The Great Oil Mystery

The generally accepted (read: people in Europe and America think its true) belief is that oil is old dinosaurs, algae, trilobites and ferns, squished under unimaginable pressure for unimaginable periods of time.

That, like so much of science, is a theory, and it turns out, like so much of science, there are alternate views on the subject.

Kevin Kelly is an exceptionally interesting guy and on his blog he has a very interesting post about some of those competing views -

The conventional wisdom is that oil descends from algae from eons ago. Lots and lots of algae.

[There] alternative theory that oil comes from non-biological carbon compounds deep in this planet, like the methane oceans we find on other planets.

An emerging third theory is that bacteria living within rocks produce oil.

This seems important to me for one and only one reason. If there is a globally unlimited resource of hydrocarbons, the likelihood of naturally arising economic signals strong enough to change emission and consumption patterns would be quite low. The appearance of high energy prices is actually good news. That it arose on its own because of supply constraints and the tumbling dollar is less than ideal because it doesn't target inefficient energy consumption as smartly as a carbon tax or a cap and trade system would and it doesn't lead to a national renewable energy fund. It just dumps money into the hands of ExxonMobil and Russia.

Putting money in the hands of people who gain from the widespread use of clean technologies is just smarter.