On this question: Is there a deep, hot biosphere? , I provided an answer which was essentially a summary of Thomas Gold's book "The Deep Hot Biosphere", which I have just read. The answer was upvoted, and yet, it was deleted summarily after a claim that it is "unreferenced". It is not unreferenced, it has exactly one reference, which is Gold's book (although this book itself has many references which one can include). The deletion is unjustified even by the claimed standards of this site. I ask that it be restored.
The consensus in petrolium science in the west is that oil is biogenic. The consensus in the Soviet Union (and in modern Russia and Ukraine) is exactly the opposite. Gold was one of the few English writers who supported this position.
It is common practice on this site to evaluate claims not by reading the material, or learning what the subject is about, but based upon statistical counting of the number of sources that support one claim over the other.
This is guaranteed to lead to ignorant censorious deletion in those cases where the majority mainstream opinion is mentally defective. The opinion that oil is biogenic is the mentally defective claim, it is ridiculous to think that you can get pure hydrocarbons from plants under natural conditions, it is just a stupid thing that many powerful people believe, although they also now have to acknowledge that abiogenic methane exists at the very least, and deep thermophillic bacteria too.