Fossil Fuels

These topics and questions are likely to turn up in any kind of a debate with greens or "Gaia" worshipers...

Greens are basically Malthusians; it is a good idea to understand who Thomas Malthus was, and what the term 'Malthusian' means. Thomas Malthus was a cousin of Darwin's who is generally credited with the idea that human populations tend to rise geometrically while supplies of food and every other kind of thing that humans require only rise arithmetic. The original formulation of Malthusian doctrines was that human populations on Earth would eventually breed themselves out of existence unless wars, famines, and other kinds of major grief managed to keep human populations in check.

The theory of evolution is part of a larger super theory ( paradigm) called uniformitarianism , which posits that changes in biological and geological forms take place only very gradually and over immense periods of time. and only via processes which we observe in nature today. That is, the idea of there having ever been processes in past ages that are no longer in evidence , is ruled out a priori.

The opposite of uniformitarianism, is Catastrophism. Catastrophism had been the accepted paradigm of the Natural Sciences for centuries prior to Darwin. Beginning around the mid-twentieth century , the catastrophist paradigm has been revived , beginning with the works of the Russian classicist Immanuel Velikovsky.

Velikovsky's 1950 book "Worlds in Collision" ignited the largest scientific controversy of the last century. That controversy affects multiple scientific fields and disciplines, Including biology and geology, and affects the question of whether there is such a thing as a fossil fuel.

A number of prominent people on the catastrophic side of the controversy believe that natural gas and petroleum are not fossil fuels , but rather natural elements of the planets body chemistry , and that we will never run out of them. Two books worth knowing about and having copies of are these:

https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Hot-Biosphere-Fossil-Fuels/dp/0387952535/ref=asc_df_0387952535

https://www.amazon.com/Environment-Violence-Readings-Cataclysm-Stone/dp/0969450605

C. Warren Hunt was a noted petroleum geologist and a fellow subscriber to a catastrophism email list that I used to belong to. I first heard this claim from him. Thomas Gold's book was published a bit later. The claims, as I understand them , are that natural gas and petroleum are formed up in the Deep layers of the Earth either via the activities of anaerobic bacteria , or via chemical processes but, in neither case could be construed as fossil fuels.

What C. Warren Hunt told me was that if you dig deep enough , you will always find petroleum and natural gas. He claimed that in the Americas , the channels to those deep areas had been broken up by catastrophes in the recent past; but that in Saudi Arabia , those channels were still intact and that despite all the usage of the oil fields in Saudi over the last century , proven reserves there are now greater than they had been a century ago . in other words those channels to the Deep sources are still there in Saudi and the oil fields there refill themselves. More recently , there have been claims of American oil fields beginning to refill although that apparently had not been the case when Hunt's book was published.

The only thing that leaves as any kind of a candidate for being a fossil fuel is coal, which is obviously a fossil fuel consisting of petroleum and the remains of the gigantic forests of past ages. The only question you really want to ask is how much time our present supply of coal is good for. For an idea of what a reasonable answer to that one looks like , you need to understand a little bit about catastrophism and the prehistory of our planet.

Coal deposits are probably similar to the gargantuan muck deposits that cover much of the northern hemisphere , at least as to their scope and the manner in which they were formed. I would guess that understanding those muck deposits would provide a reasonable ballpark guess as to the amount of coal on the Earth and how much time we might have before we ever run out of the stuff. the basic answer is that we will have solved all of our energy problems centuries before we ever run out of coal.

The two best descriptions of the muck deposits are found in the pages of two books:

https://www.amazon.com/Earth-Upheaval-Immanuel-Velikovsky/dp/1906833125/ref=asc_df_1906833125

https://www.amazon.com/Red-Earth-White-Lies-Scientific/dp/1555913881

So the basic reality is that those given to paranoia need to find better things to worry about than running out of fossil fuels. Petroleum and natural gas are not fossil fuels and there is no possibility of mankind running out of coal.

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