Roberts’ Green Letter: An idea a day to transform industry.
Join today! You’ll be glad you started with the vibrato.

Dear friends and colleagues,

I ate the two eggs over easy.

I sopped up the yolk with a few bites of biscuits and gravy. Here at the Blue Ribbon Diner in Wauseon, Ohio, Deb kept my coffee mug full. I drained it as I left.

But as I left, I walked away from most of my biscuit, and a whole lot of gravy.

I walked around back to stretch Oliver’s legs, and mine. I don’t think they compost at the Blue Ribbon Diner.

My uneaten food, delivered by all the energy-intensive modern means, is going in the dumpster and then the landfill. Its hydrocarbons will break down while starved of oxygen. It will emit methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

If it’s captured and used to produce power, it will be considered renewable energy.

If not—total waste.

I feel bad about my consumption. I’m on a 2,000-mile road trip, and like a good environmentalist I think about every impact of it, down to the micro-plastics of my tires being blown into the Ohio corn fields.

But I also haven’t stopped consuming. And I question whether environmentalist messages that encourage me to feel bad about consumption are doing any good.

Could there be another way?

Roberts' Green Letter

#11: Stop justifying your actions based on…

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial