विस्तारः (द्रष्टुं नोद्यम्)
Jevons Coal Question was about British coal extraction (peaked in 1913) & Britain’s supremacy
Jevons got wrong was in underestimating the incipient oil industry, he couldn’t have known that Britain would 1 day find North Sea oil (now in terminal decline) Jevons wasn’t unique, similar concerns were expressed by William Armstrong (the famous arms maker), Louis Simonin, Alfred Russell Wallace (co-discoverer of evolution) who wrote against exporting coal & any man who understood basic geology.
“It is clear that, long before complete exhaustion takes place, England will have ceased to be a coal- producing country on an extensive scale. Other nations, and especially the United States of America, which possess coal-fields thirty-seven times more extensive than ours, will then be working more accessible beds at a smaller cost, and will be able to displace the English coal from every market.
The question is, not how long our coal will endure before absolute exhaustion is effected, but how long will those particular coal-seams last which yield coal of a quality and at a price to enable this country to maintain her present supremacy in manufacturing industry. So far as this particular
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Among the residual possibilities of unforeseen events, it is just possible that some day the sunbeams may be collected, or that some source of force now unknown may be detected.(5) But such a discovery would simply destroy our peculiar industrial supremacy…. We must not dwell in such a fool’s paradise as to imagine we can do without our coal what we do with it (Jevons 1865, 145).
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