Email from a subscriber:

I am a believer in Jesus Christ living in the state of Minnesota. I am contacting you because I have had great struggles in understanding how to steward creation for God’s glory and the good of others.

The biggest thing I’ve been struggling with is air pollution. I’ve heard from various sources that our cars pollute and this pollution can cause cancer and other health issues, even death, especially with older cars (my wife and I own a 2005 Toyota Corolla). However, I’ve also read that this correlation between current pollution levels in the US and vehicle emissions/health risks involved are being debated and discussed, even within the EPA.

I’ve struggled feeling guilty and anxious about driving a car, flying a plane, etc., because I feel like even though they are so helpful for my neighbor and me, it still feels like I’m not loving my neighbor very well by doing something that may cause them health issues like the ones I have previously listed.

What does it look like to use fossil fuels wisely and safely? Could you help me to understand the science behind all of this? Are vacations and “fun” justifiable with vehicles that pollute (I realize I’m getting into the weeds)? I can’t afford an electric car, and public transportation isn’t really the best where I am.

This raises a wide variety of concerns, any of which could require quite a bit of data and analysis to respond to in any full way. However, a thread running through what would be the appropriate responses to all of them is the unavoidable fact that all of life is full of tradeoffs and opportunity costs. If we reject X, we must choose Y; if we spend A on B, we can’t spend it on C.

Thus, for example, your automobile generates some air pollution. You could of course cease driving a car. What would be the benefits and the costs of doing so, for the environment and for all other things about which you care? Answering that question requires careful measurement of a wide variety of things, only one of which is the air pollution your car generates as you drive it and the health effects of that air pollution on yourself and others. Individuals’ differing value priorities and circumstances will lead them to assign different weights to the very same numbers that come from such measurements.

A Biblical principle is that people should take reasonable steps to prevent accidental harm to others through their actions (see, e.g., Deuteronomy 22:8). But this doesn’t mean we must absolutely eliminate all risk. Others are responsible for some of their own self-protection. (There’s no evidence, to build from the verse just cited, that anyone in OT Israel ever thought the requirement to put a parapet around one’s roof [because that’s where people gathered to enjoy the cool winds in that hot location] required parapet walls so high they couldn’t be climbed, and topped with sharp glass to keep anyone from trying anyway.)

I don’t believe you should feel guilty for driving a car, flying in a plane, etc. While these activities do involve some pollution, they also involve great benefits—not just to you but also to others. E.g., when you fly in that plane, you go somewhere where you patronize the services of others, contributing to their incomes. And when you choose to drive your car rather than walk or ride a bike, you require fewer calories for your body, which reduces your demand for food and hence for crop production and hence for agricultural land and chemicals. Or when you drive rather than ride a horse, you reduce both the horse’s demand for food and the manure pollution that, mile for mile traveled, is a far greater problem than the air pollution from cars.

The risks to health from air pollution from cars in the United States have fallen enormously over the last 50 years and now are extremely low—far lower than the risks most people take just from having less-than-optimally-healthful diets. Electric cars turn out, on complete life-cycle analysis, to be no less polluting, and in many cases more, than internal combustion engines, not only because of the pollution (unavoidably) produced while generating the electricity but also because of the many toxic rare-earth metals that go into their construction (the average EV battery weighs about 1,000 pounds and contains huge amounts of several different toxic metals—the mining and refining and transporting of which produce their contributions to pollution).

I suspect that some reading on basic principles of environmental stewardship would be useful. Let me recommend the following:

• Creation Stewardship: Evaluating Competing Views
• Is Capitalism Bad for the Environment?
• Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future
• What Is the Most Important Environmental Task Facing American Christians Today?
• Worship Not the Creature: Animal Rights and the Bible
• Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
• Mines, Minerals, and Green Energy: A Reality Check