After a heated "debate" this morning in a diary. I thought it prudent to create a new topic and discussion on this theory of Peak Oil, one that will not distract from the topic of the diary it started in. With Respect to the author and his great ideas, which I'll leave unnamed.
Is it real or a created political ploy to steal millions from everyone? Is oil created by the decomposition of dead dinosaurs as we all were taught or is it abiotic?
I fell into the trap of Michael Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon" book and his fear mongering site "From the Wilderness". I read all I could back in 2000 & 2001. Only to find out he is an ex narcotics cop that knew as much as I did then about oil and oil production and the such.
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Here's why I no longer believe in the created theory of Peak Oil and why I believe it is a lie we've been fed for a good generation now.
1.Logically speaking as pointed out in this article from the Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal article previously cited noted that it "would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil in the [Middle East]." I don't know what the precise dinosaur-carcass-to-barrel-of-oil conversion rate is, but it does seem like it would take a hell of a lot of dead dinosaurs. Even if we generously allow that a single dinosaur could yield 5 barrels of oil (an absurd notion, but let's play along for now), more than 130 billion dinosaurs would have had to be simultaneously entombed in just one small region of the world. But were there really hundreds of billions of dinosaurs roaming the earth? If so, then one wonders why there is all this talk now of overpopulation and scarce resources, when all we are currently dealing with is a few billion humans populating the same earth.
So, it would take 130 billion dinosaurs all dying at the same time in the same place and for them to be covered completely with sediment so as to start the million plus year process of creating oil, as is taught today.
One has to ask the next question well how big was the average dinosaur? Well this was a tad harder to figure out than one would expect. But the best guess is anywhere from 2 short tonnes (2000 lbs. per ton) to 121 short tonnes (or 242,000 lbs) each.
Now we're talking some big animals/creatures. I'm being really conservative and going to guess here, really low and say, 2 short tonnes which would mean the average dinosaur was on average 4,000 lbs. and there had to be 130 BILLION of them all dying at the same time in the same place and covered completely in sediment right after their deaths and left undisturbed for millions upon millions of years.
See the problem yet? As I do?
Let's not forget that Saudi Arabia supposedly holds 25% of the total oil supply the world will ever have.
So, we'd have to multiple that 130 billion dinosaurs by 4 to keep with the theories we've all been taught meaning there had to be at least 520 billion dinosaurs weighing in at 4,000 lbs each (my low estimate) to create all the oil in the world today.
Now, I know some will say, well the K-T impact could have buried them all, unfortunately, this theory has been revised and changed quite a few times over the past couple years. So, this theory can't be included, not yet.
New Doubts Raised Over What Killed Off Dinosaurs
So, strictly speaking from a logical point of view here, something doesn't add up. That seems like a lot of dinosaurs doesn't it? 520 Billion, wow. And my snark here would be, they NOW claim that our puny 7 Billion humans are really destroying the earth. So, it seems that the Earth surely couldn't handle 100 Billion to 500 Billion dinosaurs so where did all the organic matter come from?
Now, to be fair here, I even included the total number of trees in the world, maybe this could explain the problem better. Nope, trees are 60% water, so that can't be make up the difference. I could go into the mathematical figures of how I came to this conclusion, but suffice it to say, there are on average 400 trees per acre and the entire world would have 88.3 billion trees that could not be bigger than 40 feet high, due to evolution. We have a problem, not enough biomass yet.
And we have to logically discount their newest theory of plankton die offs in the oceans because this cannot be proven. Except for the simple fact the levels of plankton required to just fill Saudi Arabia would take all the plankton in the world today, dying at the same time in the same place and of course being buried all together at the same time.
So, this was my first problem with Oil being a "Fossil Fuel". Once I started to educate myself more on the subject.
This lead me to an "alternative theory" that was postulated back in the 1940's and 1950's by Russian and Ukrainian scientists and geologists and it was completely ignored by the Western world, i.e., all of us. The theory that oil is abiotic and is created in the mantel of the Earth through a geologic process.
Below are link after link after link that anyone can take the time, like I did to read and review and understand.
There is more evidence and proof that oil is created by abiotic forces than the brain numbing theory that oil comes from dead biomass, dinosaurs, plankton, etc.
