<em>The Weekly Planet</em>:<em> </em>What Extremely Muscular Horses Teach Us About Climate Change
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The first thing you should know about the history of energy in the United States is that, about 150 years ago, the horses got absolutely ripped.
“In the mid-19th century, you have a massive expansion of the horse body. They become 50 percent more powerful,” Robert Suits, a historian at the University of Chicago, told me.
This matters to the history of energy because, back then, horses were a primary form of transportation. (As Jason Torchinsky has written, horses were the world’s first semiautonomous vehicle.) It matters because of how the change happened at all—a massive program of selective breeding that was not possible, Suits said, until railroads existed to ferry promising horses over long distances.
And it matters, finally, because you must understand how yoked horses are to figure out how much energy the U.S. economy to use.
