The Blessings of Fossil Fuels – by Mark H. Rich
The argument that religious types are supposed to make about the environment can be stated in one word: stewardship.
See Steve Bouma-Prediger’s responding essay
See Chris Iosso’s Essay, “‘The Power to Change’ and the Determination Not To”
As a small-time environmental activist, the argument I’m about to make strikes even me as dubious. But it’s a good argument anyway, so here goes.
The argument that religious types are supposed to make about environmental issues can be summed in one word: stewardship. We’re supposed to be taking good care of the resources and environment we have, and that includes not wrecking the whole joint.
And it’s a very true argument. We should of course use the resources God has given us responsibly, with something like stewardship if not discipleship. You don’t even have to be a believer to be able to hold a secular version of it. But have you noticed how well the appeal is working? To say the obvious, it ain’t. The oil spill in the Gulf, besides being a disaster in itself, is painfully emblematic of how feeble our intentions and efforts at stewardship really are. We have learned that oil companies – and not just the feckless BP – are now routinely drilling at enormously difficult and dangerous depths and conditions in order to keep our oil mainline flowing nonstop.
This also means then that our church talk about stewardship has so far been mostly a lot of preaching to the choir. I am beginning to suspect that we church types are expected by society to make the stewardship argument because this fulfills the church’s socially-assigned role of nag, of scold, of old mom.
What to do, what to do? Constructive theology, of course – what else?
Despite my jocular tone, I’m also quite serious about this. Theology is really exactly what we need, and theology in the good old-fashioned sense of the word: not just talk about God, but talk toward God.
We need to think more theologically about the environment.
We are constrained by faith and piety to confess that fossil fuels are one of God’s great historic gifts to the human race. We must then feel constrained by honesty to confess that we have been abysmally irresponsible in our use of those fuels and their blessings. But it is the blessing that comes before the commission of stewardship (see Gen. 1:28), and I suspect that we have been less than honest about that blessing. Stewardship only follows honestly after honestly confessing the blessing.
So let us count this blessing, or rather measure it – take its size and feel its heft. It’s a big one! Let us first look at fossil fuels in the most direct practical way. As energy sources go, oil, coal, and natural gas are terrific. They pack a huge amount of energy into small volumes. One gallon of gasoline contains 125,000 BTUs. Eight pounds of anthracite coal (i.e., the same weight as a gallon) contains up to 104,000 BTUs. By contrast, eight pounds of white pine (the most energy-dense of woods) contains 51,184 BTUs. Eight pounds of sun-dried beef manure contains 43,360 BTUs. (It’s not often that an essay in constructive theology refers to eight pounds of sun-dried beef manure. Just saying. It might contain eight pounds of… oh, never mind!)
Reactor-grade uranium is of course about 30 times more energy dense than fossil fuels, but it is also several orders more expensive and technologically complex, not to mention that we haven’t figured out its disposal. I say that just to highlight another blessing of fossil fuels: they are relatively cheap and easy to use – to extract, to transport, and to convert into mechanical and electrical energy. To think just of cars, it’s fairly obvious how limited battery-powered cars have been so far and how much technical innovation is required to get them somewhere close to the functionality of gasoline cars. And we also know well the limitations of solar and wind power in providing baseline electrical power.
However, we have so far only touched on the blessings of fossil fuels. The real extent of the blessings of fossil fuels lies far beyond BTUs. I will discuss only two of these further blessings.
This first one will be obvious to us, being the material girls and guys that we are. Fossil fuels have enabled us to bring about a vast multiplication of material well-being within just the last two centuries. In the early 19th century Protestant missionaries who moved to remote African communities experienced only a slight change in their quality of life and their life expectancy. Visitors to missionary cemeteries will see there about the same number of infant and child graves as in the cemeteries of country churches in the US from the same time period.
Increased life expectancy and well-being have been powered by fossil fuels.
