What I understood from this article is that science and technology may be more accurately projected than society and politics; I would imagine because those seem to be more chaotic processes, but also more easily carry the bias of the writer.
The article also highlights some shortcomings of the 1922 zeitgeist as there does not seem to be much thought about the positive or negative environmental impacts of technology, other than on air quality, or any talk on climate change.
Well some of it is what your current standard is. Replacing the horse, which puts feces on the road (albeit less smelly than human feces, still really bad in the quantity of a city's traffic), with the automobile, was actually a great improvement in the environment. We don't think of it as such, because we never saw horses in the quantity that a modern city has of automobiles. But what kind of toxic sludge we would have gotten from that much horse manure in a city is difficult for the modern mind to imagine.
Similarly, the environmental impact of coal, when it was the dominant method of heating a home, was not in some decades-off global warming, it was in things like the London Fog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog), a pretty horrific environmental situation. Moving to non-coal methods of heating the home (which he mentions) is a big environmental improvement.
Pigou had just published the economics of welfare two years earlier.
The tragedy of the commons would only be published in 1968.
I wonder how much externalities were a commonly known concept in 1922.
Resource exhaustion of oil he got more right than club of Rome even in 1972.
The article also highlights some shortcomings of the 1922 zeitgeist as there does not seem to be much thought about the positive or negative environmental impacts of technology, other than on air quality, or any talk on climate change.