The amount of pollution matters and I can think of a dozen human sources of the same types of pollution that should garner more attention. Oil spills, burning plastics and tires, slash and burn agriculture, illegal dumping, all the poisonous shit people threw in the landfill the list goes on and on. Articles like this that ignore the relative scale of things unintentionally shift peoples’ focus away from the most damaging sources of pollution toward less significant ones which makes it more likely that the main causes of pollution arent dealt with.

So is space junk burning up bad for the environment? Yeah technically. Should other sources be worried about more? Yes. One tanker ship burning dirt cheap high Sulfur fuel will fuck up the environment a lot more and theyre essentially unregulated. Theyre allowed to spew pollution equivalent to millions of cars and nothing is done about it.