Crudely Put: Oil Is Everywhere

“A century ago, petroleum—what we call oil—was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water,” James Buchan

For years now, climate change alarmists ranging from Greta (“Fridays for Future”) Thunberg to Bill (“Keep it in the Ground”) McKibben have railed against fossil fuels. When criticizing petroleum specifically, they have focused much of their attention on crude oil, particularly its ostensibly pernicious role in powering vehicles, heating and cooling buildings, and generating electricity. In their views, the world would be a much better place if we could just wean ourselves off oil and substitute alternative energy sources for the aforementioned functions.

Defenders of fossil fuels have long put paid to simplistic views about an ‘energy transition,” but much of the population even today is not totally aware of the profound role of oil in areas other than transportation, HVAC, and power production. I was recently reminded of oil’s pervasiveness while reading an article on the environmental costs of “fast fashion’—in a lefty publication, not surprisingly. In the piece, the authors pointed out in passing that  synthetics comprise nearly 70 percent of textile production in the world and  that nearly “342 million barrels of crude oil…go into the making of synthetic fabrics every year.” 

These facts got me digging a bit deeper into the role of crude oil in our lives. For one thing, while a lot of oil is going into the production of synthetics, such is the size and scale of the oil industry—over 32 billion barrels were produced in 2024—textile production accounts for only a little over 1 percent of crude oil output.