Coal vs wood
Source: TW
The amount of wood required to produce charcoal, and later charcoal used for smelting was enough to cause deforestation on a large scale. Why English were forced to move to coal ahead of other parts of the world? Because use of charcoal was wiping out their forests.
5kg wood to produce 1 kg charcoal
8kg of charcoal to produce 1kg of pig iron
Massive increase in iron production in England after the switch from charcoal to coal, and the discovery and creation of steam engines Making England the top producer in the world.
Dutch failure
1 kg of glass needed at least 2400 kg of wood to produce, such examples can be multiplied endlessly. Dutch were ahead of everyone for a century but never broke through as they were stuck with peat, its not enough to have inventiveness without easy coal.
In the Dutch case, peat would have been exhausted quiet quickly by industrial civ, English coal was “infinite” in comparison
English coal switch
Source: TW
The amount of wood required to produce charcoal, and later charcoal used for smelting was enough to cause deforestation on a large scale. Why English were forced to move to coal ahead of other parts of the world? Because use of charcoal was wiping out their forests.
5kg wood to produce 1 kg charcoal
8kg of charcoal to produce 1kg of pig iron
Massive increase in iron production in England after the switch from charcoal to coal, and the discovery and creation of steam engines Making England the top producer in the world.
Coal exhaustion predictions
From the outset intelligent Englishmen knew that industrial era would only ever be a transitory phase in human history since coal wasn’t renewable, only question was how long it would last, some said only a 200 yrs, others said million yrs, others 1500 yrs. out of this arose the fears of coal exhaustion & parliamentary debates in early 1800’s on whether England should ban all coal export. For people who were only ever used to renewable energy & all the poverty (by today’s stds) that entails, coal was like magic & thus were born fantasies of limitless energy alongside fears of coal exhaustion& reversion to agrarian.
You will find the theme in several Victorian novels which is probably what that leftist muh Palestine student wants to cover but already covered somewhat by Allen MacDuffie & Elizabeth Miller
From Jevons “The Coal Question” (1865) which set off a new round of panic in Britain & provoked parliamentary debates & a letter from Gladstone to Jevons commending him. Jevon’s clearly lays out the difference between pre industrial renewable world vs his
“While other countries mostly subsist upon the annual and ceaseless income of the harvest, we are drawing more and more upon a capital which yields no annual interest, but once turned to light and heat and force, is gone for ever into space."-Jevons, p. 332.
“A farm, however far pushed, will under proper cultivation continue to yield for ever a constant crop. But in a mine there is no reproduction, and the produce, once pushed to the utmost, will soon begin to fail, and sink towards zero.
“So far, then, as our wealth and progress depend upon the superior command of coal, we must not only stop, we must go back.”–Jerons, p. 178.
The manufacturing industry of this island, colossal as is… Should our coal mines ever be exhausted, it would melt away at once our manufactures would first feel the shock ; the excess of population supported by them would cease to be called into existence
Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales By William Daniel Conybeare, William Phillips · 1822
Vast and extensive as our coal-fields are, the great consumption of them is evident from what is above stated. We very naturally say, that our coal-mines are inexhaustible; but this is not the case. Even if the Grampian mountains were composed of coal, we would ultimately bring down their proud and cloud-capped summits, and make them level with the vales.
“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 district is concerned, it is generally admitted that 200 years will be sufficient to exhaust the principal seams, even at the present rate of working.
If the production should continue to increase as it is now doing,
the duration of those seams will not reach half that period.How the case may stand in other coal mining districts, I have not the means of ascertaining; but, as the best and most accessible coal will always be worked in preference to any other, I fear the same rapid exhaustion of our most valuable seams is everywhere taking place.”
Export tax - 300 yr exhaustion
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the globalization of geological prospecting further shored up the confidence of the imperial powers as to the material bases of their domination. In 1860, in the House of Commons, Disraeli, opposing the free-trade treaty with France (the Cobden–Chevalier treaty), maintained that, since English reserves would cover no more than three or four centuries of national consumption, it was imperative for the long-term survival of the empire that exports should be taxed. Gladstone, on the other hand, a champion of free trade, mentioned other geological studies that estimated reserves at 2,000 years of consumption. A scarcity foreseeable in three centuries seemed to justify a course of action that was economically damaging in the present. The long term of English politicians managing their empire, instilled with classical references and quoting Gibbon, was in the order of millennia.2 Jevons’s well-known treatise on The Coal Question (1865) takes place in this debate about free trade and the material foundation of empire. The fact that his views were seen as pessimistic although he predicted a dominant position for the British economy during the following 300 years provides a telling example of Great Britain’s imperial self-confidence at the time.