There's a 'legit' theory out there that posits that oil is sentient.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jskmAmW87Fw

I'm going to be the person who does this I guess. Fossil fuels are mostly from plant matter, not dinosaurs, or other animals, like is often said. Still dead I guess, but not what people would think when reading this.

Burning the ancient ooze releases ancientness in the air

Also, someday someone's meemaw could power someone's car

Compared to algae and plants it's a rounding error.

Benziiiiiin. Gib mir Benziiiiiin!

I don't think "ichor" is the right word here. Lovecraft would probably use "effluvial rot" or something.

And it's also greasy and highly poisonous if spilled.

Hence the quotes.

Not only that but people will fight wars for the privilege of digging it out of the ground.

Such fowl eldritch liquid. Thou shalt prefer to be propelled by lightning contained, if you can spare the coin that is.

"Slowly" is a strong word.

I think it’s more plants than animals.

Your use of the word “exponentially” triggered my inner math teacher: no, the growth is not exponential but more than linear since the industrial revolution.

I don’t know the answer. But somehow I feel like someone on the internet has attempted this calculation.

i think it was mostly plankton

Profane vicissitude dwells beneath the barren land, doomed to mortal peril. Drinking upon our own demise in reckless cheer, humanity wastes the promises of the black blood of the earth, a curse spelled out through eons of rot.

If a couple have 2 children, then in an ideal condition the population is constant, so the death/birth is linear. Human birth can be exponentially if every couple have more than 2 children and they also have more than 2 and so on in this ideal scenario with no early deaths.

In reality you need 2+some fraction to balance out the early deaths, other couples with no children, unmarried, etc.

Plus with limited resources, population can't grow a lot because you'll start having a lot of death due to starvation, conflicts, accidents, etc.

Problem is due to industrialization, we can now support higher number of humans compared to the past, and due to vaccines and medicines we have smaller numbers of early deaths, so we have a population growth problem. But as we hit our limits it'll stabilize, or if we overshoot, it'll go down.

Return the Earth to its primordial state by burning the effluvial rot and releasing the souls of the vanquished back into our world, so that they can draw energy from the radiation of our Cosmic Creator and use it to bake us in the infernal flames of greed and hubris.

Relevant xkcd https://what-if.xkcd.com/101/

It's not dinosaurs, oil is mostly sea stuff like plankton and algae. Coal is mostly land vegetation, trees.

Dinosaurs didn't really contribute much to this pool.