[esotericn]

The amount of oil in the ground is effectively infinite with regard to any sane carbon budget, so this could only really make sense in the short term.

Ultimately in time I suppose you could consider plastics recycling as a way to extract less oil. If, for example, you could recycle 80%, then you only need to extract 20% of the oil, which is likely to be far better for the environment (less fracking etc).

On geological timescales a lot of the stuff we are doing is bonkers. It looks sort of OK now because we've 'only' had 100 years of it.

[gregable]

That's a good point. It's not as though adding a little demand is likely to do anything other than increase supply in this case.