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Thank you for the encouragement and the more piicsfec feedback. The sentence you quoted wasn't incomplete so much as confusingly written. Here's what I just updated it to:On the other hand, when I described the greenhouse burning energy to grow tomatoes because it's either in the wrong place or out of season, I was implicitly assuming that was the only way crops could be grown locally.Personal preferences are an issue, but I think the value of really good information about impacts is that it lets us check our personal preferences against their real impacts. It sounds like we think fairly similarly about local food, in that we have a whole set of reasons to prefer it, so merely finding that one of those reasons was weaker than I thought isn't going to change my behaviour. On the other hand, if doing this column taught me that long-haul food consistently had a much lighter environmental impact than the kinds of things I prefer, I think that would have changed my behaviour.I completely agree with the prescription you end with. My aim is to empower people with information, rather than actually telling them what to do, and part of that empowerment is giving them a sense of which factors are really significant and which are fiddling around the edges with no real consequence. There are a few other principles of how to evaluate competing claims (e.g. make sure you're holding both sides to the same standards and make sure to consider the broader systemic effects of what you do ), but I'd rather teach them by repeated example than by explicitly listing them.