The mainstream belief about petroleum(1) is that it is the leavings from the previous cycle of life on this planet(2), that a massive meteor impact (3) or some such thing approximately 65 million years ago exterminated all life larger than a mole, and some how all that biological material found its way under ground, where exposed to heat and pressure it turned in to petroleum.
It has occured to me that We may be wiping out the current cycle of life on this planet by burning the leavings from the previous cycle of life here.(4)
I find this ironic… you know?
If there’s truth that Intelligence is a Survival Factor… how would you figure our odds right now?
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(1) “mainstream belief” because there are contending theories about the origin of petroleum. One alternate theory, from a geologist who has (or had) a habbit of being right when his piers were often wrong, is that petroleum is actually generated by geological processes and is therefore actually a self-renewing resoruce. Perhaps not in a time frame useful to short-lived humans, but on a geological time scale it might renew itself. There are other ideas besides those two as well, but mainstream thought is that it is an entire surface world that “rotted” very quickly following mass extinction event.
(2) There have at least five mass extinctions on this planet, the wiping out the dinosaurs was the latest, a mere 65.5 million years ago (“mere” to the planet of course, not to us). It is now thought by many (and many) that we are witnessing the Sixth Mass Extinction, and that it’s all man-made. My own thinking is that it might all be man made, but I find it also possible that the Planet itself has gotten tired of the “skin rash” it has developed recently [recent in its time scale] and is having the planetary equivalent of an immune reaction. However, the end result is the same either way… A difference that makes no difference, as the Wise Old Sage said.
(3) There are several theories now about how the dinosaurs and most of the ecosphere of the time crashed, a ten-kilometer meteor being just one of them. Some of the alternate ideas of much scarier, though, so we won’t go there for the nonce.
(4) If Old Man Rockefeller back at the dawn of the previous century had lost the battle to determine whether petroleum or corn oil & alcohol was going to fuel the new automotive carriages it is unlikely that we would now be in this Global Climate crisis and probable Sixth Mass Extinction Event. Corn uses CO2 from the air, recycling all the ingredients along with new energy from Sunlight. Burning Petroleum on the other hand (and coal, and shale oil and all the rest of the so-called fossile fuels) puts CO2 in the air that was not there before. Billions (trillions?) of tons of CO2 that was geologically locked up for millions of years has now been added to the atmosphere, where plant fuels would smply have been using the same CO2 that was already in the air and adding nothing new. <Sigh>