A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 33 – Pursuing the Truth

It is far from easy in today’s world.

This short course in comprehensive thinking is really about pursuing the truth. Science is a way to pursue the truth, so is scholarship, and so are legal procedures and many other human practices. However, in a world of scarcity and fear, they all get corrupted, to one degree or another. Dennis Lee’s attorney once told me, “If you are looking for the truth, you are not going to find it in a courtroom.”

I recently wrote on how conservatively I formed my comprehensive perspective. I cannot engage in speculation to do what I do. My views are rooted in either my direct personal experiences, the experiences of those close to me, and the best scholarly and scientific findings that I know of. It took long years of effort to produce my writings.

Many areas that I write about are highly controversial, and those milieus can be like three-ring circuses of lying officials and a lying media, fraudulent “evidence,” suppressed evidence, wild speculation, and other issues, as the subjects become huge political footballs. I was dragged into the Moon landings issue, spent a dozen years on the JFK-assassination issue after reading Gary Wean’s account, did not begin to study the free-energy issue until after I had my life ruined in its pursuit, and did not begin to study the media until I had seen it lie about my companies for several years (1, 2).

Many areas that I studied were the province of scientists, and those areas could be as corrupt as the others, especially biomedical science, which is considered the flimsiest and most corrupt branch of science, even by the defenders of science. Brian O’Leary was astounded by the crazed reactions of denial and fear of famous scientists to the idea of free energy, so much so that Brian began openly wondering if humanity was a sentient species.

I have written how the political right denies Global Warming and the political left denies the corruption in Western medicine. A reader recently brought up the issue of abiotic oil, and this is a good area to highlight the nature of these controversies. I was introduced to the Peak Oilers by Richard Heinberg’s work in early 2003, just before the USA invaded Iraq. Heinberg was onboard with the idea that the 9/11 terror attacks were an inside job (an idea that I do not dismiss), but he could not seem to fathom the reality of free-energy technology and its organized suppression. That was a very curious mixture of buying some conspiracies and denying others. What I have noticed over the years is that the left in general denies any and all conspiracies and their import, no matter what the evidence is, while the right is conspiracy-obsessed, but their “evidence” is often tabloid-level speculation. Both camps miss the boat, in my opinion.

Almost as soon as I heard of Peak Oilers, I was introduced to abiotic-oil promoters, who argue that oil does not result from tectonic processes acting on the detritus of life, but is created in Earth’s mantle (or was there at Earth’s formation) and bubbles to the surface. I looked into abiotic-oil promoters back then, and have periodically done so ever since. I am highly dubious of the abiotic-oil idea. One of the first rebuttals to abiotic oilers that I read was from Heinberg himself. What became very clear from the beginning was that Peak Oil and abiotic oil were huge political footballs. Here is a presentation by arguably the most prominent abiotic oiler. Here is a good college presentation on the life-origin of oil. Here is a prominent survey of the issue, and here is another.

The abiotic (AKA “abiogenic”) oil idea is centuries old. It largely died with the rise of plate tectonics, like the pole-shift idea did. Plate tectonics provided an explanatory mechanism for a range of scientific findings. I thought that that college paper did a good job of presenting the basics, which are probably enough for most people.

Nearly all oil is found in sedimentary rocks, where that oil almost certainly formed. Paleologists are familiar with white and black sedimentary layers that they hunt for fossils in. The white layers were formed when the ocean floor was oxygenated, while the black layers were formed when the conditions were oxygen-poor (AKA “anoxic” and where the best fossils are often found, as they did not decay in the anoxic conditions). The predominant theory today is that when those black layers got subducted by plate tectonics, oil was then made. As that college paper stated, oil is found in orogens (where plates collide) and basins.

There have been claims of depleted oil fields that “replenished” themselves, but in every instance I have seen, they had little or nothing to do with the abiotic-oil idea, but were because the fields were more complex than originally thought or there was natural seepage back to where the oil had been removed. There was a famous attempt to find abiotic oil, but it was a dry well.

For me, the carbon-isotope findings are persuasive. Oil is depleted in carbon-13. Life prefers lighter isotopes, such as carbon-12, because more energy is released from reactions with them (less energy goes into moving the lighter carbon atoms). Also, nitrogen is found in oil, which comes from the amino acids of life. Also, oil is optically active, which is another signature of life (it is like right and left handedness). Life’s molecules are often right or left handed, which leads to that optical activity. Scientists have reconstructed the chemical stages of reducing life’s remains to the compounds that make oil today. Abiotic oilers have made rebuttals to those findings, generally that bacteria deep in Earth are responsible for them.

I have never found the abiotic-oil arguments and evidence very persuasive, but I am not a professional scientist. But whatever the reality is, it is obvious that the abiotic-oil idea became a huge political football, especially on the right. Buying the abiotic oil idea allows right wingers to deny Peak Oil, just as they deny Global Warming. They can have their cake at eat it too: there is unlimited oil and its use does not have any environmental impact. I regard those positions as highly delusionary, as people have cherry-picked the theories that align with their political philosophies. As I stated, the left does that same thing with Western medicine. These are only more examples of my journey’s primary lesson, in my opinion, as people abdicate their sentience for personal safety or gain.

Even if abiotic-oil theory and Global Warming denial are right, there is no way that oil can be replenished faster than we are burning it. Also, the deeper the extraction, the more energy goes into extracting it, so that it eventually takes more energy to mine it than we get from burning it. The USA reached Peak (conventional) Oil in 1970, just as Hubbert predicted in the 1950s, the world reached Peak Oil in 2005 (in this presentation), and humanity is increasingly mining the dregs of Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits.

Of course, free-energy technology, which is older than I am, makes those issues vanish, as well as many others. That is what my work is about.