The easily obtained supplies were running out. To get more of the energy source that fuelled a nation, workers had to explore and dig to unprecedented depths. Costs rose steadily and some experts were certain there was no solution. Progress would halt. In the future lay crisis and collapse.
The year is 1712. The nation is England. The energy source running dangerously low is coal. I didn’t mention this at the beginning lest the reader think these facts are somehow obscure or irrelevant to the struggle for energy we face today. They are neither.
It wasn’t England’s first energy crisis. That came in the 13th century, when population growth and deforestation led to a shortage of wood. The Black Death of the 14th century brought a brief respite, but steadily increasing population and shrinking forests in the centuries that followed forced the English to shift to a much inferior source of energy: coal.
When burned, coal gave off an acrid smoke that blackened lungs and walls and tainted the taste of food. It was even unsuitable in smelting furnaces.
But with firewood having become an expensive commodity, Englishmen made do. They devised new technologies and techniques that reduced or eliminated coal’s many failings. By the beginning of the 18th century, the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution could be discerned. But then, disaster. The seams of coal lying near the surface were dug to extinction. Miners had to burrow deep into the Earth — so deep the mines flooded with water.
Teams of horses hitched to pumps could drain the mines, barely, but the cost of pumping was enormous and the price of the coal they produced soared. Just as an era of cheap energy passed when wood became scarce, so did the era of cheap coal. But not for long. In 1712, Thomas Newcomen invented a clanking, belching, hissing machine — fuelled by coal — that sucked water out of the mines at a fraction of the cost of horse-powered pumps. Flooded mines re-opened. New mines were sunk to depths previously unimagined. The era of cheap energy returned. And it brought the Industrial Revolution with it.
Today, of course, we are told the era of cheap energy, cheap oil in particular, has passed. Again. And this time we are told it ain’t ever coming back. The more excitable doomsayers foresee the end of the world as we know it — whether due to gentle decline or apocalyptic collapse. I don’t buy it. The history of civilization is the history of people running into walls and figuring out how to climb over, go around or tunnel under. We are an inventive species.
The most important thing to remember about the energy crisis is that there is no energy shortage. We are awash in energy. The Earth’s core is a mighty furnace. Air and water swirl with unfathomable kinetic energy. In a single minute, enough solar energy hits the planet to fuel all of humanity’s needs for a year. What we lack is cheap energy.
The other ingredient needed, of course, is a market economy that rewards innovation. Would the Industrial Revolution have occurred if England had nationalized energy in 1710? Or would energy rationing have been the imposed solution, amplifying the misery of the freezing English for generations?
