You're definitely right about the difficulty of change, but I think the bottom line remains: gasoline for commuting is not actually used anywhere in the process of producing the relevant goods/services. The raw fact is that hair styling can be done without using 4 or 5 gallons of gasoline a day. Gasoline plays no functional role in providing the service of hair styling. So why should we say that gasoline is needed to provide hair styling's portion of the GDP? That portion of gasoline should be struck from "oil used to produce goods/services" because, just as a matter of bald obvious fact, the gasoline is not being used for hairstyling. There's no physical connection between gasoline and hair styling. People were styling hair for thousands of years before gasoline was even discovered.

This means that oil intensity is greatly overstated because it includes large volumes of oil being consumed for purposes other than actually providing goods/services.