[sohex]

Using fossil fuels for plastics has to be better environmentally speaking than using them for energy. Simply by virtue of the fact that the carbon is trapped as a constituent of the plastic, not binding off as CO2 and floating away.

That aside though, even if it was ‘just’ a 10x reduction in usage for energy that would still be a huge win because that becomes massively easier to mitigate and offset in effective ways.

Every time you increase or decrease the scale of a problem by an order of magnitude it changes the dynamics of approaching it significantly.