The vast change in life expectancy and material wellbeing since then has been entirely powered by the switch to fossil fuels away from wood and muscle power. As you know, the change – in those countries where it has actually happened – has provided not only more and cheaper manufacturing, distribution, and trade, but also the Green Revolution’s greater supply of foodstuffs through improved genetic stocks, artificial fertilizers (made from fossil fuels), pesticides, and irrigation (often powered by fossil fuels). We are easily and rightly impressed by the technological and scientific developments of the past two centuries, but here I wish us to notice particularly the fact that these developments were made through fossil fuels and could not have been made otherwise.
This, folks, has been a vast, enormous blessing. As usual with us humans, we have been reckless, selfish, and stupid in our use of the blessing. We are on our way to severely and permanently damaging the planet. But that doesn’t negate the fact that we got a huge blessing from God in these fossil fuels.
That’s only the material end of it. Let’s now look at the more important cultural end of it. This logarithmic increase in material well-being has also fueled a like increase in cultural well-being. I’m not mainly thinking here of PBS and Live at the Met. I mean the vast increase in sheer knowledge, intellectual sophistication, and technical cleverness that has been achieved in the last two centuries, and especially in the last couple generations.
We in the fossil fuel societies are accomplishing intellectual and technological wonders that would have been impossible to achieve without the blessing of these fuels. Let me give a small but telling example.
I’m a member of the Society for Biblical Literature. Their annual meetings gather some 4,000-5,000 scholars in a variety of happy cities around the US. These meetings are the focal point of biblical scholarship around the world, because they are so large and fecund. (There is an international meeting of the SBL, but it doesn’t gather nearly so many scholars, especially when it is not held on the north and west corner of the planet.)
Fifty years ago this society gathered only a few hundred members for its annual meeting. There are just many, many more biblical scholars alive now, perhaps more of them now than in the whole previous history of the Bible put together. Likewise, the amount and sophistication of biblical scholarship itself was much lower in the 1960s. In current biblical scholarship it is uncommon to use scholarship from that period, simply because the state of scholarship has advanced so far since then both in quantity and quality. And that is just one rather small example of the many, many intellectual advances made in the last 50 years. It’s a telling one because it’s a field that’s been around for a couple of millennia.
That advance has been made possible by fossil fuels, along with thousands more advances like it. Without the fast, cheap, and easy transportation and communication that God has given us through fossil fuels, such an intellectual advance would never have happened. It’s not that it would have happened slower via letters, articles, and books carried on foot and on horseback. I’m saying here that this increase wouldn’t have happened at all.
So we should thank and praise God for this great blessing, one of the greatest ones God has ever given us.
The lack of, and need for, a spiritual blessing
The blessing that fossil fuels cannot deliver to us is the spiritual one. As General Omar Bradley put it so many years ago, “We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.” To listen to our national and international discourses, it seems that his dictum grows ever truer with time.
The spiritual blessing we need in the face of our own massive, technologically sophisticated, economically engrained, politically-validated greed is the old one, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” For bread, add in cars, I-phones, mass-produced meat, the internet, and the rest. Without those words we remain desperately poor no matter how vast our material wealth. Without those words we will not be able to turn from our despoiling of the rich blessings of this planet. We will not be able to grow up “to maturity, to the full stature of Christ.”
It may be that God has given us the blessings of fossil fuels so that we could advance to this technological level of culture and then in turn leave those fuels behind. But we’ll also have to do some spiritual and moral maturing.
On Wednesday, Steven Bouma-Prediger and Christian Iosso join the conversation.
See Steve Bouma-Prediger’s responding essay
See Chris Iosso’s Essay, “‘The Power to Change’ and the Determination Not To”
A truly great call..Stewardship vs “Ownership”. Not holding “Title” might become a new Liberation Theology re: Creation. I look forward to this conversation, and where it might lead us as to Caring..truly caring for that which belongs to God alone.
