DDOS attack at Host Matters (which Glenn Reynolds says originates from Saudi Arabia); hope this goes through, and please forgive any errors I haven't caught! (BTW, there is a Classical Values backup site, which I rarely use....)

Anyway, I'm more than skeptical about peak oil theory, and I appreciate Justin's recent post on the subject.

In fact I'm even skeptical about oil theory. Back in 2004, I wondered whether fossil fuel is in fact that, and I linked to the work of Nikolai Alexandrovich Kudryavtsev -- "who first enunciated in 19511 what has become the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins. After Kudryavtsev, all the rest followed."

All the rest includes a recent book by James Corsi and Craig Smith which apparently ruffled a few feathers in the scientific oil community.

Anyway, I don't have time to get into detail here, and I don't know enough about the field. I cannot state with confidence that I know that "fossil fuel" is a Big Lie promoted by Big Oil and Big Environmentalism. I will say that these two huge interests could be expected to find common ground propping up the fossil fuel theory.

Is "fossil fuel" a theory?

Or is it fact?

What got my attention were the ad hominem attacks directed at the American authors. Their book explores the Russian/Ukrainian theory, but the criticism of them seems to be based largely on Corsi's Swift Boat background.

Staniford's column is titled "The Swiftboating of Peak Oil," an allusion to Corsi's co-authorship of "Unfit for Command," the New York Times No. 1 best-seller during the 2004 presidential campaign that challenged Sen. John Kerry's claims about his Navy swiftboat service in Vietnam.

Staniford said Corsi "can perhaps be forgiven for his … allegiance to the abiotic theory which has roughly zero support amongst working exploration geologists. … But what on earth are the editors of Rigzone thinking?"

Secondly, Staniford writes, "given Dr Corsi's recent history of involvement with well-funded extreme right-wing causes, are we seeing the start of a comparable campaign against peak oil?"

Fark.com has an interesting discussion of the theory, which doesn't convince me one way or the other, but the simple logic of one commenter appealed to my sense of logical pathos:

If oil comes from fossils, how many fossils does it take to create a big huge oil field that supplies billions of barrels of crude, and how did all those fossils get in that one place? Really... I want to know.. because it just doesn't seem logical.

But I don't. Highly compressed swampland over millions of years, perhaps?

And might both theories possibly be right?

Verifying the abiotic oil theory by taking an inside peek might take a journey to the center of the earth.

We can't get there from here.

UPDATE: More on the DDOS attack (via an email from Rand Simberg to Glenn Reynolds):

Rand Simberg emails, correctly, that originating in Saudi Arabia doesn't actually mean that the perpetrators are Saudis -- just the computers they've hijacked. True enough.

No way to know. And no way to retaliate.