But building a pool, throwing in plastic and bacteria could be a good thing after all.

Then just plant some trees to convert co2 into wood, then cut down the trees, make furniture, then dump furniture into oceans to make new oil.

The circle of oil!

"All plastic ever made" isn't as much as you would imagine, because half of all plastic ever made has been made in the last 13 years !

Yeah, it's gonna be similar in magnitude to 3 years. Not excellent, but not going to make a long run difference either.

That's without looking at estimates of plastic production, but it's likely enough to be higher now than the majority of the 70 years.

Here's the graph of global plastics production: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/global-plastics-p...

It's an exponential curve. Most plastic made was made relatively recently. This is less obvious in the first world, where we've had consumer plastics for many decades. Most growth in plastic use happens outside the US.

My understanding is that 4% number is for the oil used in plastic production, which is not necessarily the amount of oil sequestered in the actual plastic.

Conversely, I don't know if that number includes production from natural gas and not just crude oil, and a lot of plastic feedstock is made from it.