
it’s still putting energy into pumping it up. And what happens with the fertilizer, or plastic, or whachamacallit? It gets consumed.
The fertilizer best case becomes plant, gets eaten, pooped out yada yada eventually it becomes the greenhouse gasses. Worst case it’s spilled into the environment as overfertilizing runoff, where it offsets soil balance which helps to release… greenhouse gasses.
The plastic: after use: what happens with it? It gets burned best case, which will release greenhouse gasses. Or it end up in the ocean, not greenhouse i guess, but also not that fun.
When we extract fossil carbon from deep down to the surface, there is a very high chance it will become greenhouse gas. Some of it becomes greenhouse gas almost immediately, some of it only after a few decades, but it’s still offsetting the balance of the globe and adding to climate change.
Fossil fuels are not evil by themselves (how can anything without consciousness be evil?), but many other uses than burning it to go vroom vroom also pose problems to global environmental systems, many uses will also end into processes that will also have negative influence on greenhouse gas situation. Plastic is a miracle material with many very good uses, but the way it is still mostly used now (use once, throw out, burn) is still adding greenhouse gasses.
Poop decomposes and becomes greenhouse gas. Fancy new filtration plants capture some of that gas and produce electricity with it. Most is not captured.
Fertilizer mainly helps 1year crops grow, aka food. Not forests that will bind carbon for hundreds or thousands of years. The typical large scale agricultural industrial operations cause more release of carbon than they bind it.
A very large part of the produced fertilizer is used to, often on land where there used to be carbon binding forests, grow soy, corn etc to feed enormous amounts of livestock. Which we then eat. It is a manyfold less efficient way for humans to consume animal protein rather than plant proteins. Producing and using lots of artificial fertilizer is for sure not a positive effect on global climate change.