Yesterday Vancouver Sun columnist Pete McMartin wrote (another) good column but it made my eyes widen a little because he used an analogy I’ve used here before and just used again yesterday. Regarding Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi’s lecture/meeting with our Prime Minister Harper about Kyoto (and his suggestion that folks “bundle up” in the winter to stop global warming), I mocked that Honda was going to come out with a new horse and buggy contraption next year called “Pre-Civic”. (No, no Hollywood agents have come calling yet to offer me a spot on Letterman).
We’ve improved our air quality and that’s reason for hope
History’s doomsdayists have done badly predicting the future
Pete McMartin, Vancouver Sun
Published: Thursday, June 29, 2006History—the sober lessons of which we seem to have abandoned in favour of Doomsday scenarios—tells us that by the end of the 19th century, 2.5 million pounds of horse manure fell on the streets of New York City each day.
That is a lot of horse manure. That is a lot of horses. The offal they produced was one of the major health and sanitation concerns of the day.
The air stunk. Men and women used handkerchiefs scented with violet water as impromptu face masks. Streets were slick with filth. Of the more heavily trafficked avenues, it was said their original surfaces had not been seen for years. By 1880, New York was having to dispose not only of all that horse manure but of 15,000 horse carcasses each year.
Given the growth of Manhattan’s population then, it was considered an unsolvable problem—the punchline being that by 1920, the problem did not exist.
The automobile had arrived, and drove all the horses away.
And no one saw it coming.
He then goes on to report that pollution has gone DOWN in the Vancouver area in the past number of years despite a huge rise in the number of people and cars.
[…] Today’s generation of Doomsdayists now has the world ending not with a bang but to the sound of an idling SUV caught in traffic. In their world, we’ll either drown or die from thirst. Either way, the future sucks.
Could be. But who knows? Who could have believed, for example, that the Soviet Union would one day merely evaporate—other than that doddering old fool, Ronald Reagan, I mean? That’s the thing about the future: It sometimes has a way of confounding the pessimist’s most-wished-for fears, as the past has shown.
[…] Since the GVRD began to keep records in the mid-1980s, air quality in the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley reached a low point between 1985-1990, and then began to improve steadily.
He does point out that carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gasses” have increased, due largely to the huge (and dirty) ships plying the huge Vancouver harbors. (Like nearly all humans, he fails to point out that most greenhouse gases occur naturally, and are not man-made). But it ends well:
[…] (Though I will say that I don’t think everyone will bike to work in the future, or abandon the suburbs, even though the fabulists in the environmental movement wish with all their might that it was so.)
I do think, however, our record on improving air quality is instructive, and—while I may be a horse’s ass for thinking this—does give us cause for hope.
Optimism—wow, fancy that. And a hope that man-made technology will find solutions. Sort of like what President Bush espouses—you know, optimism and encouraging technological solutions; and which Prime Minister Harper and Rona Ambrose have talked about for months with their wacky forward-thinking made-in-Canada “advanced-thinking” solutions. Liberals are against that.
Perhaps liberals and their massive multi-billion-dollar environut industry should take a breath or two and smell the roses (which themselves eventually emit carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere as all organic matter does when it dies and decomposes).
And a clue for the pessimists: technological breakthroughs and solutions have always happened and have addressed most of our world’s problems in case you didn’t notice, and they still happen today (check out the new Honda Civic gas/electric hybrid model). And they always will happen as long as you let them —as long as you create and guard an environment that allows them and encourages them to happen. This “environment” I speak of is also known as “capitalism” and “free enterprise”. Protect THAT environment. And in this context, moving forward can improve things, while stopping or going backward may not provide you with the answers you had in mind.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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