We Don’t Use Oil, We Live Inside It

It's in everything we use.

Oil is not “just” in your car; that is the least interesting place it exists. It is in your mouth, your bloodstream, and your head, and not only because the latest American-induced oil shock is giving you a migraine. It is the quiet, plastic skeleton of everything around you. The official line is that we’re “addicted to fossil fuels,” as if humanity stumbled into a dodgy relationship with petrol and now needs a bit of rehab and some inspirational TED talks. That is nonsense. We are not “addicted” to oil; we are built out of it. The modern world is a fossil‑carbon life‑support system, and the people who sold it to us now want applause for promising to gradually unplug the machine they wired us into.

Start with the easy targets: petrol and diesel. These are the pantomime villains, the thing you see on the news when someone blocks a motorway in an orange vest. It is real, it is dirty, but it is also a convenient distraction. Because once the fuel has been refined, a large chunk of the barrel doesn’t go into engines at all. It goes into cracking plants that turn crude into charming, tweet‑sized molecules—ethylene, propylene, benzene, ammonia, Lego pieces for the petrochemical industry. Out of those little bricks comes… well, everything. Cut the nozzle off the pump, and the barrel simply walks in through the back door as a shampoo bottle, a pair of Doc Martens boots, or a surgical glove.

Look around the room you’re in now. The phone or laptop you’re reading this on? Oil, extruded into keys, casings and circuit‑board coatings. The credit card in your wallet? Oil, thinly disguised as responsibility. The bottle of water on your desk? Oil around the water, oil in the cap, and oil in the shrink wrap on the multi-pack. The carpet under your feet, the polyester on your back, the acrylic paint on the wall—solidified, dyed and woven petroleum. We turned dinosaurs and ancient algae into yoga pants and then call them “athleisure”.

Even virtue comes shrink‑wrapped in crude. The solar panel on your neighbour’s roof, the wind turbine in the glossy environmental brochure, even the electric car and those nasty, cheap interior Teslas posed against a fjord: all petrochemical success stories. The blades, the resins, the sealants, the insulation, the sleek dashboard and faux‑leather seats are fossil carbon wearing a green badge. We have built an entire religion of “transition” on the premise that we can keep the toys and just swap out the fuel, as if the problem were an exhaust pipe rather than the entire industrial metabolism behind it.

Then there is the intimate stuff, the things we rub into our bodies, your own skin moisturised with the liquefied ghosts of Precambrian plankton and fed to our children. The bathroom shelf is a small petro‑state: shampoos, conditioners, moisturisers, deodorants, perfumes, toothpastes, sunscreens, each a cheerful cocktail of petroleum‑derived surfactants, solvents, preservatives and fragrances, decanted into plastic bottles destined for landfills and oceans. The food in your fridge is there because natural‑gas‑derived fertiliser kept the crop alive; it is wrapped in petroplastic film, nestled in petroplastic trays, labelled with petrochemical inks and glued together with petrochemical adhesives. Even the fake berry flavour in the yoghurt may share a family tree with industrial dyes and fuel additives.

And when the system makes us sick, we throw more oil at the problem. Hospitals run on fossil carbon in the literal sense and in the soft, polymerised sense: single‑use syringes, IV bags, tubing, masks, catheters, heart‑monitor casings, MRI housings, filters, gloves, all designed to be used once and binned. A good chunk of the medicine inside those syringes and bags is synthesised from petrochemical precursors too. We have achieved the miracle of turning oil into both the disease vector and the band‑aid.

The punchline is that, after constructing this petrochemical spiderweb over every aspect of existence, the same corporations and governments now present “net zero by 2050” as an act of heroic self‑denial. The adverts show children in fields of wind turbines while a soft voice assures you that “together, we’re changing our energy”. Notice the sleight of hand: energy, not materials. They will happily talk about swapping out petrol for electrons, but remain oddly quiet about the plastics, fibres, solvents, fertilisers, additives and pharmaceuticals that are the real profit centres. You are encouraged to feel personally guilty about driving to the shops; nobody invites you to feel political rage that there is no non‑petrochemical option for buying a toothbrush or an antibiotic.

This is the real scandal: we were never offered a choice. Nobody asked you whether you wanted your clothes to be woven from polymers that shed microplastic into your lungs and your blood, or whether you’d prefer a food system chained to gas‑derived fertiliser that props up fragile monocultures. The decision was made decades ago in boardrooms and ministries, on the simple basis that oil was cheap, abundant and profitable, and that any environmental bill would fall due long after the decision‑makers had retired to their petrochemical‑financed villas.

So when someone says we need to “wean ourselves off” fossil fuels, imagine trying to wean a fish off water. The point is not to scold individuals for failing to be pure in a world that has been deliberately saturated. The point is to see the saturation, how far it goes, how total it is, and to understand that what stands between us and a different kind of life is not personal weakness but a built environment, an economic order, a lattice of molecules arranged into profit. The first step towards any escape is to admit where we are: standing in a bright, tidy room, surrounded by the liquefied, polymerised remains of the dead world beneath our feet, and calling it home.