From New York Horse Apples to Rovers on Mars

Having been around horse apples for the first sixteen years of my life, a book review by New Yorker reporter Elizabeth Kolbert immediately caught my eye. In their book “Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance” Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner reveal that a late 19th century commentator estimated that by 1930 horse manure would reach third-story window ledges in Manhattan.

In 1860 New York, the most popular way to get around was the horse-drawn streetcar, with a capacity of 20 adults pulled by a team of horses. Some horsecars were on rails; others had regular wheels. By 1870 there were over 100 million passengers using New York horsecars. Needless to say, such numbers required a lot of horses. The horsecars ran sixteen hours a day but horses were limited to four-hour shifts, thus requiring eight per car for each day. In addition, if there were steep grades on the schedule, additional horses were needed to pull a horsecar up the hill.

It has been scientifically determined that each horse dropped an average of twenty-two pounds of horse apples on the streets of New York each day. By 1880 a minimum of 150,000 horses were required to run the horsecar system. Thousands of others were required just to pull freight wagons around the city. Street Cleaning Commissioner George Waring estimated that 45,000 tons of horse apples were dropped on the city streets each month. In the 1890’s other large cities in the world had a similar problem. In 1894 the Times of London forecast that by 1950 London streets would be covered by nine feet of horse apples.

On our farm we had two teams of Percherons plus other smaller horses for light duties. Percherons are the largest draft horses in the world, making the Budweiser Clydesdales look like ponies. We are French, so we had to have French horses. Believe me, they dropped a much heavier load than twenty-two pounds. They were probably in the thirty-five pound range. Their horse apples were in the huge Delicious apple range while average horses deposited Winesaps. In the winter, when they were in their stalls a majority of the time, that meant that some poor sucker, namely me, had to shovel out a minimum of 200 pounds of horse apples a day. Percherons are very friendly, personable horses, but they seemed to snicker more when I had a shovel in my hands.

By 1900 every urban planning conference in the country had placed horse apples #1 on the agenda. They were the top public-health subject because of flies and disease. But suddenly technological innovation saved the day and the streets. In just a decade gas autos outnumbered horses and the last horse-drawn streetcar made its final run in 1917. Man can be amazingly inventive when he has to be. But horse apples evidently are still causing problems in horse-happy Florida. The Brevard County Commission just voted to exclude horses from its pooper-scooper law. Horse lover Wanetta Dyer convinced the Commission that “to stop a 1,000-pound animal, get off, hold it while you try to put the poop in a bag is just not a good idea.” Wrapping the bag around the saddle horn might also be too much for the sinuses.

Will Technology Answer the Challenge of Global Warming?

There is no doubt that 100 years of the internal combustion engine spewing out carbon and other emissions has added to the possibilities of harmful climate change. Oil and coal companies provide prostitutional “scientists” with millions to fight the real science of carbon and gases and their effect on our climate and environment. We have thousands of square miles of gulfs and oceans called dead zones around the world that are completely dead because no oxygen can survive the pollutants of fertilizer runoff. Corky and I have driven through 22 million acres of trees in British Columbia killed by ash borers that love the warmth of climate change. It’s a terrible sight to see brown trees cover mountainside after mountainside. We have had icebergs the size of Delaware breaking off from Antarctica because the South Pole is warming. Greenland glaciers and ice caps have melted 150 feet of ice in just one season. But Exxon Mobil, British Petroleum, and other oil and coal companies have bought enough Congressmen to make any thought of dealing with climate change difficult.

There is hope that innovative technology will assist us in dealing with climate change. Climate change, formerly called global warming, is so derided by conservatives and free market gurus it is difficult to get anything done politically. They seem to care only about today’s bottom line, not tomorrow’s children. If global warming is a distinct possibility (a strong majority of scientists believe there is global warming), shouldn’t we be planning to contain and counteract it? If we dither, what if we go beyond the tipping point?

At this moment Mars is somewhere between 36 million and 250 million miles from earth. We put a little rover car named Spirit on Mars over five and one-half years ago to examine the terrain and the atmosphere. It was expected to survive three months but it is still moving and sending us weather and seismic information after five and one-half years. Spirit is now stuck in sand and scientists are telling it to move slightly to see if it can get unstuck. It can tell us if it tilts more than one degree. The little rover proves one thing. If we can send a technological robot to Planet Mars as a geographer, we should have a good shot at maintaining the proper atmosphere for life on Planet Earth.

Engines Powered by Hydrogen and Car Bodies Made of Hemp and Sea Weed

New York Times writer Bob Herbert went to devastated Detroit to cover a new plant built in the ruins of the auto industry. Within this plant is a machine the length of a football field that produces mile after mile of thin, flexible solar panel material every day that can be sliced and shaped in any form. This material has the same symbolic quality of Henry Ford’s Model Ts replacing the millions of tons of horse apples on U.S. streets from 1912 to 1922. Oil replaced horse apples and, if we are prudent, solar panels will eventually replace billions of barrels of crude oil and millions of tons of coal.

