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This is about science, not politics or economics, and so... the scientific method should offer a clue. It should be possible to conduct experiments, both in the field and the lab, that would either support or discount the basis of this theory. For instance, has any of his theorized "deep hydrocarbon fixing microbes" been collected via deep drilled core samples? If so, what do they do in experimental conditions in the laboratory? Plus, I've always heard and read that coal is the result of millions of years of terrestrial plant life, not petroleum. The billions and billions of tons of plant-biomass material being accumulated and compressed in bogs and swamps became metamorphosed into peat, then lignite, bituminous, and finally anthracite coal. This makes sense as I have personally collected fern and plant fossils associated with coal mines in Illinois. As I remember it, oil and petroleum hydrocarbons are the result of accumulation, compression, and metamorphization of sea plankton, or diatoms. Former college buddies of mine, who studied geology and paleontology, were hired by oil companies to study fossil diatoms found in seabed cores, to determine the best offshore oil drilling locations. Anyone have more to add that might enlighten us as to where this all fits in?

It usually takes science a while to catch up to Thomas Gold and prove him correct...

From the Wash Post link:

"...Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould has labeled Gold "one of America's most iconoclastic scientists." Says Gold himself: "In choosing a hypothesis there is no virtue in being timid ... [but] I clearly would have been burned at the stake in another age."

In 1947, fresh from pioneering wartime work on the development of radar, he used his research into high-frequency receptors to publish an entire new theory of mammalian hearing. Physiologists shrugged it off for 30 years. Until auditory technology evolved enough to prove him correct.

In 1959, when everybody thought the surface of the moon was frozen lava, Gold decided it was covered with dust from meteor impacts. Footprints of the Apollo astronauts will testify eternally that he was was right about that, too.

In 1967 astronomers trashed his suggestion that energy pulsating in the distant universe was the signature of collapsing stars. The subsequent observation of pulsars won two other scientists a Nobel Prize. And proved Gold correct.

In 1992 he predicted that Martian meteorites might contain fossilized microbes. Four years later NASA announced the same thing.

Now in a new book, "The Deep Hot Biosphere," Gold says the origin and bulk of biological life is not on the surface of the Earth where the birds and bunnies are, but deep within it. Moreover, that microscopic life force is fueled by an inexhaustible supply of petroleum constantly migrating outward from our planet's volcanic core."

I have no idea whether the guy is right or not, but life exists in the deepest mineshafts, up to two miles deep. Life exists in boiling acidic water, with no oxygen and with no sunlught.

Some respected biologists believe that by weight, there is more life in the earth's crust than on the surface and in the oceans.

Assuming that petroleum is being replenished, the next question would be, at what rate?

"The billions and billions of tons of plant-biomass material being accumulated and compressed in bogs and swamps became metamorphosed into peat, then lignite, bituminous, and finally anthracite coal. This makes sense as I have personally collected fern and plant fossils associated with coal mines in Illinois."

If coal is converted plant biomass, then why weren't the ferns and other plant fossils that you found in the coal, coal rather than fossils?