Oil is a finite resource. There is only so much of it in the ground. That it exists at all is the result of a complex series of processes taking hundreds of millions of years.

Of course, while finite, the total volume is staggeringly huge: somewhere in the order of two trillion barrels. Yet globally we consume about 85 million barrels of oil each day and our collective appetite for energy continues to rise.

Ever-increasing demand for a limited resource is a party that must one day come to an end. Many experts believe the global petrol tank may be running dangerously low.

According to some of these experts, however, the coming oil crisis is not simply that we will eventually run out, not even that we will run out sooner rather than later, but that we will soon run out of cheap oil. They claim that within the next few years we will reach a point at which we cannot expand our rate of oil extraction to match rising international demand. Oil production will "peak', and then begin an inexorable decline.

To understand why, consider the process of oil extraction. When an oil field is first discovered and exploited, the oil is under pressure and it is easy to obtain high quality crude oil. As the field "matures', increasing effort is required to get a decreasing quantity and quality of oil. When the results of multiple fields in a region are aggregated, a rough bell-curve of output is obtained. Once a well or region has passed the "peak' of the curve, production declines. There is still oil in the ground, but extracting it is slower and more difficult.

The first country to experience this peak-and-decline pattern was the USA; since 1970 its annual oil extraction has steadily dropped. Since then, most oil-producing countries have also peaked. The theory of "peak oil' is that global oil production will also fit this pattern"”with serious implications for life as we know it.

So when might we reach the peak? It is difficult to tell, because there is no independent watchdog of oil reserves, and we'll only know for sure once it has happened. However, a growing body of geologists, physicists and oil industry insiders think it is likely to be within a decade, probably sooner. The head of General Motors recently announced that he believes we have already passed it.

What will happen once we pass global "peak oil'? Growing demand and shrinking supply are likely to have widespread economic and social effects. Rising oil prices will extend beyond the petrol station. Oil keeps the wheels of our global economy turning. The viability of international trade depends on cheap transportation. And oil doesn't just run our cars, planes and trucks, it is also the basis of drugs, plastics, microchips, various fabrics and hundreds of other petrochemicals.

Perhaps most ominously, our predominant agricultural practices are heavily dependent upon oil-based products at almost every stage: cultivating, fertilising, harvesting, transporting, processing, packaging, refrigerating and cooking. A study in the USA indicates that in that country the food system consumes 10 times more oil energy than it provides to society in food energy.That is, for every calorie of food on the plate of an average American, 10 calories of oil
were needed to get it there. Cheap oil has enabled cheap food, or as Professor Albert Bartlett neatly puts it: "Modern agricultureis the use of land to convert petroleum into food."
Can't we simply find more oil? Despite huge investment in exploration in recent decades, oil discovery peaked back in the 1960s. Our steadily growing demand has overtaken the rate of new finds. The last decade in which the world discovered more oil than we used was the 1980s. Today, we consume it four times faster than we find it.
What about alternative sources of energy? The short answer is that there are currently no alternatives ready to be mass produced that are as transportable and efficient as oil, and many of the other options still rely heavily on oil in
their production. And switching sources is a process that takes decades, which may be longer than we have.

What might life be like when we have declining oil production, growing world population and growing demand for oil? I don't pretend to be an expert on peak oil, and realise that there is a diversity of opinion regarding its timing, effects and extent. Nonetheless, I suspect it is a phrase we will hear more about in the not-too-distant future. Peak oil could well herald the end of globalisation, a process intimately connected to our society's addiction to cheap energy. Perhaps the historically unprecedented material prosperity of industrialised society is an experiment rapidly reaching its conclusion.

But whatever the specifics of future energy resources, how ought we respond to such global scarcity? Does Christianity have anything to say in such a situation?

I believe the good news of Jesus Christ explodes the myths around global scarcity, liberating us to live differently.

1. Apathy and the myth of infinite growth

For many people, predictions of doom and social breakdown have become passé. There is something unreal about all the talk of the end of the world as we know it. Things have never seemed better. Technology and the free market
have harnessed human creativity beyond what was imaginable in previous centuries. Surely, we reason, market forces will create the willpower and resources to solve this problem. If this is to be an economic crisis, then there will inevitably be an economic solution. Some claim that rising oil prices simply make further exploration and development of hard-to-get oil more affordable, or that rising prices will simply accelerate research into alternatives.

These may be true, if there is time. But unless the most optimistic estimates of the oil companies aretrue, wesimply won'thave enough energy to make the changes without a lot of pain.

Such blind faith in the free market is based on what we might call "the myth of infinite growth'. Free market capitalism assumes that economic growth is normal and sustainable infinitely.

However, for this to be true, there must always be new resources to exploit, new markets to open up, new horizons to discover, explore and commodify.

However, we live on a finite planet. While human imagination and ingenuity can "create' new resources by opening up new ways of thinking and behaving, nevertheless there are certain physical limits on the system as a whole which make infinite growth a dangerous, indeed potentially disastrous, basic assumption to work with.

It is possible to generate a "Christian' version of this blind faith, based on unqualified claims of God's sovereignty. For example, if God is in charge, he won't let our civilisation collapse. And, if God loves us, he will protect our society from anything too bad, so we can ignore dire predictions of impending catastrophe. Perhaps this feeling is stronger in America, where many people still assume their nation has special prerogatives as a divinely chosen
instrument,but I suspect that a weak version is held by many of us in the West who assume, perhaps subconsciously or implicitly, that the wealth and growth of our society is a mark of God's basic approval of our democracy and freedoms.

