The article goes on to make the same error again though.
If the common person's automatic transmission needs whale oil you can't ban it.
The kind of oil that can be produced in the conditions of a mammal's body tends to not hold up to well in a 300deg automatic transmission. Synthetic oil was developed because using a factory to do "this can't happen in a body" things to tree oil results in a superior performing product. These products were adopted because they're better. And then there was little need to use whale oil, so it got banned at which point the synthetic new hotness got back ported into the older specifications of oil.
News from the time [0], certainly suggests that regulation was the cause, rather than synthetics being "better".
> The trouble involved the cooling unit for the automatic transmission oil, which is placed in the car's radiator. The fittings between the cooling unit and the radiator gave no trouble when whale oil was the fluid, but the substitute allowed the fittings to corrode. That permitted the oil to get into the radiator's cooling system and the radiator's antifreeze to get into the transmission.
You seem to have a strong claim you'd like to make on this point. It might be true, but it's a claim offered without much evidence.
I guess one thing I'd be curious about is: were non-synthetic non-animal alternatives substituted for whale oil in large quantities before synthetics took over? If so, that would be one data point in favor of the idea that regulation (and possibly the decline of the species) was the driving factor, rather than the superiority of synthetics.
If the common person's automatic transmission needs whale oil you can't ban it.
The kind of oil that can be produced in the conditions of a mammal's body tends to not hold up to well in a 300deg automatic transmission. Synthetic oil was developed because using a factory to do "this can't happen in a body" things to tree oil results in a superior performing product. These products were adopted because they're better. And then there was little need to use whale oil, so it got banned at which point the synthetic new hotness got back ported into the older specifications of oil.