I’ve had a lot of success explaining the link between fossil fuel use and climate change by taking it very basic and explaining fossil fuels are just stored carbon that was taken out of circulation and now we’re releasing it all at once
That was quite the revelation to me a few years when I learned that plants and trees pull most of their content and composition from the atmosphere and not from the ground. I know I learned about it in grade school but I never fully appreciated it until a few years ago when I read several articles and writing by scientists that describe what a forest or a simple plant.
It’s all just pulling carbon from the air and burying it in the ground. And when we burn these plants and trees, like you say, we are just releasing it all again all at once. What took the planets forests millions of years to achieve, we’re undoing in a hundred years.
Just note that today next to non of the carbon ends up in the ground. This was possible back then because there were no organisms that could eat lignin, so that part never decayed and formed… lignite and then more and more pure coal as it aged.
