> because they can leverage the potential energy in oil to replace human labor Nope, what’s being replaced is animal feed used for animal labor. People didn’t

> because they can leverage the potential energy in oil to replace human labor Nope, what’s being replaced is animal feed used for animal labor. People didn’t pull a plow by hand and then suddenly swap to tractors. For thousands of years farmers used sunlight > animal feed > domesticated animals, there’s nothing special about oil here. Track the in oil energy for a tractor vs the sunlight to grow plants to feed a pair of horses and the tractor is using wildly less energy per year to get vastly more done. You can even make it more obvious by using solar panels in the same fields feeding horses 100 years ago to charge an electric tractor. Oil is cheap, but not necessary there was even wood and coal burning tractors in the early days. PS: Horses can apparently digest the cellulose in sawdust from several types of trees. It’s unhealthy in large quantities but kind of an interesting fact.