Oil consumption tracks consumption more broadly. Consumption tends to increase in stable times and decrease during unstable times. Climate change is already causing instability.

The most oil gets consumed when all the wagies are in their cagies. Instability because of climate change, weird recessions, wars (although wars also mean massive upticks in consumption but also sabotage and trade embargoes so that balance out or results in a net increase) etc. makes it so people consume less oil.

It’s worth recognizing here that one of the biggest oil products, gasoline, isn’t really a durable good like all the other comoddities. Gas has a shelf life. Don’t believe me? Go start that mower on the half tank it still has from mid fall.

So there’s this huge component of the oil refining output that has basically predictable demand and goes bad if it sets too long.

Oh and the refinery system in most of the world is designed to operate more or less continuously. It’s how you can get a gallon of volitiles refined from oil pumped out of the ground that meet a relatively strict set of criteria for $4.23. Economy of scale and no downtime!

So if you knew there would be less demand in the future for oil products and wanted to most efficiently (and profitably!) lower your output you’d slowly shut down parts of the supply until what’s left can operate 24/7 maximum efficiency (and profitability!).

But there’s the problem of the very durable outputs of oil production like different weird plastics. They’re cheap and people are gonna want more plastic stuff because the same instability that you’re spinning down production over is gonna actually put pressure on manufacturers to make more creative use of affordable plastics in their designs.

So now you gotta get some slack in the plastic supply. You know what’s about the most low margin shit ever? Packaging!

So we’re getting articles admitting it about recycling (which is true).