After the flood story in Genesis 6-8, God made a promise to Noah guaranteeing against another global disaster that would end all life.But God made no such promises about specific civilisations.The next major incident in Genesis is the tower of Babel and the sudden, permanent breakdown of a society. Moving further into the biblical narrative, Israel's status as God's chosen people did not protect her from slavery, exile and scattering. The Roman Empire, when it fell, was a largely Christian society. However we are to understand it, belief in divine sovereignty does not justify closing our eyes to the possibility of disaster. God's rule is no guarantee against calamity.

It will simply not do to deny the possibility of catastrophe based on blind faith, whether faith in the market or in God. Following Jesus means being freed from false hopes. If, as Christians believe, God raised Jesus from the dead,
then God has promised to also raise those who follow Jesusand to restore and transform the entire created order.

In light of these great promises, there is no need to generate a mistaken belief inhuman, or western or capitalist invincibility. If God can raise the dead,vthen death (whether individual or social) need not terrify us. And this means that Christians are freed from having to believe the myth of infinite growth or relying on the market's ability to solve the world's problems. The market may have a place, but it no longer needs to be seen as humanity's saviour and hope.

By trusting in the God who is committed to humanity it is possible to ask hard questions about what might be on the horizon. It may be that predictions of peak oil turn out to be incorrect or based on false assumptions, but these are discussions Christians ought to be entering, indeed initiating and leading, given the potentially huge social suffering that may well be around the corner.

Some Christians might consider these debates a distraction from the real issue of preaching the gospel. In one sense, yes, it is quite possible for secondary concerns to make the church forget its raison d'etre: witnessing to Christ crucified, celebrating his resurrection and awaiting his return. However, willfully ignoring secondary concerns can be a symptom of an unfaithfulness that reveals a failure to grasp and embody these very truths. Christ's bodily resurrection is an affirmation of the goodness of creation and generates a hope for the redemption of the world, not merely redemption from the world. The good news includes not just our "souls", but our whole lives and the entire created order. God is the one who makes all things new. And since God's love for us is not limited to our minds, Christian love for our neighbour is also more holistic than simply imparting important information.

2. Fear and the myth of scarcity

There is a second common response when faced with predictions of calamity, and that is to run the nightmare scenarios through to their various conclusions in our imaginations and end up in despair, paralysed by fear.

What might the world be like after a global economic collapse? What will happen to our lifestyle, our security, our health and safety? What kind of a world will our children inherit?

The futurec an seem bleak and hopeless. Globalised civilisation, addicted to cheap oil, might not survive in anything like its present form, and what is left may be so unrecognisable that those who remain (which, on some estimates, may only be a small percentage of the world's present population) will find themselves desperately scrabbling for bare necessities in a post-industrial neo- tribalism. Even if we avoid this worst-case scenario, there are enough variations to make any imaginative observer pause and consider other civilisations whose short- sighted greed ended in self-destruction.

This second response is again understandable, but is also based upon a myth, the myth of scarcity. Our society looks at the world through assumptions about a "normal' lifestyle of comfort and ease, a lifestyle that is an anomaly in
comparison with most of humanity for most of history. We are the richest generation to have ever lived; and most of us belong to the top few percent of the richest people in the world, simply by living in Australia. From our highly unusual perspective, the prospect of life without all the creature comforts to which we have grown accustomed makes us deeply anxious. We assume our wants are needs and so feel that there are not enough resources to go around; there is scarcity.

Indeed, perhaps we feel that God is stingy. It's ironic, isn't it, we have more material wealth than anyone has ever had, and yet we're deeply anxious about there not being enough. Nonetheless, for the Christian, despair is not an option because, despite appearances, scarcity is not the problem. Our first parents, faced with a whole garden of goodies, nonetheless came to believe that God had short changed them by denying them the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However this image is to be interpreted, the sting in the serpent's questions was the nagging fear that God was not generous, was not good, had not provided enough.

But of course, like them, we live in a world with ample resources to provide for our needs. The problem is that we have artificially inflated our needs to include cheap transport, easy energy, comfort and inordinate, ever-expanding wealth.

The Christian Scriptures offer a different take on life:

" [G]odliness with contentment is great
gain. For we brought nothing into the
world, and wecan takenothing out of
it. But if we have food and clothing, we
will be content with that. People who
want to get rich fall into temptation and
atrap and into many foolish and
harmful desires that plunge people into
ruin and destruction. For the love of
money is a root of all kinds of evil.
Some people, eager for money, have
wandered from the faith and pierced
themselves with many griefs.

This passage is a polemic against those who think that being godly is a way to get rich, as though God paid cash for following him. Instead, godliness brings something much more satisfying: the possibility of contentment. The
threshold for contentment suggested here is counter culturally low: if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. Notice some of the things missing from this list: an iPod, well-paid employment with advancement prospects, a second car (a first car!), a mortgage-free home, financial security.

Our needs are different from our wants. Learning to distinguish them is liberating: a perspective we desperately need.

Byron Smith is a ministry assistant at All Souls Anglican Church in Leichhardt, Sydney.