In the late 1890s, a common problem existed across every major western city.

Horse shit.

You see, horses were how everyone got around, and each horse produced around 25 pounds of shit along with two pints of horse piss every day, the basic logistics of cleaning up were insane.

When just London had over 50,000 horses working at any one time and that number was only going up, people had a massive amount of fear for the future. The best and brightest minds gathered to ask the question: How could we possibly design cities to handle that much animal excrement?

In 1894, The Times newspaper predicted… “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”

Yet twenty years later, it wasn’t an issue. Cars and trams were now quicker and cheaper for use in metropolitan areas, and so the problem never emerged. Markets and innovation have a good way of dealing with this sort of thing.

The big lie of net zero is that what we are going to do matters. If the planet survives it won’t be because plucky little Britain led on the topic.

It will be because an American wanted to get rich, Chinese industries were able to scale it up to a worldwide level, and everyone else just wanted to take the cheaper option.