Abstract
Horses performed the hard work of civilization for thousands of years—plowing, hauling goods, moving armies, doing construction work, and providing transportation. Yesterday’s horses are today’s trucks, locomotives, and container ships, their combined horsepower equal to trillions of horses. What do trucks, trains, and ships have in common? Nearly all of these heavy-duty workhorses run on diesel fuel—the tractors, harvesters, long-haul, logging, garbage, cement, mining, and cranes. If 18-wheelers suddenly stopped running, civilization would be crippled within a week as grocery and pharmacy shelves emptied, service stations ran out of gas, sewage treatment tanks filled up, and mass transit stopped.
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Friedemann, A.J. (2021). Without Transportation, Civilization Ends. In: Life after Fossil Fuels. Lecture Notes in Energy, vol 81. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70335-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70335-6_5
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