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In his recent book, Seeds of Wealth: Four Plants that Made Men Rich, Henry Hobhouse defends the automobile as an environmental boon. Reviewing the book in the August 15 issue of the TLS, Paul Levy summarizes Hobhouse's argument:
In 1900, apart from a few steam and internal combustion-driven experimental omnibuses and cabs, there were 7,000 horse-drawn cabs and 3,000 buses daily, totalling "nearly 40,000 horses at work in London, each emitting 20 litres of solid effluent a day, or more than a quarter of a million tons a year. . . . At least 25 percent of this, or 70,000 tons, was dropped in the street and had to be picked up, largely by hand." Not to mention the "smelly, high-ammonia urine" and the ozone-layer-damaging methane gas contained in the flatus of 40,000 large herbivores.
I, for one, will take smog any day.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, August 31, 2003 at 10:06 PM
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