional in some manner to the fact that both individuals, communities, societies, and cultures are becoming more hedonistic, self indulgent, and a whole host of other oxymoronic adjectives.
For my lifetime and yours, gas was something you burned, then it became something you used to fertilize the lawn, to kill the weeds, to kill the bugs, to contain your bottled water, to buy your stuff. Plastic has really become not quite god, but the most utilized product on earth and one of the most persistent environmentally. Most of it at the present time is made from fossil fuels. In that respect plastics are created fossilized, just not with inorganic minerals. What we are talking about however is really not running out of fossil fuels, it is that fossil fuels are just going to rapidly become something too valuable to burn just for the pleasure of stroking your own ego.
This brings us to the final gee of this survival storehouse. For those who like to see Biblical prophesy unfolding all around us, yes that does give us six gees in number, the number of man. That final gee stands for gumption or guts. Fossilized plants really had no option into foregoing their fossilized fate. Animals and humans however have a motile mobility, if they choose to use it. Sometimes that choice is not enough because as animals they were unaware of the striking potential disaster. However, it was interesting in the recent Asian tsunami, for the most part, the dumb animals were not killed in the wave, except as restrained by their wise human masters. It was the wise human persons so absorbed, for the most part in their own pleasure, jobs, or other activities to see, from birds to elephants were all on their way to high ground.
There is another old saying, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”
Sound Transit is building a light rail line from downtown Seattle eventually to the airport. It would be nice to call this endeavor a transit system, but it really is just a single line at sort of serves a portion of South Seattle. In order to get to Interstate 5, at times various streets across the line are blocked by construction. Sometimes these cause a detour of several miles, if you are unwilling to wait through multiple traffic light changes to get across at the remaining crossing points.
As I was attempting to make such a crossing recently, it came to my mind, why is Seattle, known throughout the world as a progressive liberal city, now building it’s first light rail line, not completing an area wide light rail system. You would think if Seattle was as progressive as it promotes itself, that foresight would have led them to begin light rail in the 1970’s. The only conclusion that I can come up with is that our social democratic ideals really don’t work, because the so called leaders are really only followers. All this hoopla about community building is really an impediment for action. Until we vote and vote and vote on something and finally enough opposition is calcified by boredom, do the leaders emerge to take charge of the project as their idea. Sort of like Al Gore on his founding of the internet and promoting his vision of climate change necessities as an inconvenient truth.
To find further justification that social(ist) democracies really don’t work all you need to do is to look at the European Union. At least Iraq has a constitution. In the State of Washington however, if you were to look for the real Prince, in the Machiavelli sense, don’t look to the Governor, or the Mayor of Seattle, or the King County Executive, look to Tim Eyman, conservative initiative tax cutting guru. Nobody wants to pay for government services, so when one of his initiatives passes, what do these politicians do, instead of cutting the services that are required, they pay lip service to the proposition and work to find subversive ways to work around the constraints. A true leader would say we can not continue government services in this area without adequate financial resources and shut the program down, until the public outcry was sufficient to provide proper government services at a fiscally responsible price.
Other than Tim, there really is no other figure in Washington State who can be contrasted to this fossilized leadership. Therefore, since he ran for the job twice we must look at George Bush contrasted with the US Congress.
Tuesday an Al Qaeda linked group claimed responsibility for double suicide truck bombings that killed nine U.S. paratroopers. This was the worst attack on American ground forces in Iraq for more than a year. George got that part of the Iraq war right, it is much better to fight Islamic terrorism on their home territory than to fight them from within the United States. However, the rest of the Neocon agenda to place the United States in the role of a 19th century colonial power was just as flawed as the social democratic failures. They stood ready to lead, but no one was willing to follow, because their vision is not a vision of today’s truth.
