I still don’t understand.

In actual history whale oil made airplane engines go (as lubricants) until the 1970s when they switched to synthetic.

Most whales were killed in the 20th century to make planes go, not in the 19th to make city lights burn.

TIL - yeah the 20C saw millions killed vs 19C and hundreds of thousands. I mean obviously that was industrialisation. Seems to be mostly meat, fats for cooking and a fair amount of TNT production - as well as lubricants for planes …

But in 1986 the whaling moratorium came in, and numbers killed have been hundreds or few thousand since.

Yay Star Trek