Uses of Oil
I tried to look this up for a discussion on a mailing list, but the information was very hard to google (it ended up being buried in a government-published PDF linked from wikipedia).
Common arguments about oil include:
- Oil is not, in fact, used primarily for transportation but for generation of energy for other purposes. Therefore, reducing automobile use will not significantly reduce oil use and,
- A large amount of oil pumped is used for things other than creating energy, for instance, it is turned into plastic, so even if we weren't using oil for energy we'd still need to pump a great deal of it.
According to government data (page 35 of that document), number 1 was true in 1973, 42.3% of oil pumped was used in transportation, with the rest used as energy for industry, "other sectors" (agriculture, etcetera) or for oil-based products. but by 2003, fully 57.8% of oil pumped went into transportation.
The growing share of oil used in transportation came at the expense of oil used as an energy source in production sectors, and non-energy uses remained about the same. All oil products, from pesticides to plastics to bike chain oil, consume only 6.6% of all oil pumped.
Click Read More below to see a table of the data, or look at the PDF for pie charts.
[READ MORE] | [Feb 01, 2006] | [transport] | # | G
