Why can we just go back to using horses and carriages instead of Oil?

Question

It will be better for earth and the people !

what do you guys think?

Answer 1

Nascar events would not be nearly as riveting.

Answer 2

Horses are still in use in some parts of the country. The Amish people are one group that are not affected by the high price if gas.

However the daily commute for some would be very long with a horse.

Answer 3

I thiks it is a great idea, but i got no place to keep a horse.

Answer 4

Our country (USA) is not setup for something like that.  We like our freedoms like having a big yard, big house, and living away from work in a nice area.  Many suburbs don't have sidewalks.  You couldn't walk somewhere safely even if you wanted.

I drive 34 miles to work because my company (Honda) is in the middle of nowhere where land was cheap.  It would take hours to get there on a horse and living in a city (Columbus) and I would have nowhere to keep it at home.

Answer 5

I'd love to live in that sort of environment, but as it is, a horse and cart would take days to get to work and back!  Although I am trying to persuade my boyfriend to get a big shire horse to replace our old tractor!

Answer 6

The best (but not only) reason we abandoned horses for transport was health.  Until the 1940s, the number one public health problem was the spread of disease via horse manure on city streets.

Answer 7

Can you imagine the impact of more space for corrals..removing horse p**p..the demand on hay, alfalfa and grains..and even when a horse is not being used they require feed and water not like a car..not to mention the increase in fly's

Answer 8

We would end up paying the highway crew higher wages to clean up the poo and end up costing us more than the gas is now.

Our government would find a way to get that money.

Answer 9

Umm... yeah.  

So first of all, we will all move so that we are no more than a mile or two from our places of work.  Hope you don't own land in the suburbs...

Next: back to seasonally available fruits and veggies.  Horses can't move bananas from Chile.  Oh, and the Chileans, Hondurans, etc will lose their one source of income, so expect mass migrations.

In the other direction, we will no longer be able to provide food aid to drought or other disaster stricken areas, so expect starvation and (again) mass migration.

Meanwhile, while we are drastically ramping up local farm production (do the farmers get to keep using oil, or do they go back to horses too?), we've also got to FEED those horses, so it's going to be a battle between people food and animal food.

I could go on, but one final one for now:  think waist high horse manure on the streets of the city.  It was predicted before the start of the last century that manure would be a major source of infection in large cities, only alleviated by the onset of 'horseless' carriages.

I agree that if the internal combustion engine had not come about, we'd probably be living a more sustainable life, but the fact is, we aren't, we can't, and it would create a human disaster on a global scale if we suddenly stopped using oil now.

Good for the planet, perhaps, but bad bad bad for humans.

Answer 10

How about people learn to be more self reliant and use their feet, bicycles or even scooters when possible! Scooters use a lot less gas than other motorized vehicles. Using public transportation, while still requiring gas & oil would help, too. It's time people lessened their dependence upon animals and let animals live freely as they were intended.

xyz makes excellent points.

Answer 11

or use feet..

in fact, i did walk to walmart to get something and walk back home.. to walk from there and walk back home took me 6hrs.. and i enjoy every minute of it :D

Answer 12

Okay let's do it.

Answer 13

EVERYTHING depends upon petrochemicals.  It's not just a fuel for running cars.  It's used in running electric generators, used for plastics, synthetics, etc.

The very computer you are using has used petrochemicals in some manner - i.e. the plastic it is made of, the electricity used to run it is powered by burning fossil fuels.  

Even some medicines use petrochemicals...

Eliminating oil would essentially eliminate ALL technologies we currently use.