We often talk about the climate impact based on greenhouse gases, but extracting fuel from the ground and using it in exothermal processes of course also releases energy as heat.
This is mostly¹ in contrast with renewables, which make use of energy that’s not long-term contained to begin with, so would end up as heat in our atmosphere anyways.
So, my question is: Does the amount of energy released by non-renewables have any notable impact on our global temperature? Or would it easily radiate into space, if we solved the greenhouse gas problem?
¹) In the case of solar, putting up black surfaces does mean that less sunlight gets reflected, so more heat ultimately gets trapped in our atmosphere. There’s probably other such cases, too.
Well, my thinking was that if the produced heat was not negligible, then it would be cooler (literally) to use energy for heating which is being pushed into our atmosphere already anyways, rather than actively unearthing additional energy.