"Green Thing" Addendum & More

Addendum to "The Green Thing" post: Counterbalancing that is the fact that, other than in some city centers, most buildings before the Second World War were heated with coal-fired furnaces. That was labor-intensive, the ashes had to be disposed of and with hundreds of thousands of coal furnaces, stoves and fireplaces in cities of any size, air quality during the winter was often likely worse than modern-day Beijing. Because the pollution was so bad, businessmen would take a spare shirt into work so they could change into a clean shirt at lunchtime.

Even in cities and towns that supplied gas for heating and cooking, that gas was most often a product of coal gasification plants. Coal gas, often called "town gas" (nowadays, "synthetic natural gas") was toxic; sticking one's head in an unlit oven was a popular method of suicide.

There were still horse-drawn carts, which meant that the streets were littered with horseshit and washed with horse pee.

In some cities, such as New York, steam for heating systems was supplied by a central steam-generating plant. The steam was piped underground to the buildings that used it. Con Ed still runs such a system. Those systems were coal-fired, which essentially centralized the pollution (and was probably more efficient).

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I've begun going offline in the evening, around 7PM. I do use my computer for writing, but I shut off the network. The cellphone goes off, too. I read, maybe write, or watch some TV. But nothing that needs this massive time-sucking contraption known as the Internet.