A closer look
London's Times newspaper predicted in 1894 that every street in the city would be buried under nine feet of horse manure within fifty years. Over fifty thousand horses were keeping the city's public transport moving at the time, dropping thousands of tons of waste daily. It was the original emissions crisis, long before carbon footprints were a gleam in a corporate polluter's eye. Urban planners panicked, holding the world's first international urban planning conference in 1898 just to discuss poop, only to disband early because nobody had a solution. Fortunately, Henry Ford and the motorized automobile came along shortly after to save humanity from drowning in literal horse excrement. Now we just get to slowly suffocate on invisible tailpipe emissions instead, which is a massive win for aesthetic street cleanliness and a spectacular loss for our respiratory systems, proving that progress is just swapping one terrible byproduct for another
