Horse Manure, Climate Change, and Nuclear Energy

The "Great Manure Crisis" of the late 19th century offers some serious lessons for those worried about the "existential threat" of global warming from CO2 emissions.   

A predicted crisis that never occurred because of new technology.

Just before the dawn of the 20th century, there was desperate talk about the huge accumulation of horse manure on the streets of major world cities.  Not only was rising levels of horse poop inhibiting travel, but it threatened to become a major health hazard.  For example, New York City had 150,000 horses, each producing 15-30 pounds of manure daily.  And yes, tens of thousands of gallons of urine.

Extrapolating the problem, not unlike current climate activists projecting the effects of global warming during the coming century, the Times of London in 1894 predicted: "in fifty years, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure."  People were encouraged to travel less, avoid unnecessary trips, work at home, and collect the refuse their animals produced.   

Sounds familiar?

You can also imagine the stories in the Seattle Times (then known as the Seattle Daily Times) if some wealthy Seattle foundation had given them funds for a "Health Lab":

This terrible poop crisis never happened.  Why?  

Because of a new transportation technology, powered by the internal combustion engine.  

A good lesson for us today: it is problematic to extrapolate problems into the future assuming technologies will remain static.

Today we have a new crisis dominating the media, global warming resulting from increasing greenhouse gases. 

Yes, CO2 and other greenhouse gas concentrations are increasing due to human emissions, and the earth is slowly warming as a result.    

But it is silly to simply extrapolate rising greenhouse gas concentrations into the future because energy production technology will profoundly change during the next decades....and I am not talking about solar or wind power.

Nuclear power, starting with fission, but rapidly displaced by fusion power, will provide essentially limitless clean energy.

The False Hope of Wind and Solar

There is a lot of talk about wind and solar being the solution to the global warming problem, but the truth is that they will only make a minor contribution for many reasons, with their intermittency (only available during the day and during windy periods), environmental impacts, and low energy density being significant problems.   

Furthermore, the demand for energy, and particularly electricity, is going up much faster than renewables can be installed.  Why?   Because billions of people are moving out of poverty and the huge energy demands of data centers.  To name only a few.

Consider the U.S.  energy consumption statistics (below).   Energy use has increased rapidly during the past decades with fossil fuels still dominating (but more gas and less coal).  Wind and solar are very small in comparison.

The U.S. is actually one of the most renewable-friendly nations.  Considering the whole world (below), fossil fuels are even more dominant.

Solar and wind are not mankind's long-term energy solutions.  

Nuclear is.  Fission in the short term and fusion in the long term.  

Fission power is heavily used in some nations (such as in  France, where 70% of the electricity is from fission) and today about 9% of world energy is from fission.  No major safety issues and fission power is clean, with no air quality issues.   New designs of small modular fission reactors will make them much cheaper, more reliable, and make melt-downs impossible.

Major energy users, such as Amazon, are already committing to using such new technology fission reactors.

And there is fusion.   Fusion power is essentially limitless and does not produce nuclear waste.

The uninformed make jokes about fusion always being 20 years away.   They are wrong.  There are no theoretical reasons in the way of practical fusion reactors.  Dozens of private sector firms are working on prototypes, including Seattle's Helion.   

Break-even fusion has already been achieved.

Microsoft has agreed to purchase fusion-generated power from Helion starting in 2028

Folks...this going to happen.  Even if delayed a decade or two, fusion power will completely change the world's energy story in the same way the internal combustion engine ended the manure "crisis" over a century ago.

And one more thing.  With virtually unlimited energy from fusion, we can take CO2 out of the atmosphere, something called CO2 sequestration.  Several companies, such as Carbon Engineering of BC, are already working on prototypes.

So next time you hear end-of-the-world catastrophic predictions about global warming, think about horse waste.😀