One of the persistent, recurring fallacies in social/economic analysis is to project the trajectories of current trends indefinitely into the future to the point where there is a collapse. Ignored is the market's dynamic feedback loop indicating resource availability and changes in people's preferences. Here is an interesting piece titled "The Cure for Manure in the Streets":
Every decade has a far-reaching cure for its ills. Around 1900 the problem was pollution. Three million horses inhabited urban America, with the healthier ones contributing from twenty to twenty-five pounds of manure each day. On every street their presence was evident as swarms of flies circulated and pungent colors permeated the air. To add to the atmosphere, almost every block boasted stables packed with urine-saturated hay.
Four-legged pollution was not alleviated by a change in the weather. When it rained, the streets turned to a muddy manure mush. During dry spells heave carriage and foot traffic beat the dung to a fine dust which, as one contemporary put it, blew "from the pavement as a sharp piercing powder, to cover our clothes, ruin our furniture and blow up into our nostrils."
New York alone was home to approximately 150,000 horses or, pessimistically, to some ten million pounds of manure a year. The offerings of the 15,000 horese of Rochester, New York, in 1900, would have covered and acre of soil wiht a heap 175 feet high. In light of ever-increasing production, many Americans feared that their cities would soon disappear under the dung.
But a godsend from turn-of-the-century pollution was becoming available. At last, rejoiced Americans, the curtain was closing on the age of equine air. Cities would now be cleaner, quieter, healthier places in which to work and live. At last, the age of the automobile arrived.
(Published in One Night Stands With American History, 197. Originally Otto L. Bettman, The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible (New York: Random House, 1974) p. 3.)
Imagine if thinkers of the day had constrained social and economic development to horse-and-buggy technology because continuing the trends would spell our doom. Where people have the freedom to make their preferences known, and businesses have the freedom to respond, problems get solved. Sometimes government must get involved in ensuring those benefiting from externalities bear their fair share of the economic costs, but the solutions come from iterative feedback loops in the market. My guess is that, just as with the auto replacing the horse, marketplace innovation will bring the best green technologies into being.
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