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Black Gold Stranglehold | 
| Authors: Jerome R. Corsi, Craig R. Smith
Publisher: WND Books
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $17.79
You Save: $9.16 (34%)
Rating:  30 reviews
Sales Rank: 333021
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 356
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 5.9 x 1.1
ISBN: 1581824890
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.27282
EAN: 9781581824896
Publication Date: October 14, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
Experts estimate that Americans consume more than 25 percent of the world's oil but have control over less than 3 percent of its proven oil supply. This unbalanced pattern of consumption makes it possible for foreign governments, corrupt political leaders, terrorist organizations, and oil conglomerates to hold the economy and the citizens of the United States in a virtual stranglehold. There is no greater proof of this than the direct relationship between skyrocketing gas prices and the explosion of wealth among those who control the world's supply of oil. In Black Gold Stranglehold, Jerome Corsi and Craig Smith expose the fraudulent science that has made America so vulnerable: the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and that it is a finite resource. This book reveals the conclusions reached by Dr. Thomas Gold, a professor at Cornell University, in his seminal book The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels (Copernicus Books, 1998) and accepted by many in the scientific community that oil is not a product of fossils and prehistoric forests but rather the bio-product of a continuing biochemical reaction below the earth's surface that is brought to attainable depths by the centrifugal forces of the earth's rotation. Jerome Corsi explores the international and domestic politics of oil production and consumption, including the wealth and power of major oil conglomerates, the manipulation of world economies by oil-producing nations and rogue terrorist regimes, and the shortsightedness of those who endorse expensive conservation efforts while rejecting the use of the oil reserves currently controlled by the U.S. government. As an expert in tangible assets, Craig Smith provides an understanding of the history of America's dangerous dissociation of the dollar with preciousand truly scarcemetals such as gold and the devastation that would be inflicted on the U.S. economy if Middle Eastern countries are able to follow through with current plans to make the euro the standard currency for oil instead of U.S. dollars. Black Gold Stranglehold is a thoughtful work that is certain to dramatically change the debate on oil consumption, oil dependence, and oil availability.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 25 more reviews...
 Abiotic snake oil November 15, 2005
66 out of 122 found this review helpful
If you wanted to summarize this book, with two words, "pure bunk" would work well.
Let's look at this from a different vantage point. Let us say that the actual origins of oil aren't of interest. What we really care about is how much oil we can find, and how much we can extract from the ground.
It can easily be established that old oilfields do become depleted - as time goes on, it gets harder and harder to get oil out of them. There are no counterexamples of oilfields that just keep on giving at high rates for an indefinite period.
Regarding discovery, we are in the same situation. The true giant oilfields were discovered many years ago. The oilfields that are touted as 'new giants' today are just little pups in comparison to the true giants. Corsi points to the Barracuda and Caratingua oilfields as examples of new giants that have been discovered, but many of the true giants that are currently in production are between 20 and 100 times larger. What is worse is that the world currently uses about 84 million barrels of oil per day. These two 'giant' oilfields represent 11 and 4 days worth of world consumption respectively.
 "Zillions" of flaws December 12, 2005
51 out of 88 found this review helpful
To the authors:
* One million is 1,000,000
* One billion is 1,000,000,000
* One trillion is 1,000,000,000,000
* One zillion is not a number at all
I quote from the book: "We are now measuring natural gas reserves in measures of zillions of cubic feet."
No dear sirs, we are not measuring anything in "zillions" because "zillion" is a made up word.
And, by the way, you repeatedly say that world oil reserves are in millions of barrels. No they are in the billions. Yes, those are real numbers, and yes, numbers are hard.
And next,
* There is no such thing as "centrifugal" force.
* What you mean is "Centripetal"
* The spinning of the earth is not what would push liquids outward from the earth's crust, any more than it would cause us to fly off the face of the earth and out into space.
How embarassing.
And there's more:
You seem to group people into two categories.