This is definitely true when the Senate majority leader thinks he has a political mandate in a senate with at best a two vote margin according to ideological strength and with an actual party split of 49-49, with two independents, including that maverick of the political center, Joe Lieberman. Perhaps Senator Reid, is suffering the delayed after affects of ingesting some peyote in his Searchlight, Nevada youth, or has been too long associated with Sin City to understand the way the world really is structured.
So what we truly see in Social Democracy is a valid but vain attempt at community. They give a community through egalitarian principles which truly severely limits personal freedom. In other words we have community without diversity. In the Conservative Libertine agenda, we see again a valid but bane attempt at individual freedom. They give us liberty of personal thought and action, but no way to provide any community invulnerability.
So where we really are in America today, is no hope for consensus of unity and diversity, because we have basically discarded God from the equation and instead substituted ghettos of thought enforcement. Thought enforcement limits both freedom and community in which extremes forbid any discussion of unity, because in those ghetto rights is where power and identity reside. Without consensus, culture and civilization can not exist.
True leadership is two functions held in tension. The first is authority, the second is power. Authority comes from above, power comes from the bottom up. In the Bible Jesus only speaks of His authority, never his power. Few are the expositors who ever grasp the difference. In that light Jesus truly did have the power to demand obedience, He chose not to exercise it, because He understood the role of the individual created in God’s image. Contrary to our own opinion of ourselves, we are not Jesus, we can fit at any particular place or time into only one role or the other. Either we have leadership authority, or belong to the power base.
I knew about fifty people who have their names engraved upon the Viet Nam Memorial, while I would not venture a figure, from what I recall of a number of those people, more than a few were probably victims of friendly fire. Accidental friendly fire is what happens to young unseasoned officers who think just because they have a couple of bars on their uniform and the authority of the United States of a America written on a piece of paper, they have power to do stupid things and survive. In this case they were dead wrong. They had the authority to lead, but they never really cared about the power of life and death which was the essence of their NCOs and men.
The one fundamental that ties together both authority and power is truth. All civilized citizens in the world today live in societies where truth is circumstantial. Truth might be an interesting debate over a cup of coffee, tea, or a few beers, because while truth exists absolutely, it only becomes consequential as the stress of reality rears it’s ugly head. The best we as human beings can convey is basically a common truth, because we are so tainted by our own presuppositions, which in turn are always clouded by personal sinfulness. Our truth can be only a dark vision of the absolute. That absolute truth is only known and can be conveyed by God.
With that understanding, common truth is still a most compelling concept. The president’s problems pretty much stem from the fact that people believe that he has continually lied about the Iraq situation. Furthermore, he has conducted the war the way he learned as a Viet Nam era fighter pilot, protecting us from the hordes of illegal Latin American immigrants. Now you know why we have a problem with illegal immigration, George got at least three better jobs. Personally I don’t think George lied at anything, I think he just has a naïve trust of people and certain people either have lied or not had the competence for their position of trust. The difference is he is not running the Texas Rangers baseball team or the State of Texas, but the United States of America.
One thing politicians across the political spectrum are going to have to understand, is they may be vested with the authority to lead, but they can only lead people willing to follow a truth that ties to reality. Actually, we do not have a political spectrum we have polarization, because unity in diversity to us is based upon circumstantial definitions. Only God gives absolutes, and only stupendous change is going to force us to look beyond our present situation, even in a common grace concept of God, not the God of the Bible which centers in the work of Jesus Christ
That is the bleak desert in the recent history of this country specifically and the world in general. The truth may hurt, but not as deeply as being used as some type of lowly evolved array of protoplasm just removed by a billion or so years from a lightning bolt and swamp. The truth is it is impossible to lead people by treating them that way, because the God who created them in His image will not let that lie stand unchallenged in this world. We may be willing to wish each other good luck, but what we really need is the Godly wisdom of unity in diversity.
PDF copy
The full title of this week’s message is: The Fossil Fuel Fiasco = The Fossilized Failure of Leadership.
