At 01:43 AM 2/25/2000 , Karl Wolz wrote:
>Can you imagine just how deep the sh*t would be if we all had horse drawn
>carriages instead of cars?  Not to mention that those horses keep on
>polluting whether they're being used or not!  Manure, properly composted is
>an aid to agriculture, especially on a small farm, but large quantities of
>it, laying in a city street, it is a breeding ground for disease and when
>run off into rivers and into the sea, is a severe environmental problem.

Right-o.  Lots of things are good and/or work when only a few people are
doing it -- scavenging frying oil from restaurants comes immediately to
mind  -- lessee, Portsmouth NH, 25,000 souls, 85 restaurants, considered a
remarkable number for the population.  Let's suppose each restaurant
disposes of 5 gal/day of frying oil -- which I sincerely doubt, I suspect
it's more like 5 gal/week.  They don't give that stuff away (the fresh oil,
that is).  But anyway...that would be a total of 30 gal/year for each
family of 5.  If as I suspect I'm an order of magnitude high, it would be
more like 3 gal/year/family.  Not to mention that if there was demand for
the stuff, you can bet that a price would soon be on its
head.  Incidentally, I once rode a moped through some chunks of England,
and I can't tell you the number of towns I passed through where the primary
evidence of "town" was a single Zebra crossing (pedestrian crossing where
the ped. has right-of-way as soon as he puts foot off the pavement and onto
the street) and about a quarter-mile radius smell of fish &
chips.  Amusing, but I wouldn't like it as a steady olfactory diet.  I
suppose the inhabitants actually don't smell it, I never asked.

Ditto heating with wood -- the particulate emissions are
astounding.  Woodstoves these days tend to have some sort of catalytic
converter on them, which helps with the hydrocarbons etc -- not sure it
does much to the soot.  I've driven through Jay, Maine (which sits in a
sort of bowl) at night during a winter temperature inversion, and it looked
like a scene from hell.  All the smoke from chimneys was going ten feet
straight up and then taking a 90-degree bend, and in the HP-sodium street
lights it was just amazing.  Glad I like the smell of woodsmoke, but even a
good thing can be overdone.

And in Scotland they use a lot of coal still for heating dwellings (in the
smaller towns anyway), and that smells downright foul on a chilly day.  I
don't think they have the population density to get deadly fogs like London
used to...

david
David Beierl - Providence, RI
  http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/
'84 Westy "Dutiful Passage"
'85 GL "Poor Relation"