So apparently a large-ish contingent of American reactionaries don’t think crude oil is a finite resource. They believe the Earth regenerates it at a faster pace than it can be drilled, and this isn’t a niche conspiracy theory either. I mentioned it off-hand at work after seeing a random tweet about it, then like 5 of my coworkers all nodded and agreed. One even used the term “abiotic oil.”
Is this just cope or what? One of my coworkers literally said, “Well oil is like water, it goes through a cycle and gets replenished.” Something about how crude oil is actually made through some kind of geological process, rather than decomposed algae/animal matter from millions of years ago. I think maybe there’s evidence of abiotic hydrocarbon gasses existing from various chemical reactions with minerals, but I believe there’s never been a convincing source of abiotic petroleum that couldn’t also be explained as biological in origin.
They don’t actually believe this, do they? It’s just a thin kind of security blanket so they don’t have to consider the reality of what fossil fuels truly are?
“oil cycle” is a good bit
the important thing is nobody really knows for sure which is the true origin of oil, so we’re going to act as though it’s the really convenient one and be all affronted whenever anyone suggests otherwise.
except… even if it’s the convenient, abiotic regenerative origin… that kinda means we could potentially put more CO2 into the atmosphere than was ever present at any point in the planet’s past. Like, if it were fossil fuels, then even if we burned every last drop there would still be some form of life that could survive the conditions, cus it was life that trapped all that carbon in the first place. But if we’re just pumping an endless supply of complex carbon chains…
I remember hearing some theory that oil might be produced by extremophile bacteria deep in the crust, which doesn’t make much sense, but it’s more plausible than the idea that oil spontaneously generates out of rocks, WTF.
Coal miners regularly find fossils in coal mines, and oil companies often employ paleontologists who study microscopic fossils brought up from oil wells to learn about the layers of rock they’re drilling through: https://wiki.aapg.org/Microfossils_in_exploration
Who was consuming this oil in the cycle before humans existed.
I think there was some peak oil cope back in the day that was something along the lines of “we dont really know where oil comes from, it could come from the earth’s mantle!”
We’re so cooked
this is probably insanely harmful, at least far worse than flat-earthers, but It’s still whimsical when reactionaries revive theories of 16th century natural philsophers like this and telegony and stuff compared to the normal social Darwinism shit.
If anyone wants some brain damage I’ve never even heard of abiotic oil before. We’re cooked if there are people that think this is real…
Oil from younger rocks contains compounds linked to flowering plants, but oil from older rocks formed before flowering plants existed contains only more primitive organic compounds.
This was an interesting little detail
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This is what that billions of Koch
bloodlobbying money paid to accomplish.If oil could be cheaply manufactured without mining, there would be a solid three dozen people in most Gulf states.
Well y’see, oil comes from dinosaur bones, and satan places dinosaur bones to trick us into thinking evolution is real, and since there are more and more excavations, satan needs to plant more fake dinosaur bones to keep up. The only thing stopping this from having no limit is that eventually satan will get tired.
The problem with capitalism is that you eventually run out of Satan’s dinosaur bones
The education system is fucked lol.
Even people who correctly understand that it’s biological, think it comes from dinosaurs. It’s like they heard the term ‘fossil fuel’ and just filled in the gaps.
A lot of our oil comes from long, long before dinosaurs existed. I believe it’s mostly pressurized plankton and plants/diatoms/algae/seaweed?
But yeah, if I am to get a bit tin foil: even if the education system wasn’t fucked, I think most people are suffering from some kind of severe trauma and/or propaganda induced psychosis. Also repeated COVID infections fucked up a lot of people’s brains. Everyone is very sick and very depressed.
I’ve noticed previously smart people I know go through some weird cognitive decline in the last 5 years. It’s actually really scary.
I’ve noticed previously smart people I know go through some weird cognitive decline in the last 5 years. It’s actually really scary.
There’s also the rising CO2 levels which may be contributing to mass mental impairment, and it’s not going to get better.
