- Louis Hissink
The Hissink File - March 15, 2017

Ho hum, we are assumed to be running out of gas mainly because we are not replacing our coal fired power stations as the result of the CO2 religion. South Australia has an energy deficit and the rest of Australia will too once the CO2 religion is thoroughly embedded into Australian society.
Religion? Yes, because the CO2 religion is based on the pre-existing fear of biblical Armageddon. Surely Hissink has finally lost his marbles, some of you might mutter behind his back, but no, I have all my marbles, so I will explain it.
Australia is part of the Anglosphere that is the remnant of the British Empire which collapsed from Churchill’s folly of trying to destroy Germany as a trade competitor. The British Empire was founded on the Judeo-Christian ethic which includes the belief in biblical creation, whether of the Orthodox camp from a divine act some 6000 years ago, or in these days when scientism is at its zenith on the belief in a Big Bang some 14 billions of years ago. Both versions believe in the existence of an inanimate and unconscious un-living physical universe on which is imposed a theology ordained biosphere. This world-view believes that coal and hydrocarbons are formed from the burial of bio-detritus via the subduction zones of plate tectonic theory inside the Earth. The essence of the belief is that life is a divine creation added to a much older inanimate physical earth-system, and is thus strictly a surface phenomenon of limited extent.
This belief led to the theory of Peak Oil and the belief in finite resources of hydrocarbons. It includes the belief that coal is compressed vegetation, and since the known massive coal beds started from the Carboniferous Era, and have not been added to since, means the coal deposits are also finite.
These ideas are problematical because they are deduced from a miracle, that of divine creation. These ideas are the outcome of religiously trained peoples who are also great in number, there being, roughly, some 2.4 billion believing Christians, 1.6 billion believing Muslims, etc., etc.. So Peak Oil theory is essentially a product of this religiously inspired culture. Could peoples of this culture imagine alternative scientifically based geological models not deduced from miracles or fictions?
I’m irreligious, and as a result able to think outside the box. So I assume that hydrocarbons are not recycled biomass, but derived from a deeper biomass inside the earth. It is otherwise known as the Russian-Ukrainian theory of abiotic oil (Abiotic oil). This theory is a proven fact and importantly does not rely on the presumption of a divine creation miracle. The theory asserts that petroleum is ultimately derived from the mantle and seeps upwards via fractures forming oil at depth, and coal near the surface.
The last biological mass extinction was the K-T event 65 millions of years ago. This event coincided with the global deposition of massive beds of carbonates either from the mantle or the decomposition of the Carboniferous biosphere that preceded the Cretaceous. Where did all the carbon and carbon dioxide come from? The mantle seems the most plausible conclusion, everything else considered. What caused it? No one knows.
We do not know what caused that extinction, but some of us do understand that coal and oil, and hence gas, (methane) are instead mantle originated emissions that have, in places, replaced buried biomass.
We are, as a biological species, the outcome of a hydrogen-carbon based life forms and live by converting hydrocarbons into energy. To do that we burn carbon to produce carbon dioxide which is then recycled into the symbiotic plant kingdom that we ultimately feed on. Call it a super Gaia theory if you must, but the Earth’s biosphere is an outcome of the processes of the Earth as it is. The presence of CO2, everything else being equal, in an atmosphere indicates the presence of carbon based life-forms.
The weird thing about CO2 is that it absorbs heat such that as a biological population increases, thus producing more CO2, that extra CO2 then absorbs the heat which then starts to cool the environment down, causing the carbon-based life forms to reduce in population. A carbon-based biosphere thus uses CO2 as a feedback mechanism regulating population numbers.
To an irreligious individual like myself, abiotic oil theory is a no-brainer. To a devotee of an Abrahamic faith abiotic oil theory is, however, a heresy for it imputes that life is not a specific divine creation. But as the devoted outnumber the rest, it is unlikely that any change in energy policy will occur, here and elsewhere in the Anglosphere and West.
There is no shortage of energy, for we have potentially abundant sources of petroleum, coal and gas.
There is, however, a chronic shortage of intelligence, and that remains an insoluble problem while religion trumps reality. The energy shortage flagged by the politicians at the present moment is totally self-inflicted by the belief in the fake-science of climate change. It suggests that plate tectonics too is fake-science, along with our present day understanding of geological evolution (which includes biological evolution).
We have adopted the Climate Change religion. As the previous religion dealt with utopia or heaven in the hereafter, I am not sure that the priests of the new Climate Change religion understand the cost of enabling utopia in the present here and now.
We are living in interesting times.
Louis Hissink
Henry’s Irreligious Geologist.