Motor of Change

This morning at the service station, the image of all those cars - including our own - being horses instead imposed itself on me. And I remembered - from reading about it, I should add - how people once said about horses that they were sullying the roads.

This was reported to have been in the days of cars still being in their infancy and also at their experimental stage, and at the same time utterly progressive; only the automotive tinkerers themselves, and some of the very-well-to-do with enough money at their disposal to have others do the tinkering for them, could expect to be seen riding one.

Riding they still were, even though it wasn't on horseback, but the perception remained. The car was called an automobile because it was also seen (another perception) as a thing driving on its own (auto), mainly without a horse attached to it at the front. A horse, mind you, from its own perspective or from the rider's when he or she is sitting on its back, can walk, trot and run on its own, too.

(Microsoft ClipArt)

Surely, a horse needs to eat, as much as a car needs to drink. Movement in all cases relies on a sufficient amount of energy that gets transformed one way or another to trigger and maintain the respective movement. Nobody yet thought about the consequences as much as we do today. When people complained about horse dung dirtying and clogging the streets, they saw the automobile as a cleaner solution.

These days, we talk a great deal about carbon dioxide coming from cars' exhaust pipes and being amongst the prime reasons - apart from industrial waste gas - fuelling the current climate change. Though a changing climate is nothing new, this one is generally seen (and supported by data) as being man-made. But apart from carbon dioxide, there is also much talk about methane.

And this unpleasant component in our sea of nitrogen that we wade through as much as fish swim through what's predominantly, but not exclusively, hydrogen dioxide, this unpleasant component which in itself is nothing new either, is mainly unpleasant due to its increased presence in our atmosphere.

And on top of that, methane is suspected, or even proven to a certain extent, to be an even stronger agent driving climate change than carbon dioxide. Its main emitter? Cattle. Primarily so, because there are so many of them these days to feed a population expecting huge if not excessive amounts of beef.

With all that carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen and their roles in more complex molecular compounds stand for being in the public domain, all that's left to ask is, what would it be like if all those cars (counting them or asking the Bureau of Statistics) were in fact still horses? Would it be a better atmosphere in all its senses?

We shouldn't forget, honestly, that horses - being vegetarians and ruminants like cattle - also produce a lot of carbon dioxide the normal and well-known way, and methane of top of that, much like cattle. Well, of course, one might add, we also exhale water and carbon dioxide, but there's the power of the numbers - and the figures of the Bureau.

(Microsoft Media)

If all those cars were horses there would be millions and millions of them. Apart from the extra space they'd need at people's homes - you can't simply put a horse in the garage or on a parking spot and then forget about it until, of necessity, you have to go to the bowser (make that a service station with a huge haystack and oats by the container load) again or have it serviced.

There'd be roads and freeways absolutely packed with horses, riders and carts. We'd still get similar traffic-congestion updates on the radio. And people wouldn't be so private on them and inside most of the carts drawn by them; people would be much more out in the open, unless they were inside a closed vehicle with a chauffeur up front and the reins in his hands; then he'd be the one out in the open or at least under a wee canopy.

Who knows, people might be swearing more at each other, or they might be more polite. That's open for discussion. But there'd be enormous quantities of horse dung cluttering the roads, apart from the methane leaving the beasties at their rear ends. It's things like methane and carbon dioxide (and monoxide) that we rarely worry about because we can't see them, can't hear them and we only smell them or suffer directly from them when they occur in a high enough concentration around us making breathing difficult.

So much for the good old days, though we might be able to use all that dung on our roads as a source of energy.