How Global Warming might
be ended sooner than we think.
It's not just Global Warming. In the past there have been widespread food
and firewood crises.
The author thinks that, to avoid the continually increasing costs of
increasingly difficult to obtain fossil fuels, the world will simply switch to
more
plentiful, powerful,
and cleaner nuclear fuels. Renewables, clean coal, and ultra-energy
efficiency make little sense when price and
performance are far more powerful long-term factors.
Levitt and Dubner tell the horseshit story as a prelude to discussing climate change:
Is there a quick fix for the
climate? by Elizabeth Kolbert November 16, 2009 - The New Yorker
Keywords
Climate Change;
"SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide
Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance" (William Morrow; $29.99);
Steven D. Levitt; Stephen J. Dubner;
Al Gore;
"Our Choice: Plans to Solve the Climate Crisis" (Rodale; $26.99);
Global Warming
In the eighteen-sixties, the quickest, or at least the most popular, way to get
around New York was in a horse-drawn streetcar. The horsecars, which operated on
iron rails, offered a smoother ride than the horse-drawn omnibuses they
replaced. (The Herald described the experience of travelling by omnibus as a
form of "modern martyrdom.") New Yorkers made some thirty-five million horsecar
trips a year at the start of the decade. By 1870, that figure had tripled.
The standard horsecar, which seated twenty, was drawn by a pair of roans and ran
sixteen hours a day. Each horse could work only a four-hour shift, so operating
a single car required at least eight animals. Additional horses were needed if
the route ran up a grade, or if the weather was hot. Horses were also employed
to transport goods; as the amount of freight arriving at the city's railroad
terminals increased, so, too, did the number of horses needed to distribute it
along local streets. By 1880, there were at least a hundred and fifty thousand
horses living in New York, and probably a great many more. Each one relieved
itself of, on average, twenty-two pounds of manure a day, meaning that the
city's production of horse droppings ran to at least forty-five thousand tons a
month. George Waring, Jr., who served as the city's Street Cleaning
Commissioner, described Manhattan as stinking "with the emanations of putrefying
organic matter." Another observer wrote that the streets were "literally
carpeted with a warm, brown matting . . . smelling to heaven." In the early part
of the century, farmers in the surrounding counties had been happy to pay for
the city's manure, which could be converted into rich fertilizer, but by the
later part the market was so glutted that stable owners had to pay to have the
stuff removed, with the result that it often accumulated in vacant lots,
providing breeding grounds for flies.
The problem just kept piling up until, in the eighteen-nineties, it seemed
virtually insurmountable. One commentator predicted that by 1930 horse manure
would reach the level of Manhattan's third-story windows. New York's troubles
were not New York's alone; in 1894, the Times of London forecast that by the
middle of the following century every street in the city would be buried under
nine feet of manure. It was understood that flies were a transmission vector for
disease, and a public-health crisis seemed imminent. When the world's first
international urban-planning conference was held, in 1898, it was dominated by
discussion of the manure situation. Unable to agree upon any solutions-or to
imagine cities without horses-the delegates broke up the meeting, which had been
scheduled to last a week and a half, after just three days.
Then, almost overnight, the crisis passed. This was not brought about by
regulation or by government policy. Instead, it was technological innovation
that made the difference. With electrification and the development of the
internal-combustion engine, there were new ways to move people and goods around.
By 1912, autos in New York outnumbered horses, and in 1917 the city's last
horse-drawn streetcar made its final run. All the anxieties about a metropolis
inundated by ordure had been misplaced.
This story-call it the Parable of Horseshit-has been told many times, with
varying aims. The latest iteration is offered by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J.
Dubner, in their new book, "SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic
Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance" (William Morrow;
$29.99). According to Levitt and Dubner, the story's message is a simple one:
if, at any particular moment, things look bleak, it's because people are seeing
them the wrong way. "When the solution to a given
problem doesn't lie right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution
exists," they write. "But history has shown again and again that such
assumptions are wrong."
Levitt and Dubner tell the horseshit story as a prelude to discussing climate
change: "Just as equine activity once threatened to stomp out civilization,
there is now a fear that human activity will do the same." As usual, they say,
the anxiety is unwarranted. First, the global-warming threat has been
exaggerated; there is uncertainty about how, exactly, the earth will respond to
rising CO2 levels, and uncertainty has "a nasty way of making us conjure up the
very worst possibilities." Second, solutions are bound to present themselves:
"Technological fixes are often far simpler, and
therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined."
. . . . "By far the preferred way to confront climate change", Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen has written, "is to lower the emissions of greenhouse gases."