Hi Glen, Regarding the Thomas Gold book, I have been urged not to take it seriously by geologists I trust. I also do not have the expertise to enable an informed opinion of my own. They seem to suggest, however, that Gold purposely ignores (a lot of) evidence that works in favor of the conventional (post-colonization of land by plants origin) view rather than his own. His thesis apparently was given a hearing in the community for a while some time ago, and when he simply ignored questions about other evidence rather than answering them, the community finally got tired of him. So he did what any of us would do: publish it in a book.
We have also had a lot of people through the Institute, and I have seen some up at LANL, to talk about peak oil. Apart from one oil-industry spokesman at a LANL meeting, none of them has expressed a serious reservation about the peak oil extraction rate estimates's being roughly right. The issue being that the energetic costs of extraction (no matter how they come to be priced) become limiting on the value of getting to oil, considerably before even the currently estimated reserves are "fully" exhausted. I have the Gold book, too, and need to read it at some point, because there may still be correct claims about the pervasiveness of bacterial and archaeal life well into the crust, which I would care about for other reasons. Eric ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
