Just a couple of weeks ago I attended a City Council Meeting to support a local measure to have the Power Company in my area commit to 100% Renewable Energy by 2030. I sat patiently to the agenda of the many items that the city council have to deal with before the item about having the city council support the renewable energy measure came up. I was with several other members of my local support group giving our 3-minute opinions on why the council should wholeheartedly support the power companies renewable energy measure. I listened to my friends as they quoted many facts and statistics supporting cleaner air, health and other benefits of going to renewable energy. I also watched the body language of the council as they sat through the short procession of people. The disinterest from four of the die-hard oil and gas members on the council was apparent. As I sat there I pondered what I could say to get them to actually listen to anything that a professor might have to say that they hadn’t already heard repeatedly from any of my friends. Then I remembered something from my Sustainable Living textbook and smiled – horse poop! (I prefer horseshit, but this was a public forum and I didn’t want to offend any sensibilities and lose them before I had even started.)
My little 3-minute story on horse poop and technology to the city council. In the 1850s, the western world was on a binge of industrial growth using coal power as the source of power and energy for nearly all the manufacturing and transportation that was occurring. Factories and steam trains were on a roll ramping up the industrial revolution. Unfortunately, a major side effect of burning all this coal was choking and awful primary air pollution with black smog’s being an almost common event from the early 1800’s until the 1970s. In 1899, there was little incentive to stop burning coal and except for ending the industrial revolution, there was really no technological way to abate the issue. Another major issue of the day was local transportation. Steam trains were great for moving freight across distances and electrical trams were moving people through the cities on mainline public transport. The problem was that to get to anywhere off the mainlines you need reliable transport that could move things around. There were some early electrical trams for people, but local freight and Hansom cabs (horse drawn taxi cabs) still needed horses to pull the many people and thousands of wagons that moved goods and freight around the cities every day. Each horse can produce about 2 pints of urine and about 15-35 pounds of poop a day on its journey through the streets.
If you have walked around recreational horse riders on a trail, you will notice copious amounts of horse poop on the trail. And this is from only a few horses in one day. Now expand that to millions of horses on every street and thoroughfare every day you can only imagine the piles of horse poop and the smell. It had gotten so bad that policy makers called in scientists to help resolve the problem. Horse diapers (Nappies) were tried but the expense of only moderate effectiveness for so many horses was not feasible. In the 1890’s, London and New York City both held horse poop congresses to discuss how they would avoid drowning in horsed poop. It was estimated that at 1894 growth rates, the cities would be 9-feet deep in horse poop by the year 1950! The solution it turned out had little to do with scientists diligently trying to solve a problem and more to do with businesses like the new automotive industry powered by distillates of oil (gasoline). (The main use for oil until this point was lubricating oils and kerosene for lamps – most of the other fractionation products were waste.) Both John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil) and Henry Ford (Ford motors USA) and Karl Benz (Benz-Cie motors Europe) were happy to lead the way. While the automotive transport helped resolve the horse poop problem it also added to the air pollution with newer secondary pollution. The reason this was more acceptable was that horse poop was a known health problem, and secondary fossil fuel pollution was almost invisible by comparison.
At the time, there was no shortage of politicians and business men screaming about how the automobile was going to destroy civilization as we knew it with rampant unemployment. Needless to say, the horse poop problem was resolved through a technological innovation. It would be another 70 years before the problems of fossil fuel pollution (coal especially and some oil) was partially resolved through technology that could ‘clean’ up emissions (e.g. coal stack scrubbers, catalytic converters, and unleaded fuels). While air quality has been improved from what it was in 1900, the problem of primary and now, especially, secondary pollution needs the removal of fossil fuels from the whole system. The good news is that the many primary Renewable energy sources and their secondary derivatives (e.g. Hydrogen and compressed air) can eliminate fossil fuel pollution as a major problem. Of course, we still have politicians and business men screaming how renewable energy and fuels are going to destroy civilization as we know it – sound familiar?
Technology has created the modern world we live in and with it, all the ‘side-effects’ that come with energy needs to make all that technology happen. The next technological revolution we are about to enter will be as dramatic and game changing as the automobile was to the millennia old muscle power technology it superseded.
To Be Continued……
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