Fossils From Animals And Plants Are Not Necessary For Crude Oil And Natural Gas, Swedish Researchers Find
ScienceDaily (Sep. 12, 2009) — Researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm have managed to prove that fossils from animals and plants are not necessary for crude oil and natural gas to be generated.
Raining hydrocarbons in the Gulf
"We're dealing with this giant flow-through system where the hydrocarbons are generating now, moving through the overlying strata now, building the reservoirs now and spilling out into the ocean now," Cathles says.
Endless oil
Russian research has shown that the Earth doesn’t need dinosaurs to produce oil.
Do dead dinosaurs fuel our cars? The assumption that they do, along with other dead matter thought to have formed what are known as fossil fuels, has been an article of faith for centuries. Our geologists are taught fossil fuel theory in our schools; our energy companies search for fossil fuels by divining where the dinosaurs lay down and died. Sooner or later, we will run out of liquefied dinosaurs and be forced to turn to either nuclear or renewable fuels, virtually everyone believes.
Except in Russia and Ukraine. What is to us a matter of scientific certainty is by no means accepted there. Many Russians and Ukrainians — no slouches in the hard sciences — have since the 1950s held that oil does not come exclusively, or even partly, from dinosaurs but is formed below the Earth’s 25-mile deep crust. This theory — first espoused in 1877 by Dmitri Mendeleev, who also developed the periodic table — was rejected by geologists of the day because he postulated that the Earth’s crust had deep faults, an idea then considered absurd. Mendeleev wouldn’t be vindicated by his countrymen until after the Second World War when the then-Soviet Union, shut out of the Middle East and with scant petroleum reserves of its own, embarked on a crash program to develop a petroleum industry that would allow it to fend off the military and economic challenges posed by the West.
Confessions of an "ex" Peak Oil Believer
By F William Engdahl, September 14, 2007
The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of oil anytime soon are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise. Peak Oil is not our problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. Dick Cheney and friends are all too willing to assist.
And just for clarification, F. William Engdahl is the author of "Seeds of Destruction". He sums up the theories and the politics pretty well here.
Odd Reservoir Off Louisiana Prods Oil Experts to Seek a Deeper Meaning
Economics never hindered the theorists, however. One, Thomas Gold, a respected astronomer and professor emeritus at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has held for years that oil is actually a renewable, primordial syrup continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attacked by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs, he says.
Stalin And Abiotic Oil
What they were acknowledging, lest anyone misunderstand, is that the oil that we pump out of reservoirs near the surface of the earth, and the oil that is spontaneously and continuously generated deep within the earth, could very well be the same oil. But even so, they insist, that is certainly no reason to abandon, or even question, our perfectly ridiculous 'fossil fuel' theory.
The link above is chock full of links and scientific reviews for abiotic oil creation. I don't want this diary to go much further today, it's quite long now. Hopefully people will review this and educate themselves.
In conclusion, I feel it necessary to come to a simple and poignant understanding here. History has shown that we have been lied to, manipulated and conned time and again by those "in power". Remember a few thousand years ago the world was built on Salt and the control thereof.
What makes us think that oil today isn't the salt of the Romans Empire? Or that the political motives that pushed the Romans to manipulate and lie to their people that Salt was a "limited commodity" and therefore more valuable isn't occurring now? Do we not learn from history anymore?
Michael C. Lynch, from MIT's Center for International Studies, published this back in 2002. And he dissects "Hubbert's Curve"; which was the beginnings of the Peak Oil theory itself.
The many inconsistencies and errors, along with the ignorance of most prior research, indicates that the current school of Hubbert modelers have not discovered new, earth-shaking results but rather joined the large crowd of those who have found that large bodies of data often yield particular shapes, from which they attempt to divine physical laws. The work of the Hubbert modelers has proven to be incorrect in theory, and based heavily on assumptions that the available evidence shows to be wrong. They have repeatedly misinterpreted political and economic effects as reflecting geological constraints, and misunderstood the causality underlying exploration, discovery and production.
Maybe it's time that the "dogma" of Peak Oil, and the erroneous claims made be tested and debunked, even here at Daily Kos.
So, to those that will call me all sorts of names or derogatory and colorful adjectives. I challenge you to to read up on the materials before assuming anything. Question your belief system and let's see if it can hold water when the facts are reviewed.
After all, is a life not questioned worth living?