Do you believe the Obama administration is waging a "war on coal"?

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_{The Obama has said that it wants an "all of the above" policy, however they are eliminating the biggest, safest, and most reliable option in removing fossil fuels (which, by the way, are renewable; it takes a relatively substantial amount of time, but they do renew themselves).}

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No, they don’t renew themselves. Living things die and are converted by very slow geological processes into hydrocarbon polymers aka fossil fuels. It takes a very long time.

It took the entire planet’s biosphere hundreds of millions to billions of years, the lives and deaths of quadrillions or more of living things, soaking up solar energy through direct or indirect (eating of plants) photosynthesis and using it to forge molecular bonds in simple molecules to assemble them into complex proteins (hydrocarbons), all to produce the supply of petroleum in the Earth. In the space of a little more than one nominal human lifespan, we’ve used up about ½ of that. The remaining ½ is further down, in more difficult to extract forms such as shale “oil” (not really petroleum but actually kerogen, a very inferior substance somewhere between real oil and tar), “oil” sands (ditto), etc.

We’re using it up billions of times faster than the Earth is making more.

Oh, and the line about Obama bankrupting coal companies? That was taken out of context. What he actually said was that under the Cap & Trade plan which didn’t pass, if someone wanted to build a new coal-fired electric power plant, they could still legally do so, but the lowering caps on emissions would eventually bankrupt them. He said nothing about the coal mining companies being bankrupted, nor existing coal-fired plants, and furthermore, this was only about what would happen under Cap & Trade which failed to pass the Senate.

If anything, Obama’s attempt to restrict the fracking method of natural gas extraction (which is environmentally dangerous in its own right) would, had Congress passed it, helped save coal from its recent collapse due to competition from the now much cheaper natural gas!

Nice try, but no. I know about “abiotic oil” and it’s balderdash. One quick thought exercise will suffice to disprove it.

The basic idea is that the oil is formed underneath the Earth’s crust by non-biological means, then gets “spun” towards the surface by the centrifugal force of the Earth’s rotation, right?

Well, guess what? The strength of centrifugal force is a function not only of the speed of rotation, but also of the distance from the center of rotation! Want proof? Get on a merry-go-round and have someone spin it. If you’re near the center, you won’t feel much centrifugal pull. But if you’re hanging off the edge, you will, even at the same speed of rotation.

Another experiment that many in my generation performed as kids: get a record player (turntable) and place a 33¹⁄₃ RPM LP on it. Turn it on and set the speed up to 45RPM (we used to do that a lot to make singers sound like they were on helium, or go all the way to 78RPM to make them sound like chipmunks). Place a tiddly-wink (thin smooth plastic disk we old fogies used to play games with that didn’t require batteries or LCD screens [imagine that!]) on the record near the center. It won’t fly off. Place it closer to the edge, and it will.

This makes sense, since, all else being equal, and at the same rotational speed in RPMs or whatever, something that is rotating along with a disk or sphere that is closer to center has a lower angular velocity (actual speed of that object actually moving) than something further away from the center but still attached to the rotating object and thus revolving around its center of rotation.

Now, consider that deep inside the Earth is also closer to the center. Not only that, but polar areas don’t move as fast as the Equator does due to angular velocity and distance from the axis of rotation (the Earth’s axis).

So, by this hypothesis, most of the oil should be in tropical regions, and none in polar regions. So what the heck is ANWR? Siberian oil? Etc.?

Never mind that, even at the equator, even on top of the tallest mountain near the equator, getting as far away as it’s possible to get from the Earth’s axis of rotation and still be attached to the Earth, the maximum possible centrifugal force still isn’t enough to come anywhere near overcoming the force of the Earth’s gravity! Things still go down, not up!

So much for abiotic oil.