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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

Every energy source becomes renewable on the right time scale.

That's not actually true. The conditions for the formation of coal and oil may likely never happen again because the bacteria to break decompose trees did not exist then but exist now, making oil formation impossible because trees decompose now. Unless they all die out, we won't get any new oil ever.

I'm curious about this. We certainly won't get any more coal, but a whole lot of carbon gets subducted into the mantle regularly. Some gets turned into diamonds. Some gets blown out of volcanoes. Is the oil we pump out of the ground produced directly in the continental crust or is it generated from some of this carbon subducted with oceanic crust that has been transformed by some process and then made its way back into continental crust?

I'm lazy, so I'm hoping some geologist will stop by and educate me.

This nerdbait story is all over the internet but is not true.

See https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1517943113, "Delayed fungal evolution did not cause the Paleozoic peak in coal production"

Stop burning petroleum and wait long enough and it will re-form just fine.

Did not know that, thank you. However how do you know it will re-form just fine? The abstract says:

> Instead, coal accumulation patterns implicate a unique combination of climate and tectonics during Pangea formation.

and I don't know how to determine if those conditions will happen again?

I think it's a joke about how all finite sequences will repeat during infinite time. But it doesn't really add anything to the discussion.

And every energy source becomes non-renewable on the right time scale.

Post humanity, post-earth time scales might not be relevant to most discussions.

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