If the Russian Bot Farm thing you’re talking about is Ukraine bombing a data center and seeing 90% fewer right wing posts, I regret to inform you that it wasn’t accurate.
The bots they were talking about were search crawler bots from Yandex. Actual Twitter/X bots saw no change in traffic.
Plastic alternatives are in development and in various stages of manufacture. That’s a solved problem.
The other oil could/should be recyclable, which is a lot better than burning it, never to be used again like in an engine.
Physics says both use the same amount, just one is spread out more and the other is all at once. I don’t have the formula, but basically it takes the same overall effort to stop an object regardless of if it’s slowly or very fast.
There was likely some overlap, but there was no major network shakeup like some people were claiming.