By Akintunde Akinleye and Leila Alieva

Oil—no other raw material pervades so many areas of our lives: our cities, our bodies, our emotions. Airplanes, tanks, and spacecraft, motorways, shopping malls and suburban settlements, nylon stockings, mountains of plastic, and vinyl – key materials and technologies, lifestyles and visions of our time owe their existence to the energy density and transformability of oil.