Henry Ford's green side

Washington Times ^ | April 26, 2009 | Editorial

[JohnRLott]

President Obama used more than 9,100 gallons of fuel to fly and drive to Iowa to promote energy conservation for Earth Day on Wednesday. That's a revealing example of tree-hugger logic. To mark the president's acknowledgment of the wonders of modern transportation, we would like to honor a few environmental heroes who made Mr. Obama's Earth Day travels possible - like Henry Ford.

Mr. Ford mastered the art of mass production with the assembly line, which made automobiles available to the masses. Introduced in 1908, Mr. Ford's Model T sold more than 15 million units, opening the world to unimagined mobility. It's likewise fitting to remember Etienne Lenoir, the inventor of the gas engine, and Nikolaus August Otto, who made the internal-combustion engine practical. Without these discoveries, pollution and disease would be rampant.

Environmentalists often paint a romantic picture of a cleaner existence in a past that never existed. With 6.7 billion people in the world, it is odious to imagine the mountains of manure that would pile up in city streets gridlocked with horses. Despite all the concern about carbon-dioxide these days, cars are remarkably efficient machines in terms of their emissions. Without cars, so much for the smell of clean, fresh air. . . . .

[HiTech RedNeck]

To be fair, the modern pneumatic tired bicycle didn’t exist then either.

[mamelukesabre]

Back before they started cleaning up smog problems in LA, there was a certain model of honda that actually cleaned up the air. No joke. they actually measured the pollution in the air being drawn into the engine and then the pollution in the exhaust and found the pollution was actually less in the exhaust.