The one and a half billion-plus automobiles on the world's roads are among the single worst polluters on earth, releasing an estimated 24 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, heating up the atmosphere. Don’t just blame Mother Nature or Father Time for this mess. It is in great part the result of a human, not natural, occurrence. For example, all the earth’s active volcanoes above and below the oceans produce approximately 1 percent of the carbon dioxide exhaust produced by gas-powered cars.

My dad said after I got my first speeding ticket, “When you drive over a bump in the road, you can’t go backward and reverse it.”

My granddad, born in 1880, told me stories about the horses before cars took to the roads. Among his recollections was the smell of horse manure as it wafted through the air on congested muddy city streets. During the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894, Gramps was 14 years old at the time and the world's major cities were steeped in horse s--t. An estimated 35 pounds per horse per day, marinated in urine. Between 30,000 and 50,000 horses ferried passengers and goods through burgeoning city streets back then. New York City out trotted them all with nearly 100,000! The putrid streets became so toxic in New York City, the average lifespan of the one horsepower equines declined to less than a third of their given longevity. Dead horses pushed to the sides of the road sometimes lay stagnant for weeks. Too heavy to budge intact, they would be cut up for removal.

Imagine we hadn’t invented the automobile. An estimated 1.5 billion one-horsepower horses trotting, cantering and galloping up and down today's cosmopolitan thoroughfares. We’d all be wearing fashionable, but mucky, hip boots to slosh through intersections and into the likes of Saks Fifth Avenue when the light turned green. Thank you, thank you, thank you Henry Ford! It was your imagination conceiving mass-produced, affordable Model T’s that decontaminated the rancid environment. One might conclude that we need a modern-day Henry to meet the environmental challenges we are facing down the road.

Not so fast! Henry didn’t imagine the colossal bump in the road now confronting us with bump-in-the-roadblock soon-to-be-obsolete gas engines.

Well then how about Elon Musk? He’s got a hell of an imagination! Or will his “EV” vision just become an exhaust pipe dream ... another bump in the road around the bend with unforeseen extreme global warming causing hundreds of millions of hot summer night air conditioners to compete with hundreds of millions of nightly charging electric autos?

This year in the Southwest, nighttime temperatures surpassed any month in 128 years of record keeping. Extreme heat at night is a health hazard, inhibiting deep sleep and the next day’s performance. It can result in dehydration and respiratory illness in children and seniors. Air conditioning will become critical lifelines for vulnerable people as global temperatures continue to increase. (Today, the earth’s surface temperature is warmer than it's been in 125,000 years. — scientificamerican.com.)

We love our cars. My granddad said, “We loved our horses too.” What will gain our affection clip-clopping forward? What will take us where we have to go avoiding the ominous bump-in-the-road? The answer may lie within how we get from point A to B? Via Zoom? Via virtual reality? Via hologram? Via, “Beam me up, Scotty?” Whatever direction guides our survival instinct path, the key driver will need to embrace the greatest challenge for our imagination … testing the quintessential human characteristic that separates Jules Verne from a squid.

Einstein put it succinctly, “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”

Chuck Davidson

Cragsmoor