In an effort to return humanity to a pre-industrial utopia of living in harmony with nature, scientists at MIT’s Office of Sustainability used their most advanced computer modeling tools to determine what the world would look like if we had never unleashed the horrors of fossil fuels. Instead, they mathematically extrapolated what life would be like if we just scaled up the technology available in 1769, never extracting a pound of coal, an ounce of oil, or a cubic foot of natural gas from the ground.

And … the human race would have drowned in horseshit.

The model predicted that scaling horse-drawn transport to meet the demands of growing cities would have buried London under nine feet of manure, had the city not first been mercifully obliterated in a catastrophic methane explosion when the accumulated decomposing effluent of millions of horses achieved critical mass and went up like the Hindenburg, only more fragrant.

The model’s second finding was more encouraging. Without fossil-fuel-dependent nitrogen fertilizer, Earth’s carrying capacity dwindles, meaning billions of humans could no longer exist to despoil the planet. This outcome, while superficially alarming, is in fact precisely what the most enlightened climate thinkers have long recommended. Humans, after all, are a carbon-emitting scourge upon an otherwise peaceful planet, so starving them to death should be celebrated as the greatest rewilding event since the Pleistocene.

There was, however, one wrinkle the models failed to anticipate. Without fossil fuels there never would have been electricity, and hence no computers. This means MIT’s climate scientists would have to conduct their modeling using thousands of graduate student serfs hunched over abacuses in tallow-lit basement warrens, their stipends payable in turnips and their thesis defenses conducted by whale-oil lamp. Blessedly, their carbon footprint would be net zero.

Story suggested by Robert A. Jones