収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Gold was an amateur pretending expertise outside his field, and his work has been thoroughly debunked. It's not just creationists who've picked up on his stuff; I've also seen it from self-proclaimed "libertarians" who irrationally see any discussion about the scarcity of resources as somehow anti-capitalist. People who are otherwise quite smart.

Their fundamental failure of logic rests on two mistaken ideas:

If oil or other petroleum products can be created abiotically anywhere, even by humans, then most oil must be abiotic. So evidence of methane on planets without any signs of life are to them proof that oil on earth is similarly abiotic, despite differences in planetary formation.

If abiotic oil exists, then it can be economically extracted. The idea that it can take so much energy to extract oil that alternatives will be chosen instead completely eludes them. So, it must be possible to economically drill to the oil that magically exists in the interior of Earth and extract it at a price that allows the current oil economy to last forever. Also, it's economically possible to use methane from other planets, and other hydrocarbons out there in space.

In fact, the actual data contradicts both ideas, which are illogical in any case. The isotopic signatures of known oil reserves match biological origin almost everywhere. The sole case where any natural abiotic oil was found included only the merest traces, with the bulk (as in more than 99%) of the oil in that location being biological in origin. I have the entire text of this particular bit of research on my home computer, from a previous effort to debunk the whole idea that ran into calls for scientific evidence either way.