Thanks for this thoughtful tally on the “blessing” of fossil fuels. On the face of it, i have to agree with the blessing theory and can’t say my own work hasn’t been been advanced by it. I depend on the internet and am an avid twitter user; i mean, seriously, to date, i have tweeted 7,266 unique tweets in 2 years! And i presented last week to an audience in chicago on the powers of Web 2.0 etc etc.
However, I can’t help but read about the blessings of fossil fuels with my Middle-East hat on. I am originally from one of the top oil producing countries in the world. Oil was discovered in Iran early in the 20th century and at the time of course, Iranians thought it was a blessing and their troubled/poor days were numbered. The trajectory of oil’s history in Iran parallels that of democracy’s history in Iran. Three times in the last century Iran came close to real, bottom-up democracy and three times it was thwarted by outside forces: 1906, 1953 and 1979. Oil had a big and increasing role each time and my grandfather, father and myself were directly affected by the upheaval each time. And oil has “polluted” the economy and politics all along.
What I am saying is that for those people living in oil PRODUCING countries that are still not first-world, they would have a hard time agreeing that fossil fuels have been a “cheap” blessing. They might have held the promise of modernization and riches, but in reality they have turned out to be a source for the plundering of their nations first by outsiders and eventually by natives in power. Iran’s theocracy experiment would not have lasted these 30 years were it not for oil revenues propping them up. Even though this oligarchy in Iran has put most iranians on the electricity grid, built highways and schools galore, they have taken away individual rights and freedoms which has put the country back not forwards. OIL has been their enabler. Same goes for Saudi Arabia, Libya, Nigeria, etc etc… Norway is unique in that there were no foreign companies plundering there. Hmmm, I wonder what they had that Iran didn’t??!! Any guesses???
Hello Mark, your essay forcees thought and comment — good job! As I ponder next week’s election and the possible outcomes for action, or lack of same, on energy policy in the next congressional session, what advice do you have for people of faith? How do we respond/react/be proactive?
Noushin, thanks SO much for your invaluable perspective!! You’re completely right that oil hasn’t been cheap at all in the Middle East, as well as many other places around the globe. One of the infuriating aspects of the current global oil system is that it simply doesn’t reflect the true costs of oil. These include the vast environmental costs; the military and undercover adventures of Western powers; the lives lost and families destroyed in both the Middle East and the West; the political costs of democracy thwarted in the Middle East and perverted in the West (especially in the US); the spiritual costs of an imaginary culture war between Islam and Christianity, both enlisted to serve as ideological supports for political calculations. And this list is by no means complete.
Yet I insist that the blessing was not somehow wrong. It is rather we humans who are wrong. We have let Leviathan and Mammon turn this blessing into their private plaything. We should learn from the Bible that blessings are given by God for the benefit of everyone.
BTW, if your tweets were Scripture, you’d nearly have completed the entire New Testament, with 7956 verses. Way to goeth!
I am one who, shall I say, has tended to be fairly unmoved by the stewardship approaches to climate change and aspects of environmentalism. I do some of things my parents did, which were handed down to them by their parents, that supported stewardship. However, this week, I had two engagements with this matter of fuels that has put me on edge.
First, I learned that the earth has about 50 years of oil and 50 years of natural gas reserves left, or at least identified. 50 years. My 7, 4, and 15 month old grandchildren appear to be in deep trouble because my views about energy and fuels, along with those of several billion others, are rather complacent. Is the BP mess the only way to really extend our reach for oil?
Second, I just read an article in the New Yorker about David Koch, a billionaire who funds much behind the Tea Party. The article says he believes global warming might be a good thing. “Lengthened growing seasons in the northern hemisphere, he says, will make up for any trauma caused by the slow migration of people away from the disappearing coast lines.” The article then quotes Koch as saying, “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a greater land area will be available to produce food.”
I have to admit. I feel I’ve been cold and callous because of the 50 year thing, and I wonder about Koch’s temp when I read such brazen, calculating, cavalier words.
Speaking to at least myself here, but it seems to me that theology without politics + will to change our collective reliances on certain energy sources = _________.