Conflating “New” with “Sustainable”

There is a shocking bit of naïveté in the way people are conflating the new with sustainable. For example, people seem to be taking at face value that electric vehicles will be our salvation, without taking into account how the electricity is generated locally. Other factors such as the manufacturing of batteries ought to be taken into account too, though I assume that these, at least, can be generalized somewhat and are applicable globally.

How about what’s called “clean” or “cultured” meat? Do people really know how much plastic is used in these cultures? How energy-, water-, and resource- (as needed to create the various media components) intensive they could be? How about whether the cultures are robust to contamination? It seems that, in our way-too-simplistic world view, the fact that we don’t see the pollution (e.g. methane from cow burps and farts), means that the pollution does not exist. Has a proper life cycle analysis (LCA)been done by disinterested parties? It seems the people hawking these products (be they firms or venture capital) are the ones commissioning or promoting these LCAs. There’s a lot of froth, hype, and creative accounting here. You’ve been warned.

As an aside, I wonder if someone could come up with an LCA that proves that fossil fuels are green.