The email that alerted me to this was called "Drill deep enough, find Gold"

[james_davis_nicoll]

The relevant bit begins around 2:20

"Jerome Corsi: 'Co2 is Good' & 'Obama's Gay' Conspiracy Nut - Rachel Maddow Show" (Watch on YouTube)

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Googling thomas gold light pressure tosses up an old post of mine as the second hit...

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

Well, we already know that They suppressed the Nazis' lunar missile bases (Heinlein 1947), super-advanced aircraft (Spielberg 1981), and nuclear-armed A10 ICBM (Hystery Channel, passim). Why shouldn't They have suppressed breakthrough Geologie und Planetologie as well?

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

Gold would have been appalled at the people citing him now.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Is it my imagination, or did Maddow used to have much higher information density? I don't remember her repeating herself so much.

[johnreiher.livejournal.com]

I never heard the abiotic theory of oil replenishment. I do remember reading about a different theory that oil is the waste product of anaerobic bacteria that lives deep in the crust. I can't remember if it was Gold who posited that idea or not.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Whatever the source, oilfields still run dry when you pump out their contents faster than new oil can seep in, so it's irrelevant to our near-future energy policies. Same as with helium trapped in oilfields - whether it's formed from radioactive decay or alien mole-people's party balloons, if we waste it now, it'll take generations for more to accumulate.

[graydown.livejournal.com]

Someday, the helium bubble will burst. And then we'll all sound very silly.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

Stolen

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

:)

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

Folks like this never seem to tire of coming up with new reasons why they don't feel like protecting the environment. I wish they'd at least be honest about it and say, "Because moneymoneymoneymoneymoney." It would save everyone a lot of time.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

If anything, a modern biological source would be more likely to support oil field replenishment. I suspect the "theory" may be a distraction tactic, intended to confuse and delay people who might otherwise spend time annoying oil companies.

There's a gene-tweaked breed of E. coli that produces diesel oil as a waste product, so it's not biologically impossible.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Some of the gas coming from shales is actually biogenic. The Marcellus (I think it is) shale in Michigan, for example, has a part where the methane is produced by microbes acting on kerogen in the shale.

Excessive salinity shuts this off, so one solution is to purge a fracked shale formation with fresher water.

I worry a bit that once gas shales are "done", the fracturing will lead to long term production of more methane, which may leak out for centuries.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

I think it's part of the effort to keep the Overton Window somewhere where you can't say "we really need to stop adding carbon to the atmosphere".

One way to do that has been making the argument that there is no possibility of an oil shortage, there's nothing to worry about.

(Never mind that coal, which is more abundant than oil, is the larger problem.)

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Now let me tell you about Underground Coal Gasification. It will enable deep, thin bed, and/or offshore coal to be exploited. Carbon for a thousand years!

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Heh. I'd heard about Corsi re the Obama birth certificate nonsense, but I was unaware that he was a conspiracy theory one-stop shop.

[solarbird]

It's not as goofy as these guys' involvement would naturally make you think.

Abiotic methane is legitimate, it's been demonstrated in the lab, here's an example. That's the nugget - HA! NUGGET! - of truth here, and it came out of investigations of these same older theories.

Nobody's figured out how to get to oil from that through geologic methods, though, and the Soviets abandoned the oil and natural gas deposit part of the theory because it was terrible (no better than random) at predictions, which has obvious implications.

[sanskritabelt.livejournal.com]

"which has obvious implications" yes, "inferior Bolshevik engineering not subject to the pressures of the free market", etc etc etc blah blah blah

[solarbird]

...I was thinking more along the lines of "predictions based on a theory never proving out casts doubt upon the validity of the theory," but carry on if you like...

[sanskritabelt.livejournal.com]

You can't seriously expect these people to accept the argument "The Soviets tried it and it didn't work". Don't you know the Soviets were communist?

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Could it be that some people are *really* confused about the Fischer Tropsch conversion process?

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

To be fair, this does explain why the Soviet Union, with its unlimited supply of oil and natural gas, was able to gain such an overwhelming edge in productivity over the Americans, who were of course held back by leftist dogma and why, in the end, the US proved unable to compete with Russia.

Because that's what happened, right?