Stan Ovshinsky, the developer of the solar panel machine, is an American that Herbert describes as the genius of U.S. alternative energy. While in Detroit Herbert drove a car which has no gasoline tank at all. The car’s power is supplied by a safe, solid-state hydrogen storage system invented and developed by Ovshinsky. The car produces no carbon or other pollution but does leak a little water on the roadway from the hydrogen tank. Perhaps if we are prudent, solar panels on the roof of a car, with an engine powered by hydrogen will also replace millions of barrels of crude oil and millions of tons of coal. We can never get there if ignorant, uninformed politicians stick their heads in the sand and always vote “No!” while in that position their butts are still exposed spewing horse apples.

We have to listen to scientists like Ovshinsky instead of igoramuses like Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe. While Inhofe has been busy calling global warming a hoax, Ovshinsky has been a leader in the development of flat screen TVs, lithium batteries, solar materials, hydrogen fuel cells, and even new forms of computer memory. Without the Ovshinskys of the world working on electric cars, the Inhofes of the world would still be dodging and shoveling horse apples.

But science marches on. Toyota has developed a Prius with an exterior made of seaweed that weighs one-third that of a steel Prius. Such a weight loss doubles the fuel efficiency. Other materials from bamboo, hemp, corn husks, and soybeans are currently being developed for use in cars. The one major drawback is that some of these materials get soggy when wet if the protective coating wears off. But what do I know? Perhaps there is someone out there developing body panels from horse apples.

Once in a blue moon we get a positive message about science from areas outside of carbon emissions and polluting industries. The University of Nebraska Board of Trustees, a governing body in a very red Republican state, met the challenge of the “No!” crowd last week by rejecting by a 4-4 tie vote a proposal to drastically limit embryonic stem cell research at the university. A day before the vote, France announced that medical teams using embryonic stem cells developed “temporary” skin to help burn patients recover from serious burns.

Did Goldman-Sachs’ CEO Give God a Good Bonus?

Perhaps it is the sign of our confused times that in the same week that Sotheby’s sold Andy Warhol’s painting of “200 One Dollar Bills” for $43.7 million, the Department of Agriculture announced that a record 49 million Americans “lacked access” to adequate nutrition. Sotheby’s total sales for that evening were $134.4 million, about twice as much as estimates. In the same week Christie’s auction, selling postwar and contemporary art, brought in another $74.1 million. I suppose its possible that some billionaire gets his rocks off by staring at the reproduction of 200 one-dollar bills. Is it only money that keeps the buyer from being called psychotic? Inquiring minds want to know.

In the city that houses Wall Street, over one million New Yorkers live in “food insecure” households. That’s one in seven households. Over 1.5 million New Yorkers have applied for and received food stamps in 2009.

One Wall Street business, Goldman Sachs, is planning to give employees $23 billion in bonuses in 2009–-during the worst recession since the Great Depression. Goldman Sachs’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein said the firm is doing “God’s work.” Blankfein did not answer the inquiry about the size of God’s bonus. The average pay at Goldman Sachs in 2008, during another bad year, was $622,000 per employee. It is expected to be much higher in 2009. The Best Congress Money Can Buy is evidently staying bought because there has been no serious effort to limit bonuses–even if Wall Street businesses got huge bailouts from taxpayers. $23 billion is not chump change. It would pay for a very good family health insurance plan for 1.7 million families. It would pay 115,000 full four-year scholarships at Harvard. It would pay to upgrade 191 million school computers to the Windows 7 operating system. By the way, Goldman Sachs pays a whopping one percent as corporate income tax. In 2008 Goldman Sachs paid only $14 million in taxes worldwide. The firm did pay $6 billion in taxes in 2007–while paying out over $13 billion in bonuses to its employees. With the Great Recession going on Goldman Sachs got very creative in its accounting and tax departments.

How About a Homeless Doll for Homeless Kids?

Food pantries and charitable agencies around the U.S. have been hit hard by the recession. The Twin Cities Salvation Army has had an increase of 130 percent in Christmas Assistance requests. (By the way, if you want to make a young homeless child feel good, you can buy a “Homeless Doll” from the American Girl Doll Company for $95.) Hunger Solutions Minnesota states that the state’s 300 food pantries have seen an average increase of 26 percent. 49,000 North Dakotans and 547,000 Minnesotans are considered “food insecure.” We used to call them hungry.

Food stamps now help feed one in eight Americans and one in four children. More than 36 million food stamp cards are in service. A Rand study indicates that half of all Americans will now use food stamps by the time they reach the age of 20. Among black children it will 90 percent.

The richest one percent have more collective wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The bottom 90 percent don’t have the price of a Congressman. The deck is stacked against anyone who works for a living. The deck only has one ace and the rich have it.

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