We track and report greenhouse gas emissions as one of our top measures of our impact on the environment. I propose that that measure may be a distraction.

I wrote about the importance to know the 2 carbon cycles and not to confuse them: burning wood affects the environment differently than extracting fossil fuels from underground and burning them. They weren’t in the biosphere so they affect it differently than burning wood, which just shuffles chemicals around the environment.

Here are the products made from oil:

We may like the short-term benefits we can create from any of those products, but all of them eventually become pollution. Whatever we do with them, they hurt us. Emitting greenhouse gases is only one such path.

In other words, once we extract oil, no matter what we do with it, we hurt people and wildlife. Likewise for other fossil fuels. In Limits to economic growth: A peer-reviewed paper by podcast guest Tom Murphy, Tom shows that fission and fusion produce waste heat that would overwhelm us as much as global warming. If we grow how much we use them exponentially, that overwhelm could happen in a few human lifetimes.

What to track instead

Tracking the introduction and creation of materials that hurt us from outside the biosphere to in it seems the relevant measure. Whether it gets emitted or is distributed some other way is secondary to if it gets brought here.

I’ll work on figuring out how to find out I’m missing something or, if not, to help switch us to tracking the more relevant measure.

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