Do fossil fuels insulate the crust from the Earth's interior?
Quoting from John Russell's response to this article, "This is arrant nonsense!"

Russell concludes with


  How did this paper get through the peer-review and editorial review processes? What technical standards were applied to determine the apparent merit of its contents so as to justify its inclusion in a reputable journal?


Just because something is published in a scientific journal does not mean it is fact. Publication is where science starts rather than ends. Sometimes, pure garbage manages to slip through peer review and get published, even in reputable journals. This is one of those times. Moreover, the publisher of the underlying journal, Taylor &amp; Francis, has had issues with shoddy peer review.

The Earth's energy imbalance is 0.6±0.17 W/m2. The Earth's internal energy budget, the amount of energy that escapes from the interior of the Earth, is 0.087 W/m2, about half the uncertainty in the Earth's energy imbalance. (That largish uncertainty is because the imbalance is a difficult quantity to measure.) Even if all of that 0.087 W/m2 is due to humans removing the Earth's insulating layer of hydrocarbons (it isn't), it does not come close to accounting for the 0.6±0.17 W/m2 imbalance. The numbers don't add up.

Or as John Russell put it in his response to the referenced article, "This is arrant nonsense!"