this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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Lots of it is generated by burning biologically sequestered solar energy from hundreds of millions of years ago.
Which is not renewable. Unless you can wait for a couple of million years.
not even then. the conditions that turned vegetation in to coal no longer exist
The process still exists, its just limited to rare environments, and will never be the scale as it once was.
The thing is that back in Carboniferous, there were the first trees but no decomposers for that so the process still exists but there are other processes that make it much more unlikely
One of my favorite insane conspiracy theories is that petroleum is constantly produced and is a renewable resource but that fact is hidden from us because it would mean "they" wouldn't be able to impose carbon taxes and create more profit from other energy sources.
I suppose it isn't completly a lie. It just takes 100 million years under some pretty specific circumstances, but there's likely places where it's currently being produced naturally right now...
The theory is that there is biotic petroleum(the oil we know) formed from biomass from millions of years ago and there is abiotic petroleum that constantly forming from carbon sources deep in the Earth.
Depending on what degree of delusion, they either believe that there is more petroleum being produced than we use or there is less being produced than we need and we need to offset the deficit with other forms of energy.
As you can imagine, the believers in limitless abiotic petroleum tend to have some overlap with young Earth creationists and flat-earthers.
The planet can, maybe the next species of critters to pick up a pointy stick can make use of it after it resets itself.
Well technically its still electricity created by the sun. Plants absorbed Carbon dioxide, turned it into carbon with the power of the sun, died and got buried deep below.
Yes, that's what they said.