Thread by @rohitreads

Amidst all the celebratory coverage of the UK closing its last coal plant it's worth thinking about how coal dependence arose across the world in the first place /1

This map by the famous French cartographer and engineer Charles Minard (of Napoleon map fame), shows English coal EXPORTS to the rest of the world in 1864. /2

Much of the engineering orthodoxy around coal combustion, its use in transport, mining, railways, small industry etc. came from the spread of the British colonial project across the world. Coal as a commodity was barely mined in India until the 1860s. /3

While I applaud the British power system's ability to transition out its coal plants, let's not be under any illusion why coal is the dominant fuel of power generation in over twenty countries across the world in the 20th century; it was the fuel of empire. /4

As Vaclav Smil has pointed out, energy systems change slowly. While the existential urgency around climate change has certainly accelerated action against coal-based power across the world, there has been marked resistance to this as well. /5

Rising global commodity prices post-wars, oppositional political swings due to to coal regions being left behind, companies going back on their no-coal announcements when macro conditions change, the decline of coal has been more of a sawtooth than a uniform decline so far /5

Understanding fossil fuel history is key to understanding why these systems are so embedded (not just technically, but also socially and politically). Here are a few reading suggestions, which I have found useful over the years. /6

Prasannan Parthasarathi's, Why Europe Grew Rich But Asia Did Not puts commodities (cotton and then coal) at the middle of some of some of these Great Divergence questions between developed and developing countries /7

Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy is a classic, analyzing the relationships between different fossil fuel regimes and the political systems they tend to produce /8

Mark Thurber's Coal is a fabulous short introduction to the political economy of the commodity in modern energy systems /9

A slightly longer comparative perspective is Thurber and Morse's co-edited volume on The Global Coal Market, which particularly looks at the political economy of coal in most large emerging economies /10

I'll end with a quote from Barbara Freese's excellent book, Coal: A Human History, "We can never know where we might be if we had not taken the path paved with coal. We know the world would be altogether different. /11

"Probably, we would have urbanized, centralized, industrialized, and mechanized anyway, but decades even centuries later, on a much smaller scale, and in different places and ways. Without coal, we would have languished longer in the poverty, tedium, and oppression.... /12

"...of the preindustrial world, but we might have found a more gradual and humane path out of it than the one we took. Had we taken that different path, we might have less material wealth today, but we might not now be facing the most serious environmental ..." /13

"...threat we've ever known. Coal has always been both a creative and a destructive force. It is the tension between the two that makes the story of coal so compelling. " /end

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