Also see: black and white or false dilemma fallacy

It's a good thing we burn all these precious hydrocarbons, less microplastics in the environment.

Oh no, turns out that even if we stop burning oil we still need 6% of it for plastics, clearly this means there's no environmental benefit to reducing how much we ship by 94%, and we can't possibly for example move the plastic production to where the oil comes from so what we ship isn't crude and oh look people are already genetically modifying bacteria to produce oils suitable for various of the huge range of things in the category "plastic", which is such a broad range of things that saying anything about the whole lot in one go is a bit like saying "eat more fruit" when you mean "you are short of vitamin C specifically", oh wait hang on a minute…

About 5kG of polymers per kw. That’s about a gallon of oil if it all came from oil. Where I live a 1kW solar panel offsets 100 litres of oil in a car every year. Oil from a single full tank of petrol could produce enough energy to drive a car about 1 million miles over its lifetime.

> Onion headlines aside

Well technically speaking crude oil is a form of solar energy. (Sun -> plants -> animals -> crude oil)

28% is used for petrochemicals and "other".

The rest is for energy, mostly for transport.