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Is the heat produced by fossil and nuclear fuel negligible? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/askscience

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm not exactly sure of the context of the question.

Electricity plants use the excess heat for district heating. It isn't just wasted. If we could suddenly stop using coal or other combustibles for electricity production, we'd still need to produce energy for heating.

Transport is different though. Gasoline engines are highly inefficient and produces a lot of excess heat that isn't used even when the heater is on full blast. It's not much in comparison to power production though, so while it will be more efficient to drive and heat a car by electricity, excess heat from cars isn't really an issue in itself. It's the pollution that is the main issue.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

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.