In the era before coal, oil, and electricity, the environment suffered greatly.
Whales were slaughtered for lamp oil. Forests were cleared for firewood, mine props, building materials, roofing shingles, and sailing masts.
London (“The Big Smoke”) and Pittsburgh (“The Smoky City”) were smothered in smog from open fires, charcoal kilns, and iron smelters. Horses powered public and military transport, and city streets were layered with horse manure.
Then came the hydrocarbon revolution. Kerosene lamps saved the whales, and coal-powered steam engines delivered electricity (clean-coal-by-wire) to the cities — and much of the sulfurous smog disappeared.
Coke from coal replaced wood charcoal to make iron and steel. Steel and concrete saved the forests, and trucks and railways allowed the farmland, which once fed millions of horses, to produce food for humans.
Not one of these boons for humans and the environment was driven by a U.N. resolution or funded by statutory levies on consumers or subsidies from taxpayers. None was mandated in a government energy plan.
The anti-human, anti-industry policies of the Global Greens are now reversing all that progress.
A key event occurred in 2006, when a leading left-wing politician, Al Gore, invented the Global Warming Industry.
Despite a finding by a British High Court judge that his movie An Inconvenient Truth contained nine key scientific errors, it is still shown in schools.
This has misled students and teachers and created spreading circles of damage to jobs, industry, and the cost and reliability of electricity. It also created the fake industries of climate hysteria and green activism.
The Green Piglets were born, and the environment and the economy suffered.
Land that once fed horses is now used to produce biodiesel and ethanol for cars, so food prices must go up.
Forests are felled to burn in green power stations and for green-tick buildings while grasslands are invaded by feral pests and woody weeds from the ever-growing parks and Kyoto Protocol forests.
Birds and bats are being sliced by wind turbines; flatlands are being smothered by solar panels, access roads, and transmission lines. But electricity costs soar, and supply is rationed while reliability crashes.
Behind every one of these modern maladies are troughs of Big Green Pigs getting fatter on market mandates, subsidies from consumers or taxpayers, and special tax treatments.
In the background, governments fund an academic/media industry promoting climate alarmism, energy-rationing, and intermittent energy.
Electric cars and penny farthings were pushed off the roads by Henry Ford’s gas engines, but politicians are trying to put them back — a Tesla for the rich and a bicycle for the poor.
Consumers and industry don’t count, and taxpayers are there to be milked. In this Greentopia, no one needs miners, farmers, or fishermen. All are lost for a fake global warming emergency.
Objectors are told: “We must obey the UN Agenda.”
(Sacrifices are necessary to keep feeding the Fat Green Pigs.)
Read more at American Thinker
Perhaps the greatest 20th century advance in medicine was the automobile.
It finally allowed the doctor to get where he was needed and it eliminated streets full of fly/disease ridden horse manure.
Skeptical? In my time, I recall as a boy, roller skating down the street, dodging piles of manure on my way to the library. Typically a pile every 50 -100 ft.
In those days- milk, bread and garbage wagons were pulled by horses- the manure of which was typically collected by city workers with more horse drawn wagons.
Even the ashes from coal fired furnaces were collected by horse drawn wagons. This in a city of nearly a million souls.
If you survived childhood, you could look forward to dying of something like pneumonia by age 60 or so. Likely at home that is, since there were no ambulances. I’d just as soon ride to the crematorium in a black limo, thanks.
Yes lots of horse manure back then. I own two horses and fill up 2 55 gallon trash cans every week with manure. Thank goodness for some Black Phoebe birds that help keep the flies in check.
But, but, none of that matters as long as all the peasants do what the lords in the manor tell them to do. Dear heaven, how did we arrive at such a state for supposedly advanced civilisations? Mindless mobs running around crying climate emergency/catastrophe/crisis like robots and zombies. Where are those things happening? Please for once can someone tell me where I should look? Maybe it’s all like the polar bears extinction? Over hunting, not climate change was the problem, now they are become real pests as they breed up quickly. Or maybe it’s the Amazon and South East Asian forests that are being cleared to grow crops for biofuels. I think we are so naive and gullible it’s frightening.
Some people think that the Horse and Buggy days were cleaner i can still remember someone making poster in High School FIGHT POLLUTION GET A HORSE this was a total fraud anyone who thinks the 1890’s was a clean time have been reading the wrong stuff or watching too many liberal made mvies in fact the 1890’s was time of dirty air horse manure disease smog and without Air Conditoners and electric heaters a summer or winter could be very suffering and with no refrigerators and freezers no one could keep meat and vegetables fresh for long and now we have these idiots who are trying to return us to those Bad Old Days. I have read the book THE GOOD OLD DAYS THEY WERE TERRIBLE one its by Ottomight want t o read its by Otto Betman
The late Dixie Lee Ray wrote two books you need to read them one titled ENVIROMENTAL OVERKILL the other one is TRASHING THE PLANET in one she mentions the so called Good Old Days and well there is something about the 1890’s that’s makes in unlivible Dead Horses they did,nt live long lives because of pulling the heavy wagons and milkmen became notorious for deluting the milk with water the process of Pasturization of milk makes it safer to drink and the chloriniztion of tap water makes it safer to drink as well
Rather excellent, thank you Viv Forbes.
Progress has always caused some pollution, which further progress then cleans up. History tells us this.
In 1272 AD, King Edward 1 of England passed a law trying to cut down the fogs of “The Big Smoke”, Charles Dickens called them “London Particular” & the 1952
“Black Fog” reduced visibility to 10 centimetres, 4 inches, killed 4,000 people immediately & another 8,000 in subsequent months.
I was born 1953.
The 1956 Clean Air Act resulted. (1).
Today, our fake news Mainstream Media try to portray one London death from asthma as a National pollution disaster.
John Doran.
Ref (1) page 13, of the Introduction to geology Prof. Ian Plimer’s great book:
Heaven And Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science.
This is just silly ranting and raving and a bunch of generalizations and assumptions that are out of context of the comparative realities of the eras you refer to vs today? Did you think to check out the world population levels for the past 2000 years? It begins with estimates from a couple of hundred thousand to 25,000,000 global population at the time of Jesus Christ. By 1850 it was in the neighborhood of a 1 Billion.