Don’t worry, your pessimism isn’t totally misplaced. See that big “natural gas” line?
Natural gas is just a more palatable word for methane, and burning methane is still putting an enormous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. But methane by itself is like 10x worse than CO2 and the EPA estimates as much as 10% of all methane for domestic use ends up in the atmosphere. Fun!
YES, methane stays in the atmosphere a shorter duration as methane, but most of it naturally breaks down into CO2 which then stays in the atmosphere just as long as all the other CO2. It is much worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.