Source: TW
Almost from the beginning of the industry, it would seem, fears have been anxiously expressed that one day (and possibly one day quite soon) the coal would run out.
Owen
In 1603, George Owen, author of a Description of Pembrokeshire, remarked that ‘the Countrie people’ feared that the export of coal ‘in time [would] wholely weare out the Coale and so leave the Countrie destitute of fuell’.75
Williams
The earliest writer to have given the topic more than a passing comment appears to be John Williams, a Scottish mineral surveyor, whose Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom was published in 1789.76
Williams noted that the general view ‘which I have often heard asserted with great confidence’ was ‘that coal is inexhaustible’.
This was perhaps not an unreasonable view at the time given the low levels of contemporary production and the great leap of imagination required to foresee the levels of output produced a century later.77
But Williams argued that once the ‘real origin’ of coal, then a matter of speculation and dispute, was understood, it had to be accepted that no more would be created and that therefore present supplies, however copious, were finite. Signs of the impending exhaustion could be seen already he argued: the great tracts of coal already ‘wasted’ (worked out), ever increasing depths of working, rising costs and rising prices. The consequences of exhaustion, thought Williams, would be catastrophic Jevons was in no doubt about the importance of coal: it was ‘the mainspring of modern material civilization;’ ‘coal,’ he wrote, was ‘all powerful’; this age was ‘the Age of Coal’.80
‘England’s manufacturing and commercial greatness, at least, is at stake’.81 His analysis showed that the progress of invention tended to make the use of coal more efficient, but he argued that this tended to increase demand as the use of coal became more profitable, not reduce it.82
He reviewed possible substitutes.
- Geo-thermal energy? It was only available in hot springs and volcanoes.
- The tides? No novelty, this: tidal mills were mentioned in the Domesday Book but tidal estuaries silt up.
- Wind power? Too hard to capture –an ordinary windmill gives only about seven horsepower.
- Water power? Britain’s endowment of streams and rivers running with sufficient power was too small; the factory system could not have grown in England had it been dependent on the water wheel.
- Electricity? Steam was needed to turn the dynamo and coal to make the steam.
- Hydrogen? Electricity was needed to separate the hydrogen from water and steam was needed to produce the electricity.
- Revert to wood fuel? Nearly the whole surface of the country would have to be re-afforested to provide sufficient fuel for the iron manufacturing industry alone.
- Oil? Its supply was even more limited and uncertain than that of coal.
- Solar power? One day, perhaps, a method of collecting the sun’s rays would be found. ‘But such a discovery would simply destroy our peculiar industrial supremacy.’
Jevons
What was required was some source of energy which would preserve the competitive advantage that coal currently gave, almost alone, to Great Britain. The Coal Question was a national, not a global, question for Jevons.
The question was not ‘How can humanity maintain its standards of material comfort when global coal resources are exhausted?’ but ‘How can Britain maintain its economic dominance when British coal resources are exhausted?’
Understanding this makes it easy to understand Jevons’s response to the question ‘When the coal runs out in Britain can we not simply import it, as with so many other raw materials?’ The answer was ‘No’.
British industry was based on British coal and possession of the coal gave Britain a competitive advantage in the production of coal based commodities.
Look at Ireland. No coal intensive industry had ever been established there; if it had been profitable to establish it in Ireland, it would have been more profitable to establish it in south Wales, Lancashire, or Lanarkshire, nearer the coal.
Why then was there such an extensive export trade from Britain? Jevons’s answer was in terms of the cheapness of shipping coal as ballast on return journeys but he could have pointed out that exports of British coal were hardly the foundation for an industrial economy anywhere else. British coal exports did not sustain industrial economies in Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark or Russia; they sustained the domestic fires of the wealthy, and enabled some specialist activities such as railway locomotion and the maintenance of a steam navy.
Should exports be restricted? Jevons argued that the coal trade was too important to British shipping, and British shipping too important to British security, to curtail it. Jevons’s nationalism implied that the discovery of coal resources in other countries was a cause for concern, not a cause for rejoicing.
Jevons was willing, it is true, to regard the coal resources of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ nations, including the USA, as a blessing and expressed the hope that in other countries, India, China, Japan, etc., where the known coalfields were too small or yielded coal of too poor a quality to pose a competitive threat to Britain, there would emerge upon and around each coalfield ‘a prosperous community enjoying those uses of coal which older nations are discovering’.85
But where there existed the possibility of successful competition by foreign powers with British industry, Jevons saw only a cause for anxiety and concern.86
If the discovery of coal resources elsewhere was to transfer the competitive advantages enjoyed by Britain to other countries, it was no longer possible to assume that future generations in Britain would be both more numerous and more prosperous than current generations. How should one respond to such a prospect?
It behoved the present generation, argued Jevons, to consider its duties to subsequent generations.
We may spend it [our material wealth] on the one hand in increased luxury and ostentation and corruption, and we shall be blamed. We may spend it on the other hand in raising the social and moral condition of the people, and in reducing the burdens of future generations.
Even if our successors be less happily placed than ourselves they will not then blame us.87
This appears to be one of the first discussions of intergenerational welfare and distribution in economics. It is a question which Mill did not tackle.88 It is now one of the central questions in economics and global policy …