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:

1. 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,

2. 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.

The “Other Sectors” category is comprised of ‘agriculture,’ ‘commercial and public service,’ ‘residential’ and ’non‐specified.“

Western Europe has long defied economic growth models by remaining stubbornly poorer than the United States. In his 2002 paper Two Centuries of Economic Growth: Europe Chasing the American Frontier, Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, attempts to explain the paradox. His conclusion questions our assumptions about wealth, the wisdom of American post‐World War II urban development policies, the GDP as an accurate measure of wealth, and the future viability of the American way of life.