“Comment is free; facts are sacred.”

That quote is from CP Scott, Liberal MP and editor of the Guardian at the turn of the 20th Century. What he meant was the primary purpose of a newspaper is to report the truth first and opinion second. I’m laughing hollowly to myself as I type that, but I do try to live by that principle: establish the facts, then give your opinion on them.

One of the great ironies of modern life is we have never ever had so much free and easy access to incredible amounts of information, data and facts, and yet we are swamped with cherry-picked data, half-baked opinion and zombie myths (you can kill them over and over again but they never die). And nowhere is this more true than Sustainability, particularly in climate science and clean energy. Everybody thinks they’re an expert.

This week I couldn’t resist trying a cheeky little experiment when the opportunity presented itself in my e-mail inbox. In a popular business newsletter I subscribe to, the author launched into a random diatribe against electric vehicles before suggesting hydrogen was the answer. I hit reply and said hydrogen would never be the answer because the physics meant hydrogen vehicles made no economic sense.

He fired a response back, suggesting I should open my mind as you can get hydrogen buses.

Yes, I said, but for every unit of electrical energy you put into a hydrogen bus, just 13% gets to the wheels, whereas in an electric bus, 69% gets to the wheels. This is why London has almost 2000 electric buses and just 20 hydrogen buses. Hydrogen can’t compete.

I got another reply suggesting I get out of ‘lockstep’, the implication being that I was just following the crowd – unlike a free-thinker like him. Of course the reality is that I had bothered to factcheck the two sentences in my second reply before hitting send, avoiding a wee factual error of my own, rather than just type out the first thing that came into my head.

I decided to stop poking the bear further as I had proved my point (to myself) and it would be a bit rude. But this exchange is another example of how facts are never enough to change minds. Instead of considering the facts I provided, my supposedly free-thinking correspondent just got irritated by my challenge and dug his heels in further. I achieved nothing, other than a bit more evidence for my maxim that Sustainability is about change and change is about psychology.

And that’s a fact.