It’s also considered a fringe theory.
Anyways, Matthew Simmons is a leader of what can only be described as a doomsday cult — the peak oil movement. You may think I’m exaggerating, but spend some time reading what’s been written on The Oil Drum and peakoil.net. One of the few places you can have hundreds of people writing about how they hope that someone finds a way to kill 95% of the world’s population because it’d be better than the inevitable upcoming global oil collapse, and *nobody seems to notice or care*. Why are we so concerned with the ELF and ALF and their bulldozer-destroying/home burning/lab raiding antics when we have tens of thousands of Peak Oil nuts who talk about how great it’d be if someone genetically engineered a superdisease or triggered a nuclear war?
They’re idiots, too. For example, they’re utterly convinced that the Athabasca tar sands — a huge sticking point for them — can’t be developed because “there’s not enough water” in the Athabasca river. Just ignoring that the production only needs a fraction as much water as is currently being used, the tar sands are less than a thousand miles away from the *ninth largest lake in the world*, plus dozens of other major rivers and lakes. To them, if the price of anything rises or the production of anything falls, it’s *clearly* due to a peak, and anyone who doesn’t agree is in denial. To them, new tech, like CO2 injection (which, for the US alone, is projected to give (three numbers I’ve seen) an additional: ~10B, ~90B, or ~400B barrels of oil, depending on the source) can’t work, all of the world’s major oilfields are found (despite just last year Brazil discovering three supergiants, one of which may be the world’s third largest oil discovery in history), coal liquefaction facilities can’t be built fast enough (as though Appalachia wasn’t covered in shuttered steel mills and with a very high unemployment rate) and that coal is running out (equally idiotic), and so on. It’s idiocy, but they cling to it like a religion.
A religion that wants 95% of the world’s population to die.
Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.
The new findings from the study led by Ralph Lorenz, Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., are reported in the Jan. 29 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters.
“Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals,” said Lorenz. “This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan.” ....
.... If all the observed liquid on Titan is methane, it would only last a few million years, because as methane escapes into Titan’s atmosphere, it breaks down and escapes into space. If the methane were to run out, Titan could become much colder. Scientists believe that methane might be supplied to the atmosphere by venting from the interior in cryovolcanic eruptions. If so, the amount of methane, and the temperature on Titan, may have fluctuated dramatically in Titan’s past.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20080213.html