* Subscribers to Hubbert's peak hypothesis/fossil fuel theory -> "Pessimists"
* Subscribers to abiotic oil theory -> "Optimists"
No dear sirs, in science, pessimism and optimism doesn't enter the picture, one presents evidence to support hypotheses, and one usually doesn't make ad hominem attacks on the people whose hypothesis you are attempting to debunk.
Now I will say one good thing about this book - it has at least led me to look more into the idea of abiotic oil. It's interesting to note that I learned more about the subject in wikipedia than I did in this book.
Two stars.
These guys won't go far with their "theories" November 2, 2005
48 out of 83 found this review helpful
Abiotic oil theory was dreamed up by Bible thumpers
because they can't stomach the earth being shown to be
more than 8,000 years old. They must debunk any science
that shows the earth to be millions of years old, for
that would conclude our planet WASN'T created by God a
recent 800 decades ago. Hence, it can't take millions
of years to make oil.
The authors go to great lengths babbling that the earth
has an oil factory deep within it, and the centrifugal
force of the spinning earth pushes these juices to the
surface for us to enjoy, because God has provided them,
complete with carcinogens and harmful greenhouse gases.
(let's don't even wonder how oil can be thrust to the
surface by centrifigal force while our oceans don't
seem to fly away.) In reality, testing of the chemical
composition of oil shows it is clearly derived from
fossil elements. All unrefined oil carries microscopic
evidence of the organisms from which it was formed.
These organisms can be traced through the fossil record
to specific time periods when quantities of oil were
formed.
Although there were many laughable statements in this
book, the one I found most ridiculous was that there
wasn't enough dinosaur biomass ever on the earth to rot
to make oil. The authors conclude, therefore, that oil
doesn't come from dinosaurs. The fact is that dinosaurs
roamed the earth for 165,000,000 years. Imagine how
many 80 to 100 ton dinosaurs lived and died during that
period! Another good one has our authors wondering
aloud how the oil got deep into the ground since
dinosaurs lived on the surface. They should have asked
my 7th grader about gravity and seepage and tumultuous
earth changes, quakes, plate shifting, etc.
The authors don't seem to realize that the price of oil
is set by the commodities market, and not by oil
companies. That little tidbit of knowledge kinda ruins
the whole complaint of their book, doesn't it?
The book was nicely spell-checked, but I recommend
these guys stick to political commentary, and leave the
scientific theories to scientists.
Disappointing November 2, 2005
44 out of 60 found this review helpful
After reading the claims that this book would turn the world on it's ear, I was expecting a whole bunch more. There's been more than 50 years of scientific research into fossil fuels, I find it difficult to believe that all of a sudden everything we know about oil is wrong. A few quoted technicians versus 1000's of teams of geologists and research specialists doesn't seem like a fair match.
This book didn't prove it to me, oil is fairly obviously becoming harder and harder to drill for, and more expensive to bring up. The Canadian Shale takes almost as much energy in natural gas to produce the oil as it's worth, and they can only generate a million barrels a day. Hardly enough to make a difference in a world that uses 89 million barrels of oil per day.
For another book in this category I highly recommend Michael Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon". THAT book makes sense, and scares me as a see the effects of our diminishing cheap oil supply.
Abiotic or not is completely irrelevant! April 3, 2006
44 out of 82 found this review helpful
This book appears to make the case that if oil is being produced abiotically, then all of our problems with oil supply are over. Here is a simple, virtually irrefutable argument which demonstrates that nothing could be further from the truth. Even if oil *is* being created abiotically in the core of the earth; i.e. even if new oil is constantly being created, the rate of production would have to be so slow as to be practically meaningless; otherwise we would literally be swimming in the oil created during the millions of years that humans weren't using any oil at all. To illustrate using a simple analogy, if water is dripping into a basin at a rate of one drop per hour, but you are removing water from the basin at a rate of 1 gallon per hour, the basin will be empty after some finite amount of time even though the water in the basin is constantly being replenished. Once the basin has been emptied of all stored water, the usage must be reduced from one gallon an hour to one drop per hour; i.e. for all practical purposes water can no longer be drawn from the basin. An elementary school student could figure this out. That the author of this book couldn't speaks badly for any other content the book might contain.
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