Several years ago I was at a conference in Oxford with an academic who told me that petroleum oil is the organic outcome of terrestrial chemical processes and is completely renewable.
Like diamonds, oil’s high value is based on a false economy. Maybe Crown Prince Abdullah agrees.
“‘The world is more likely to run out of uses for oil than Saudi Arabia is going to run out of oil,’ Adel al-Jubeir, top foreign policy adviser for Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Abdullah, said Wednesday.”



{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s true! Petroleum is indeed a totally renewable resource
All it takes is one to 560 million years, and voilà! We’ve got a whole ‘nother 150 years’ supply of oil!
So really, the problem isn’t that we’re running out of oil, it’s that people are just too damn impatient.
Jeez, freakin’ alarmists…
Just towing the party line there, Mr. Harrison. Good. The memetic engineering is working.
Yeah, I was thinking of believing in creationism, and that the world is 5000 years old and that the dinosaur bones were planted by Satan, and that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but then I thought, “no, that would require me to be a fucking moron, or an addled, delusional addict believing in things totally counter to all objective evidence (or a member of the current administration, but perhaps I’m getting redundant there..)”
Besides, I recently bought shares in an oil and gas fund that’s going up nicely on tightening supply, so keep this bloody stuff to yourself, Mr. Abraham!
Well, comments like that will make the Baby Jesus cry.
Wait just a minute.
There is actually scientific evidence for the proposition that oil may be a renewable resource – evidence which indicates oil is produced much more rapidly than previously believed.
I’m telling you this as one who graduated summa cum laude from Clemson University with a degree in physics, went to graduate school in physics at the University of Virginia, and is now an honors student at the Washington University School of Law.
There is actually strong scientific evidence to suggest that we may never run out of oil, just as there is strong scientific evidence to suggest that dinosaur fossils aren’t actually as old as is commonly thought.