At least Utah was never like 1920′s Pittsburgh, when office men would bring an extra white shirt to work because te soot falling from the sky would hopelessly dirty the first by lunchtime. Ugh! And we think winter inversions are bad now.

I don’t disagree with you at all. My noting that these drawings are dated was not smug superiority that we, with our buried power lines and automobile emissions tests are morally better than our grandparents with their smokestacks — I meant only to note a very visible difference between the worlds of 1923 and 2009. Where 1923 was realistic and proud of the fact that they could generate such technology, someone illustrating the same general idea today would go to any length not to show the grit and grime that goes along with energy production. Ads for new cars show them skimming effortlessly along pristine mountain or desert highways, not stalled in traffic on smog-laden city streets. Ads for the company that is doing its best to make Utah the world’s nuclear garbage dump show smiling men in pristine white hard hats walking by unspoiled deserts under clear blue skies — not men in hazard suits, not earth movers tearing into the virgin ground, and most certainly not their grimy old sludge truck recently discovered to have been spilling radioactive waste on the public highways because a hole had been “repaired” with duct tape. No, today we go to any length to pretend that industry has no side-effects; these drawings from 1923 freely acknowledged — even celebrated — the grime as well as the glamour. That dates the drawings. It’s not a condemnation.

All the other gifts of the modern industrial age like elevators, antibiotics, medical research, affordable versions of things like scissors, tweezers, watches, cameras, dvds, indoor lighting, comfortable furniture, beds, a table to eat upon, refrigeration of food, we tend to forget lately, when trying to be green and vilifying industry. The truth is that without industry, we’d all be living in log cabins and sleeping on straw. We’d all be subsistence farmers. And many of us would have to die because industry supports far more people than would be possible without it.

Okay, big soap box here, but I think these people in 1923 were a lot more realistic about how humans make a living in the world than we sometimes are now. We think of things like electricity and central heat as though they’re a natural right, as though they’re like gravity, something that just happens. We forget that it takes a lot of effort, capital, and fuel to make these things possible.

50% of our electricity now comes from coal, yet people seem to think they should just outlaw it, because of global warming. They think we can get by without it. It’s so unrealistic. Can everyone afford to pay 3 to 5 times their current utility bills in order to eliminate it? I know I can’t.

Okay, end rant! I just think lately people are very unrealistic about industry. I feel better now that I’ve said my piece. =)