The first line of the Top Secret Intelligence Summary that I was forced to read in my spy days in Europe usually began as follows, “Eminent hostilities by Soviet and Warsaw Pact nations against Allied NATO forces is not expected in the coming week.” The summary then went on to detail troop movements and exercises by all of the above, as deterrents to thermonuclear war.
The Soviet Union as been pretty much replaced by the Russian Federation and much of the Warsaw Pact is now part of NATO. Someplace in that stream of intelligence still being generated, there are probably still more complex intelligence summaries using the terms Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations, and perhaps some references to Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
In my last article I made reference to the icon Pogo cartoon from Earth Day 1971 by Walt Kelly featuring Pogo and his friend PorkyPine. The cartoon is also available: http://www.planetwaves.net/pogo.web.jpg
Fast forward 36 years to this last Sunday and Pogo and PorkyPine enter into the current genre, Porkypine would begin by stating something about the reality of Global Warming, but the final line would still be the same. “Yep, Son, we have met the enemy and he is us.”
So why has nothing changed? I would submit total fossilization as a failure to confront the reality of the limits of fossil fuels. However, who says it takes millions and billions of years to make a fossil, all you need to do is become totally self indulgent in your present forest of trees, then reality will bury you.
The reality of the last forty years is that we have burned our future on the altar of self indulgence, and we ran out of gas. One of the Principles of Business Ecology is “Everything eventually runs out of gas.” We still haven’t accepted that reality, but it is about to bury the economy really any of us have ever known.”
Locally gasoline is now well over $3.00 a gallon. The real market price of what gas should cost is not that high, but oil is no longer a free market commodity. The price of gasoline is now controlled by oil cartels and speculators. However, the reality is that prices are going to continue to escalate rapidly because of demand and worldwide shrinking production, known as Peak Oil. All the while fossilized leadership in this nation debates a pullout from Viet Nam, excuse me Iraq, and what happened to some emails about some legally fired lawyers who work for the Attorney General and the President.
“Yep, Porkypine we have solved global warming, by just doing nothing. Now it is too late and the stuff of the last half of the 20th century will soon be nothing but fossils of folly. Fossils of folly is really a euphemism, for rocks of cancerous indulgences.”
One thing you can say for rocks, they by themselves have no free energy. They are pretty low on the entropy scale.
There is an old Christian “4 gees” principle when it comes to surviving a stupendous change happening. Those four gees are: Groceries, Guns, Gold, and God. To bring this principle up to date for the 21st century, we must add two more gees, gas and gumption.
The reality however is that you probably won’t always be able to go to the grocery store or mega-mart to buy your vitals, and if you can you may not be able to afford what you used to take for granted cuisine. When from ten to fifty times more energy is consumed in bringing a food calorie to your store, perhaps groceries will make way for grub, like in grub stake, beans and biscuits.
Guns and bullets are mainly used as a deterrent in urban areas to control gangs of thugs. One of the interesting thoughts that appeared on the internet in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings is, contrary to gun control interests, there is less gun violence in areas where the constitutional right to bear arms is not infringed but encouraged. Could it actually be true the old NRA bumper sticker that says: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”
Gold is gold, swiping your Debit MasterCard might still be worthwhile to purchase your priceless memories, for everything else you will need hard currency. Over the history of human civilizations, gold, if not the prime means of financial transactions, has been the means of maintaining wealth in turbulent times. We recently published our first installment of “Thirst No More,” the Wonder Springs ministry newsletter which is available on the web site. This will give you a basic concept of how you might be able to exchange some of those electronic bits and bytes, for some real hard currency, real gold.
God is the last provision on the original list, probably because we normally call on Him only after we have reached our own end. Actually, God is both the first and the last and the in between also. Business Ecology is based upon the premise of the unity and diversity represented in all aspects of creation. It is more than just a coincidence that unity in diversity is also one of the best theological descriptions of the Christian Godhead personality. As we move forward with this theme in subsequent articles, those who still can function mentally in what can be considered a rational manner, should take note that the stupendous change increases we are now seeing on planet earth are positively directly proportional in some manner to the fact that both individuals, communities, societies, and cultures are becoming more hedonistic, self indulgent, and a whole host of other oxymoronic adjectives.
