[Federalist] Deep within a southeastern cove of Brooklyn lies Dead Horse Bay. Vintage debris washes up on its shores thanks to a decomposing underwater landfill. Old Clorox bottles, tires, men’s work boots, and shards of broken glass toss back and forth on the tide, continually churned together with old horse bones.The bones come from an 1850s-era factory that used the carcasses of dead horses to make glue, fertilizer, and other materials near the bay. That such a factory was necessary — and that thousands of old horse bones line a small bay in Brooklyn — point to the fact that horses were a way of life in New York City before cars replaced them. Nearly 200,000 horses lived on the small island of Manhattan at the end of the 19th century, meaning piles of dead horse carcasses and giant mounds of manure were a daily occurrence for city residents at that time.
Note that the average horse produces around 30 pounds of manure a day. If you do some back-of-the-envelope math, that means New Yorkers literally put up with dumping more than 1 million tons of excrement on their streets every year to preserve their freedom of mobility.
That’s what climate activists and their allies in the corporate press don’t seem to get. As leftists push Americans to make the cumbersome and extremely expensive switch to electric vehicles, they forget that Americans already can go wherever they want, whenever they want, thanks to gas-powered cars. Why would they give that up and pay more in the process?