We live in interesting times. Is it a curse or a blessing to be part of the struggle to save our planet? If you’re overwhelmed by the responsibility, you might retreat into cynicism, give up hope, and do nothing — leaving it to others to take action. But if you invest the time to understand our complicated world, you can make wise choices to create a better future. Shallow cynicism offers false simplicity, while deeper wisdom provides real hope.

Let’s start with the recycling symbols on plastic containers. That’s a public relations effort perpetrated by the Society of the Plastics Industry starting in 1988 to sell more plastic. By putting a recycling symbol on all kinds of plastic, which is almost impossible to recycle, the industry made their products more appealing. The swiftly cynical takeaway is that recycling is a scam; a wiser insight is to recognize that industries often greenwash, so we shouldn’t trust their marketing. But we can invest a little time to understand the science of recycling, and know that even if we can’t really recycle plastic, we can recycle metal, glass, and cardboard.

When President George W. Bush established the Renewable Fuels Standard by signing the Energy Policy Act of 2005 into law, cynics were quick to point out that making motor fuel from corn is worse for our planet than simply burning fossil fuel. Furthermore, motorists discovered that it could damage vehicles to burn a blend stronger than 10% ethanol (E10) mixed with gasoline refined from fossil petroleum; stronger ethanol blends, such as 85% ethanol (E85), require vehicles to be designed differently.

It would be easy to conclude from this debacle that it’s better to stick with tried-and-true fuel formulations. But the deeper lesson is that a sustainable fuel standard encourages more thinking about vehicle design — and that has led to electric vehicles that burn no fuel at all. Our renewable fuel policy will only be a complete failure if we fail to learn from our ethanol mistake.

When it came to light in 2015 that Volkswagen was lying and cheating to skirt rules about fuel-efficient diesel engine emissions, cynics were not surprised. This scandal was just one example where purported technological advances proved to be too good to be true. But cynics
are out over their skis when they trash-talk electric vehicles. Fully battery-powered cars really do eliminate tailpipe emissions–because they burn no fuel and have no tailpipes. Generating power from sunlight really does eliminate electricity emissions–and that’s also easy to verify because you can install your own solar panels to charge your own electric vehicles.

That leaves “embedded” or “embodied” emissions from mining and manufacturing. Those emissions are harder to know, but a helpful clue is to compare the total mass of an electric vehicle, including its batteries and the solar panels to recharge them, to the much greater total mass of a combustion vehicle plus all the fuel required to operate it.

Cynics delight in telling people that so-called “clean natural gas,” the greenwashed name for methane extracted from fossil reserves by hydraulic fracturing, is not the bridge to a sustainable future that its pushers claim. Not only do methane explosions destroy hundreds of buildings each year in the United States, but methane’s global warming potential is 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Wise property owners and builders will heed the cynics’ message and keep natural gas out of residential and commercial structures. However, wise voters and public officials will also understand that natural gas in power plants and industrial facilities can help us make a smooth transition to a sustainable energy system.

Our world is facing serious sustainability challenges, but yielding to the temptation of hopeless cynicism doesn’t help. A better use of our intelligence is to embrace, rather than evade, the complexity of our planet, acknowledge our ability to make wiser choices and invest the time to acquire the deeper wisdom required to understand why hope is warranted.

Fred Horch is principal adviser of Sustainable Practice. To receive expert action guides to help your household and organizations become superbly sustainable, visit SustainablePractice.Life and subscribe to “One Step This Week.”

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