For my lifetime and yours, gas was something you burned, then it became something you used to fertilize the lawn, to kill the weeds, to kill the bugs, to contain your bottled water, to buy your stuff. Plastic has really become not quite god, but the most utilized product on earth and one of the most persistent environmentally. Most of it at the present time is made from fossil fuels. In that respect plastics are created fossilized, just not with inorganic minerals. What we are talking about however is really not running out of fossil fuels, it is that fossil fuels are just going to rapidly become something too valuable to burn just for the pleasure of stroking your own ego.
This brings us to the final gee of this survival storehouse. For those who like to see Biblical prophesy unfolding all around us, yes that does give us six gees in number, the number of man. That final gee stands for gumption or guts. Fossilized plants really had no option into foregoing their fossilized fate. Animals and humans however have a motile mobility, if they choose to use it. Sometimes that choice is not enough because as animals they were unaware of the striking potential disaster. However, it was interesting in the recent Asian tsunami, for the most part, the dumb animals were not killed in the wave, except as restrained by their wise human masters. It was the wise human persons so absorbed, for the most part in their own pleasure, jobs, or other activities to see, from birds to elephants were all on their way to high ground.
There is another old saying, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”
Sound Transit is building a light rail line from downtown Seattle eventually to the airport. It would be nice to call this endeavor a transit system, but it really is just a single line at sort of serves a portion of South Seattle. In order to get to Interstate 5, at times various streets across the line are blocked by construction. Sometimes these cause a detour of several miles, if you are unwilling to wait through multiple traffic light changes to get across at the remaining crossing points.
As I was attempting to make such a crossing recently, it came to my mind, why is Seattle, known throughout the world as a progressive liberal city, now building it’s first light rail line, not completing an area wide light rail system. You would think if Seattle was as progressive as it promotes itself, that foresight would have led them to begin light rail in the 1970’s. The only conclusion that I can come up with is that our social democratic ideals really don’t work, because the so called leaders are really only followers. All this hoopla about community building is really an impediment for action. Until we vote and vote and vote on something and finally enough opposition is calcified by boredom, do the leaders emerge to take charge of the project as their idea. Sort of like Al Gore on his founding of the internet and promoting his vision of climate change necessities as an inconvenient truth.
To find further justification that social(ist) democracies really don’t work all you need to do is to look at the European Union. At least Iraq has a constitution. In the State of Washington however, if you were to look for the real Prince, in the Machiavelli sense, don’t look to the Governor, or the Mayor of Seattle, or the King County Executive, look to Tim Eyman, conservative initiative tax cutting guru. Nobody wants to pay for government services, so when one of his initiatives passes, what do these politicians do, instead of cutting the services that are required, they pay lip service to the proposition and work to find subversive ways to work around the constraints. A true leader would say we can not continue government services in this area without adequate financial resources and shut the program down, until the public outcry was sufficient to provide proper government services at a fiscally responsible price.
Other than Tim, there really is no other figure in Washington State who can be contrasted to this fossilized leadership. Therefore, since he ran for the job twice we must look at George Bush contrasted with the US Congress.
Tuesday an Al Qaeda linked group claimed responsibility for double suicide truck bombings that killed nine U.S. paratroopers. This was the worst attack on American ground forces in Iraq for more than a year. George got that part of the Iraq war right, it is much better to fight Islamic terrorism on their home territory than to fight them from within the United States. However, the rest of the Neocon agenda to place the United States in the role of a 19th century colonial power was just as flawed as the social democratic failures. They stood ready to lead, but no one was willing to follow, because their vision is not a vision of today’s truth.
