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Catastrophic predictions that spell dark days for humanity are nothing new.
The Times predicted in 1894 that in 50 years time, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of horse manure. It was the crisis of all crises.
There was, to be fair, some evidence for this. As urban populations rapidly increased and cities grew, the demand for transportation also soared. Horses were the primary means of transportation in cities, pulling carriages, cabs and carts. The sheer number of horses led to a significant and growing issue – the accumulation of horse manure in the streets.
And it wasn’t just the manure, as Ben Johnson writes:
Each horse also produced around 2 pints of urine per day and to make things worse, the average life expectancy for a working horse was only around 3 years. Horse carcasses therefore also had to be removed from the streets. The bodies were often left to putrefy so the corpses could be more easily sawn into pieces for removal.
The streets of London were beginning to poison its people.
Countries all over the world faced the same problem, disaster was predicted, and all sought to find an urgent solution.
New York hosted the inaugural International Urban Planning Conference in 1898. The main topic on the agenda was the horse manure problem. However, after three days of debating a seemingly wicked problem they could not find any solution. In fact, the attendees were so discouraged that the conference was abandoned and they all went home.
However entrepreneurs, working alongside members of the public solved a problem that the planners could not. By the end of the 1920s this seemingly insurmountable problem had completely disappeared.
The solution to the horse manure problem was a technological solution – that came out of nowhere. In cities all across the world, horses had been replaced with motorised vehicles.
If you wait long enough, most problems get resolved.
This is a great story, but unfortunately it may not be true. According to Wikipedia no such statement in the Times is known – although there was a letter of complaint, and there’s no evidence an Urban Planning Conference took place.
Either way, the “Great Horse Manure Crisis” – a Law of Horse Manure if you will – serves as a reminder of a couple of important points:
- Problems that seem overwhelming and permanent sometimes have unexpected (and often technological) solutions.
- Predicting future problems based on current trends without considering potential innovations and shifts can lead to inaccurate conclusions.
I was thinking about this whilst listening to a recent episode of Let’s Talk Ideas in which Dave Parkin talks to my colleague Mark Willis about what we mean by net zero, common misconceptions about the transition, and what we need to do to get there.
It seems people are unsure about what it takes to get there, and what getting there looks like, particularly our political leadership.
Last summer, the man who is almost certainly our next Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, announced he would ‘speed ahead’ with green investment plans, after earlier stating the Labour Party would ‘throw everything at the problem’ of catastrophic climate change.
Just a few months later, he’d gone back on this, blaming his u-turn on the economy being ‘trashed’. More recently Humza Yousaf set in motion the end of his tenure as First Minister after a damning report found the Scottish Government’s 2030 climate change target is unreachable.
A politician going back on something they have said isn’t anything new, but the climate crisis/emergency/debate is arguably an example of what happens when bureaucrats become over involved and under informed about a very complex problem.
Really, we should all be a little sceptical as history shows that politicians and bureaucrats have a frankly appalling record of predicting which technologies and innovations will thrive, become successful and solve societal problems.
As David Heinemeier Hansson writes:
Whether it be of the climate, the economy, or politics. The weather, the money, and the people have a funny way of proving experts wrong time and again. Just when they think they have it all figured out, the story takes an unexpected turn. And you really don’t have to live through too many of such turns before you start developing a healthy skepticism for the people who are so sure about what’s going to happen next.
Of course, the idea of waiting and see what innovation throws up is strongly disputed by those who insist we don’t have the time and that technology on its own isn’t enough, and that we all need to adopt drastic lifestyle changes.
In Let’s Talk Ideas Mark points out the cost of getting there:
The Climate Change Committee – the independent body that the government set up to hold themselves to account – estimate we’ll need additional 13.5 billion of investment every year will be needed. And that rises over time rising to up to 50 or 60 billion pounds every year from the 2030s onwards.
Dave Parkin counters this, very well, in the podcast, pointing to the technology available today and the range of investment frameworks that could exist to make the transition more palatable.
Where I start to lose faith with the ‘Net Zero or we are damned argument’ is when we become over reliant on worst case statistical modelling that doesn’t account for a Law of Horse Manure event but also when we fail to set out a realistic view of the future.
It’s very easy to set a goal date for solving something or eradicating an issue. Actually mobilising the various people, players, industries to take action whilst allocating them sufficient resources is another thing entirely.
The bit that concerns me is when we start talking about the behaviour change and choices people will have to make. As Dave Parkin rightfully says:
We need a dialogue with the electorate as a whole about the changes which we are all going to need to make.
It can be healthier, it can be cheaper. There can be a whole raft of benefits from deploying these technologies. But it is going to require people to make choices and decisions and that debate has to be led at a political level.
This is where we need to spell things out. What are these choices and decisions? What will people need to give up?
The Take The Jump Campaign suggests we we take no more than one short haul flight every three years and one long haul flight every eight years. As someone who took two long haul flights and three short haul flights during April that strikes me as a tad unrealistic.
Does that make me irresponsible? I’d argue otherwise. As Jennifer Bernstein writes:
We should not assume that optimists are climate change denialists or somehow minimizing the severity of the climate crisis. Humanity’s ongoing climate change mitigation offers reasons for optimism, not apocalysm, underscoring that it’s not too late to take action
You can’t uninvent technological innovations like cars, planes or smartphones. You can make them cleaner and more sustainable. To achieve Net Zero targets in the present time frame will almost certainly require some form of social mandate, but politicians are waking up to that fact that this is a very hard sell.
The climate crisis will be resolved, just not yet. It’s likely to proceed very slowly, and then be resolved very quickly when we least expect it.
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner summed this up in SuperFreakonomics:
“When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lie right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong.”
Or maybe I’m wrong – and we are all doomed.
But I’m glass half full kind of person.
However bad things look, don’t despair. Something always turns up.
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