Wednesday, April 26, 2006
The Truth About Oil…
Is cheap oil our birthright? Is it the path to true happiness????
Okay, I admit, I just paid $38 to fill up the tank on my Saturn VUE, and I don’t like it. Who would. When we bought the vehicle (the best gas mileage, safety and the only small SUV that could hold three car seats) three years ago it cost $20 max to filler up. But, I am not going to go crazy like many people out there (Senator Chuck Shumer talking about breaking up the oil companies, yea, that will help).
The truth is that we live in a finite world. Why does gold cost $500/ ounce? Because it isn’t sand. There is a finite amount of everything on earth, and we don’t like it. Okay, I know, there are issues about drilling (can one be pro-environment and also favour drilling in ANWR – that would be me). There are issues about the grades and additives in gasoline. And yes, there is the whole world tensions about Iran and the Katrina mess. But putting that all aside, why do we think that everything should be abundant and cheap?
The oil/gasoline “crisis” is really a theological one. We don’t like to think we are finite and that we live in a finite world But that is what it means to be human. Accepting our finitude is essential to a happy life, not to mention a relationship with God. I can still remember my career group Sunday School teacher, the late and great Rob Gregory pounding it into our heads:
Man is finite and incomplete
God is infinite and complete.
At the time, I couldn’t figure out why he wanted us to grasp that concept. But it really is one of the essentials of life, both in the world and in religion. It explains why we are absolutely nuts about smoking – we think if we avoid second hand smoke we can live forever. Humanity, to paraphrase the German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, wants its cake and to eat it too…without gaining weight.
It is not a good answer, but it’s the one rooted in reality. Oil is going to cost more and more, as will gasoline, as we use more of it up. One day we very well may use up all the petroleum in the world (though that day is probably long after I have become a fossil). Our time horizon has to be an eternal one, and our care of the resources of this earth must be similarly long-haul. Practically everything on this earth is non-renewable, and because of that how we use things will effect those who come after us.
Embracing our own finitude relieves us of our own god-complex and frees us to recognize that the meaning of true happiness is not found in $1.15 gasoline. As Augustine of Hippo reminds us in his Confessions:
“And man wants to praise you, man who is only a small portion of what you have created and who goes about carrying with him his own mortality, the evidence of his own sin and evidence that you resist the proud …. Yet still man, this small portion of creation, wants to praise you. You stimulate him to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”
