Abiotic

Post-Impressionism / Konstantinos Maleas/ Santorini

Sitting around on a cloudy Sunday morning, slugging down a couple cups of tea and waiting for the laundry.  I’m considering heading over to hang out with the boyos for a bit, but that is still up in the air.

An interesting article over at Ugo’s a couple of days ago.  I read Thomas Gold back in the 80’s when I was still in grad school and I was sorta-kinda hopeful that it was correct.  I guess that the vestiges of the oil-price wars and the legacies of the seventies were still with me.

I was kinda surprised that the theory was still being discussed.  While Ugo did put abiotic oil into what seems a reasonable place in the grand scheme of things, he also got me thinking about the ways of science and the nature of debate.

First and foremost, I tend to agree with Ugo that abiotic is probably a minor component of oil formation.  Hell, even if it is a significant component, the chances of it pulling us out of the slump we are in is almost zero.  So for the most part abiotic oil is used as a crutch for those who just can’t believe for a moment that we have gotten ourselves into the predicament that we are in.

But by the fact that a lot of smart folks are out there still arguing about just how, over the course of a couple of million years, we got blessed with a buttload of almost-free energy seems a touch incongruous.  Simply put, we thought something was bigger than it was and acted accordingly, now we are noticing that Mother Hubbard’s cupboard is looking decidedly bare.

Now, I am throwing a touch of judgement out here, but really, it isn’t very heartfelt and it isn’t all that useful.  But since both biotic and abiotic oil take geological time to create, and the problems that we have with peak oil appear to be coming around in this old man’s lifetime, I tend to think that this is angels dancing on the head of a pin.

I can understand why Ugo wrote the article ten some odd years ago, and I appreciate the thought that went into it, but I kinda feel sorry for his role as one of the leading lights of the peak oil scene.  The fact that he is fighting the same fight after all this time must be exhausting.  Folks are spending a lot of time trying to convince folks that nothing is going to change

What the peak oil movement was so rude to tell people is that the world that they wanted is not available.  That the cheap energy that fuels the frivolity of the modern world is going to be less and less available and will need to go into activities more important than W.A.P.

The scope of the article was tunnel vision.  I suppose that the best that I can offer as a contribution to the core thesis of the article is a refinement of the analogy.

I think a slightly more refined (but certainly not more accurate) analogy would be much more difficult to convey than the elegance of Mr. Vonnegut.  Imagine instead that the Tralfamadorian allowed movement of the head but not an increase in visual field.  But to make it even more Tralfamadorian, whenever the head moved, there was pain.  

With a lot of time and a lot of pain, you could piece together a much more complex picture of the world.  But I really don’t see this in the cards.