The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

by Hope Jahren

My dad grew up there during the 1920s and remembered the adults around him being skeptical of the idea that cars could ever replace horses as a means of daily transportation. All that money for a vehicle, and impossible to know if you were getting a good one? They shook their heads, unable to imagine paying hundreds of dollars for a hunk of metal that you couldn’t prod the haunches for muscle, or check the manure for worms, or even inquire as to the sire and dam. No, it would never catch on, they assured one another, plus where were you going to get all that petrol from? They’d have to sell it up and down the streets or bring it around in a milk wagon, and Main Street already managed to burn itself down once every five years without the benefit of gasoline running through the gutters. A century later, there is one passenger car for every two people of driving age in the United States, and gasoline is indeed sold up and down the streets of America.