Not quite there, i think heat and related stresses will get us first
No lie I was literally taught in school about fossil fuels being from fossils, and it wasn’t until more recently as an adult I learned the real science. We don’t need reeducation for people…we need straight up education.
I might get in trouble for anti-religious sectarianism for saying this, but people underestimate how much damage US Christianity has done to peoples understanding of reality. I literally just tried to google about the origins of oil, and any of the websites on it that allowed comments were flooded with people commenting things like “WRONG: evolutionists want you to believe that oil is organic and finite so they can keep prices high! Why would organic material be found so far under the crust? Wake up!”
If the site policy is that protective of the intellectual influence of Evangelicalism, the site should be shut down because it has lost the plot.
It’s not, I’m just dumb lol
AmeriKKKan evangelicals are a cancer. Few things aggravate me more than the fact that when Norwegian black metal musicians decided to start burning down churches, they stayed in Norway and torched old pre-Christian “heathen” churches built by Norse pagans. If they could have just come over to the US, they could have had a grand old time with some of the evangelical megachurches out here, many of which aren’t built or wired up to code because in spite of somehow being able to afford $2M in real estate, the clergy are still penny-pinching chodes.
Its worse because he burned the traditional stave churches build by norwegian CHRISTIANS - but since evangelicals think that catholicism is paganism because it preserved some pagan remnants- it was a pagan church in their eyes.
I have had that same thought so many times. The history of church burnings in the US is fraught with race crime history because the KKK and others firebombed black churches because they used them to organize for civil rights.
It would be nice if it was just bored Satanist teens who thought it would be funny if they burned down evangelical mega churches over and over
I sincerely hope every here recognized Christian Fascism as being the American 21st century form of fashion and doesn’t try to stand up for it as a relgion.
There are a lot of Christian sects in the US that wield or or less political and cultural power, but American Fascism is based in the Christian Fascist sect that grew out of slave state protestantism.
Religious Tolerance and Christian Fascism is very much a “paradox of tolerance” thing. Christian Fascism must be destroyed because it’s a threat to everyone and everything else.
Oh good. I wasn’t sure what the consensus was with people here. Good to know I’m not gonna be stepping on toes
:yea:
it’s also that no one trusts one another unless they instantly vibe with whatever inner delusion unites them. Everyone’s split into little islands of soothing fun little stories
I mean I can sympathize with mistrust of institutions and expertise, but this is a level of skepticism beyond anything I’ve heard before. Like this baffles me more than flat earthers somehow. It’s just naked cope is what it is.
I think I’ve been noticing decline in myself. Never even had covid (as far as I know)
I would really love to see data on pre-covid cognitive tests compared against the same demographics now. With so much covid denial and weirdness going on it’s hard to even assess which information to pay attention to.
The weird patsocs are really into abiotic oil lol
they read about Mystery Flesh Pit National Park and thought it was a real thing that existed and there are real slumbering elder gods that poop oil
I thought that the Permian Basin Superorganism ate oil
Sort of, but also it eats nucleotides and mantle heat
nucleotides
Like big chunks of DNA buried underground?
Made of uranium yeah
https://thespouter.substack.com/p/to-dispense-with-abiotic-oil
recommend a bit of “investigation” prior to right to speak. It has an interesting history. Mao and Stalin were abiotic oil guys for a time!
There is a difference between people believing retrospectively dumb shit in the past versus believing dumb shit today. I’m not going to call some 16th century natural philosopher dumb for believing in elan vital or whatever.
the casual dunking from people with no idea of its historical background was more the point here. an interesting idea with a history in socialist science and instead reduced to the lowest common denominator for a cheap dunk is reddit culture for better or worse. Hence investigate…then dunk.
“Some Russian scientists investigated it in the 50s” and “Stalin was an abiotic oil guy” seems like a massive equivocation since Stalin wasn’t a geologist nor was he involved in geological research so far as I am aware aside from funding research into how to close the oil-production gap with the US.
