Heartland - ID's Ecological Catastrophe

I hope this helps you to better understand the rights argument for fossil fuels.

PLEASE read it – Hopefully you will gain a better understanding of the right-wing thinking.

From Heartland.org – a 2000 report entitled:

The Increasing Sustainability of Cars, Trucks, and the Internal Combustion Engine

By

Joseph Bast is President, and Dr. Jay Lehr is Science Director, of The Heartland Institute,

Cars and trucks, in other words,

arrived just in time to rescue 

the nation’s growing cities 

from an ecological catastrophe.

C. Environmental Benefits

Air pollution is generally counted as a cost, or “negative externality,” of popular ownership of cars and trucks. Often missing from such calculations, however, are the beneficial effects on human health and the environment delivered by cars and trucks when they replaced prior modes of travel and cartage that polluted more. “The modern American automobile,” writes Gregg Easterbrook, “is the cleanest system of transportation ever devised.”7

Before the advent of motorized travel, most Americans relied on horses or sat in carriages pulled by horses for personal transportation. Freight also moved by horse-drawn wagons or, for longer distances, smoke-belching trains. Fred L. Smith, a former senior policy analyst for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and now president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, gives this vivid and unpleasant description of the impact horses had on America’s cities

100 years ago:

A horse produces approximately 45 pounds of manure each day. In high-density urban environments, massive tonnages accumulated, requiring constant collection and disposal. Flies, dried dung dust, and the smell of urine filled the air, spreading disease and irritating the lungs. On rainy days, one walked through puddles of liquid wastes. Occupational diseases in horse-related industries were common.8

Smith goes on to report that New York City in the 1890s had to dispose of 15,000 dead horses every year, a huge public health and environmental problem. Often, these rotting corpses were hauled in open-air wagons to the edge of town, where they were dumped into huge kettles and heated over coal fires (without emission controls) until they were “reduced” into grease, later to be sold to the manufacturers of candles and lubricants.

the

nation’s growing

ecological catastrophe.

Horse Poop!