This is definitely true when the Senate majority leader thinks he has a political mandate in a senate with at best a two vote margin according to ideological strength and with an actual party split of 49-49, with two independents, including that maverick of the political center, Joe Lieberman. Perhaps Senator Reid, is suffering the delayed after affects of ingesting some peyote in his Searchlight, Nevada youth, or has been too long associated with Sin City to understand the way the world really is structured.
So what we truly see in Social Democracy is a valid but vain attempt at community. They give a community through egalitarian principles which truly severely limits personal freedom. In other words we have community without diversity. In the Conservative Libertine agenda, we see again a valid but bane attempt at individual freedom. They give us liberty of personal thought and action, but no way to provide any community invulnerability.
So where we really are in America today, is no hope for consensus of unity and diversity, because we have basically discarded God from the equation and instead substituted ghettos of thought enforcement. Thought enforcement limits both freedom and community in which extremes forbid any discussion of unity, because in those ghetto rights is where power and identity reside. Without consensus, culture and civilization can not exist.
True leadership is two functions held in tension. The first is authority, the second is power. Authority comes from above, power comes from the bottom up. In the Bible Jesus only speaks of His authority, never his power. Few are the expositors who ever grasp the difference. In that light Jesus truly did have the power to demand obedience, He chose not to exercise it, because He understood the role of the individual created in God’s image. Contrary to our own opinion of ourselves, we are not Jesus, we can fit at any particular place or time into only one role or the other. Either we have leadership authority, or belong to the power base.
I knew about fifty people who have their names engraved upon the Viet Nam Memorial, while I would not venture a figure, from what I recall of a number of those people, more than a few were probably victims of friendly fire. Accidental friendly fire is what happens to young unseasoned officers who think just because they have a couple of bars on their uniform and the authority of the United States of a America written on a piece of paper, they have power to do stupid things and survive. In this case they were dead wrong. They had the authority to lead, but they never really cared about the power of life and death which was the essence of their NCOs and men.
The one fundamental that ties together both authority and power is truth. All civilized citizens in the world today live in societies where truth is circumstantial. Truth might be an interesting debate over a cup of coffee, tea, or a few beers, because while truth exists absolutely, it only becomes consequential as the stress of reality rears it’s ugly head. The best we as human beings can convey is basically a common truth, because we are so tainted by our own presuppositions, which in turn are always clouded by personal sinfulness. Our truth can be only a dark vision of the absolute. That absolute truth is only known and can be conveyed by God.
With that understanding, common truth is still a most compelling concept. The president’s problems pretty much stem from the fact that people believe that he has continually lied about the Iraq situation. Furthermore, he has conducted the war the way he learned as a Viet Nam era fighter pilot, protecting us from the hordes of illegal Latin American immigrants. Now you know why we have a problem with illegal immigration, George got at least three better jobs. Personally I don’t think George lied at anything, I think he just has a naïve trust of people and certain people either have lied or not had the competence for their position of trust. The difference is he is not running the Texas Rangers baseball team or the State of Texas, but the United States of America.
One thing politicians across the political spectrum are going to have to understand, is they may be vested with the authority to lead, but they can only lead people willing to follow a truth that ties to reality. Actually, we do not have a political spectrum we have polarization, because unity in diversity to us is based upon circumstantial definitions. Only God gives absolutes, and only stupendous change is going to force us to look beyond our present situation, even in a common grace concept of God, not the God of the Bible which centers in the work of Jesus Christ
That is the bleak desert in the recent history of this country specifically and the world in general. The truth may hurt, but not as deeply as being used as some type of lowly evolved array of protoplasm just removed by a billion or so years from a lightning bolt and swamp. The truth is it is impossible to lead people by treating them that way, because the God who created them in His image will not let that lie stand unchallenged in this world. We may be willing to wish each other good luck, but what we really need is the Godly wisdom of unity in diversity.