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It's not though, because if it weren't being used for Lego/plastic products in general we wouldn't just burn it it'd just be left in the ground (or potentially

• whatshisface 8y ago
  >We burn about all the oil we want for the price right now so anything not used in plastic would just not be extracted. That's simply not the case. If you have two consumers competing for the same resource, the price is kept high and the supplier works to produce more while both consumers work to consume less. If one of the consumers is removed, the other has less of an incentive to conserve and the supplier has less of an incentive to produce. If the demand for oil to be used in the chemical industry went down, slightly more oil would be burnt and slightly less would be produced. If the price of oil fell due to a weakening chemical industry demand, oil-burning enterprises would become more proftable. The lower the price of oil, the cheaper renewables must be to compete. Further, if it was true that the demand for oil to burn was totally inelastic, carbon taxes would be pointless from the outset because raising the price of consumption wouldn't reduce it.
  • fmajid 8y ago
    It's not the production of oil that sends CO2 into the atmosphere, it's the burning of it. Thus even though less oil would be produced, more CO2 would still be sent into the atmosphere.