Few industries are pointed at as often as oil and gas. And few sustain so much of what almost nobody connects with them. The people who work in that sector live with that contradiction every day, putting up with the easy headline while making possible, in the background, even the paper that headline is printed on.
Oil is one of the most astonishing substances that exist, and as a society we have decided to hate it in public while using it in private without a second thought. A litre fits in a bottle, keeps for years without losing any of its energy, and releases it all at once when needed. From it come the plastic in a heart valve, the asphalt on the road the ambulance drives along, the fiber in the clothes you're wearing, the fuel in the plane that takes you to see your family. None of this runs on good intentions. It runs on hydrocarbons.
Nobody makes that connection in everyday life. We protest against the oil company in the abstract, against the logo, against the sector, while driving to the demonstration on a full tank, taking a medicine synthesized from petroleum derivatives, wearing a polyester jacket. There is no conscious hypocrisy in that. There is a disconnection between what we consume and what we demonize, and that disconnection is rarely free for the people who work on the side that takes the blame.
Even what is presented as the clean alternative depends on fossil fuels to exist, and that part never appears on any poster. Wind turbine blades are made with petroleum-derived resins. A solar panel needs plastic, transport and heavy machinery running on fossil fuel, from the mine to the factory and from the factory to the roof. Wind turbines are still lifted into place by diesel-powered cranes. The energy transition, as it exists today, is still born from oil and gas before it can do without them.
I don't write this to say nothing needs to change, or to downplay what it costs the planet to keep depending on fossil fuels the way we do. I spent years as an engineer working on green hydrogen, convinced we could replace oil with something clean at the same scale. Doing the numbers changed my mind, not about the need to change, but about how honest we are being with ourselves about what that change means. It's what led me to write Inner Degrowth.
A civilization can ask for things that don't fit together without noticing. One of them is wanting to feed the whole planet while publicly despising what makes feeding it possible. Another is wanting to leave fossil fuels behind without accepting that doing so, without an equivalent substitute, means living with much less.
The honest conversation is not about whether oil is good or bad. It is about whether our societies are willing to look at what they are made of before deciding whom to point at. Until we do, we will keep blaming the people who keep the lights on, and keep avoiding the harder question of how much we are really willing to give up.
By the same author:
'Inner Degrowth':
An Engineer on Why the Energy Crisis and
Our Inner Emptiness Are the Same Problem
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marcos Rupérez Cerqueda is a Spanish industrial engineer with a master's degree in hydrogen from Aalborg University. He worked for years on green hydrogen projects before questioning their promise, and now works on rural technology development in the Spanish Pyrenees. He is the author of Inner Degrowth: From Energy Collapse to Existential Void.
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