Which Catastrophe are you focused upon?

I live in Texas, it comes with a unique flavor of people - my neighbors.  I was walking Malibu (my golden retriever) and stopped to chat with a neighbor mowing his yard.  I asked about his mower - an 80volt Kobalt electric push mower.  He liked it a lot, was glad he didn't have to store dangerous liquids in his home (gas & oil) and enjoyed the exercise.  I commented that the pollution from small engines was a significant source and that the internal combustion engine used in these tools was still based upon 19th Century technology.  I knew that he was a tech guy with a very large database company.  I was proud of his choice.  Like a true Texican, he remarked that was not his concern - that moving to electric was just moving the source of pollution from one place to another (his lawn to the power plant).  I suggested that that was true AND that the power plant was designed to deal with the pollution.  He ignored that info, I assume he was thinking that our Cheeto In Chief had removed the need for the power plants to make gains in reducing pollution and greenhouse gasses during the COVID pandemic.

I continued the walk - thinking about the value of moving the many many sources of pollution to a large industrial plant that could be designed to deal with the off-gasses and pondering if there were any statistics to be easily googled.  I found this:

Grass Lawns are an Ecological Catastrophe

Another estimate is that every gallon of gasoline burned by lawnmowers emits 20 pounds of CO2. According to the EPA, one gas lawn mower emits 89 pounds of CO2 and 34 pounds of other pollutants per year. According to a Swedish study, using a mower for one hour has the same carbon footprint as a 100-mile car trip. The EPA found that gasoline-powered lawn mowers emit eight times more nitrogen oxides, 3,300 times more hydrocarbons, 5,000 times more carbon monoxide and more than twice the CO2 per hour of operation than electric lawn mowers.

This resulted in a vicious circling of the depression drain - pondering if we humans would ever wake up and view our place upon this earth as stewards at the pinnacle of the food chain, responsible for our immense wake.  I'm not sure that we will, and I'm metaphysically OK with that obvious outcome.  That human-kind will seal its demise before it achieves enlightenment.  In fact, many of my personal decisions have taken this mindset into account.

Then I read an email from a group of optimists with a wonderfully different mindset, the Motley Fool - my goto resource for investment advice. Here's an excerpt from that email I recently got from the Motley Fool:

Hi, David! Here's a quick hit at how we've been thinking about things recently: Tomorrow is a coin toss.  Next week is a wild guess.  This year is a shot in the dark.  The next five years, we feel good about.  The long run, we feel great about. When things are crazy, it’s easy to get caught up in the daily headlines, but the best thing people can do right now think long-term.