Imagine replacing all the cars in LA with horses. The average horse produces 50 pounds or .8 cubic feet of manure every day. They produce .11 pounds of methane per day. There are 2.1 million cars in LA. The math comes to 38,325,000,000 ponds of manure per year. That is about 613,200,000 cubic feet of manure. The methane would come to 84,315,000 pounds per year. There would also be almost a billion gallons of urine to deal with. The feed requirement would take most of the arable land in California. The water requirements would almost double the current use and create a water crisis in the state. All of this just for LA. The rest of the state would have to just move out. Here is a quote that I found that rings true to me. It is long. The author is:
Marlo Lewis, Jr.
Staff Director
Subcommittee on National Economic Growth,
Natural Resources, and Regulatory Affairs
Speech to the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness
July 1, 2000
Horse Feathers
Let's try a thought experiment. And I ask that we strive to do justice to the memory of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo.
In the late 19th and earth 20th centuries, horse manure was a major health hazard in American cities, causing encephalitis and other insect-borne diseases. Each horse emits about 45 pounds of waste per day. And, pound for pound, the stuff is certainly deadlier than CO2! By the early 20th century, there were so many horses that one-third of all U.S. farmland was devoted to producing fodder.
Now, imagine that a James Hansen of that era steps forward and makes extrapolations from current trends. Factoring in urbanization, population growth, and economic growth, this modeler projects that by 1950 Americans will literally be inundated in equine emissions. Disease outbreaks will decimate cities. Wildlife habitat will disappear as farmers cut down forests and drain wetlands to grow fodder for horses. Food prices will soar as more agricultural resources are diverted from human nutrition to horse nutrition. Environmental refugees will stream across borders, straining social services. The equine emissions crisis will aggravate or cause political instability and international conflict.
To avert the crisis, policymakers propose an international treaty to limit the use of horses. There are fierce debates on whether all countries should have binding equine emission limits, or just the industrialized countries. Some argue that, since so much of economic life depends on horsepower, all nations must "meaningfully participate," or else the treaty will create unfair trade advantages for developing countries. Others retort that developing countries are too poor to limit their use of horses, and should not be asked to do so until they reach our stage of development.
To break the stalemate over the treaty, some politicians propose a system of early action crediting. Under this scheme, businesses that voluntarily reduce their use of horses would earn credits they could later use to offset their obligations under a mandatory treaty. But a number of thorny details remain to be worked out. Should the reductions be measured against an historic baseline - how many horses the firm actually used? Or against a future projected baseline - the number of horses the firm planned to use under a business-as-usual scenario? Or, should the crediting be performance-based, with firms earning credits by reducing their use of horses per unit of production or sale? And what about sinks - should credits be given only for manure reductions or also for manure sequestration?
In the meantime, horse breeders lobby Washington to establish a "Partnership for a New Generation of Horses." Under this scheme, taxpayers subsidize the breeding of horses that get more miles to the bushel of oats. Other interests lobby Congress for a "clean manure program" - an R&D effort to develop fodder that generates less infectious droppings.
Urban planners also get into the act, advocating "smart growth" policies. Ironically, these proposals are the exact opposite of what Al Gore is promoting today. Since the "solution to pollution is dilution," these activists advocate low-density, sprawling development. Sprawl, they explain, will reduce the number of horses per square mile, hence reduce ambient equine emission concentrations.
And then along comes - Henry Ford! He solves the equine emissions crisis before it even starts by exploiting the commercial potential of a new technology. A quarter century after the modeler's dire predictions, automobile civilization replaces horsepower civilization.
What today's sustainable developers don't seem to comprehend is that technology change is the great X factor in human affairs. Even in the short run, technology change is rather mysterious. Who among us predicted the marvels of the Internet economy even 10 years ago? Over the long run, technology change is essentially unpredictable. All we can safely assume about the world of 2075 or 2100 is that it will be more different from our world than ours is from the horse and buggy era. By the 22nd century, mankind will likely produce and consume energy in ways we cannot even imagine.
As Mark Mills reminds us, all climate models are based, explicitly or otherwise, on long-term technology forecasts. That is, to know how human activity will change the climate over the next century, one must also know what kinds of energy technologies will be prevalent 50 or 100 years hence. But that is impossible. We cannot know what has not yet been discovered or invented. What we can reasonably expect is that the 21st century will have its share of Henry Fords - and Einsteins, and Watson & Cricks.
The Kyoto Protocol is based on climate models that make various assumptions about key natural variables like water vapor, solar radiation, and ocean-atmosphere interaction. But even if the models some day get the science right, and can grasp the exact relationship between a ton of CO2 and an increment of global temperature, the models would still be no better than guesses - and most likely wrong guesses at that! Why? Because no matter how smart the science gets, the models must still make assumptions about that which cannot be modeled - long-term technology change.
Because long-term technology change is inherently unpredictable, climate change, insofar as it is affected by human activity, is also inherently unpredictable. Furthermore, because long-term technology change is unpredictable, it is sheer folly for today's politicians to believe they can plan the energy economy of 2050 or 2100.
What then is the driving force behind this precautionary foolishness and pseudo-sustainability? What fuels this Horse Feathers treaty and agenda?
I suspect that behind the Kyoto Protocol is the age-old lust for power. Carbon dioxide is not only the fundamental nutrient of the planetary food chain. It is also the most ubiquitous byproduct of industrial civilization. Manufacturing, electric power generation, farming, automobiles, aircraft - all are major sources of carbon dioxide emissions. To successfully control CO2 emissions, government must regulate practically everything - and on a global scale.
Clearly, we have more to fear from climate change policy than from climate change itself. If we are to remain a free and prosperous people, we must categorically and unequivocally reject the Kyoto Protocol.
