Your life is awash with oil

Oil is filthy old stuff that causes nothing but pollution all the way through our use of it, but why, oh why do we keep going back for more. Pretty simply, we

How can this be so, and what is so special about oil?

Firstly, there is a lot of oil around. Enough that for many decades it seemed like there was so much that we would never run out. Like the (estimated) five billion passenger pigeons that lived in the US, once, and no longer. Or the millions of square kilometres of arctic sea ice, which is, just oh just, still around. So with vast quantities of oil, its use became commonplace, first largely as a fuel for direct combustion in motors and for generating electricity. Then, although some plastics had been invented as early as the 1920s, after WWII, the production of plastics became commonplace, first as fibres and then for packaging.

Now, paints, varnishes, furniture, clothing, appliances, stationery, motor cars, roofing, almost everything you can think of is available in a plastic version. Imagine a world without insulated wires