Nature's Evil

When coal definitively overtook grain, the Malthusian logic of resource panic was promptly transferred to coal. In 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons wrote The Coal Question , in which he warned of the imminent exhaustion of coal supplies in the British Isles. According to Jevons, between 1800 and 1865 the population of England had doubled but the production of coal has increased by a factor of eight. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century the population had been growing by 10 per cent every ten years, and the consumption of foodstuffs in England had grown correspondingly. But the urban population was growing much faster – it was doubling every twenty-eight years, almost as rapidly as the population of North America had been growing in the time of Malthus. The amount of coal being extracted was growing even more quickly, wrote Jevons. It was not the increase in grain production but the growth of the coal industry which gave rise to the unprecedented expansion of English towns. Digging deep into the earth to create coal mines was like exploring the American frontier, or even ‘the further shore of our Black Indies’. Or, no less triumphally: ‘We are like settlers spreading in a rich new country of which the boundaries are as yet unknown and unfelt.’ 15 Jevons states that the development of industry and the switch to free trade offers a way out of the Malthusian trap: bread is now exchanged for goods produced with the help of coal. But then Jevons takes a step back. The end of coal is inevitable and imminent. Reserves are finite, and there is a limit to how deep mines can go; every metre deeper made coal more dangerous to extract and more expensive. Neither could the efficiency of coal combustion develop indefinitely. Granted, steam engines – mine pumps, railway engines, river steamers, steam-powered ploughs – became more efficient as time went on: they consumed less coal per unit of work produced. But there were more and more such machines and the country needed more and more coal. At this point Jevons formulated a new paradox: every step that increases the efficiency of a natural resource only increases its consumption.

Comparing coal with grain and his doctrine of exhaustion with Malthus’s, Jevons argued that a coal crisis would be more devastating. The productivity of farmers’ fields could reach a plateau but they would nevertheless continue to yield a harvest. An exhausted mine is a different case altogether. Giving less coal but requiring more labour, it soon becomes unprofitable. At this point, the owner stops maintaining it, and the mine gets flooded or collapses; Jevons knew of such cases. In general, he predicted an imminent halt to economic growth. ‘We cannot indeed always be doubling the length of our railways, the magnitude of our ships, and bridges, and factories.’ 16

If coal runs out, what will replace it? Jevons runs through the alternatives and finds little comfort. He talks about wind power, the power of water and tides, and discusses peat; all these things have their good points, but they are unreliable, limited to specific places, and are no match for coal. He knew about oil and that it had the potential to outperform coal. All the same, for him oil was just a liquid form of coal. If coal runs out, there won’t be oil, thought Jevons. Perhaps people would learn to harvest the sun’s energy by as yet unknown means, or would obtain heat from completely new sources. But he was pessimistic on this point as well: when the sun’s rays replaced coal, England would lose its competitive advantages.

Keynes

Unlike the French physiocrats, the British political economists – Smith, Malthus, Ricardo – were at work precisely in the era and the country of coal. But, even while using its heat and energy, they preferred to think of themselves as living in an organic, grain-focused society. It was Jevons who saved economics from its ‘artificial groove’ by addressing coal. Keynes wrote about Jevons with unusual warmth and saw him as an important predecessor. He started his memorial essay with the fact that Jevons was born in the year after Malthus’s death; Keynes delicately forbore from mentioning that he himself was born the year after Jevons’s death. 17 All three shared the feeling that the resources used by humankind are limited and close to exhaustion, and that the analysis of these resources, in relation to labour, is the very essence of economic science. In Keynes’s words, this ‘extraordinary continuity of feeling ’ was ‘profoundly in the English tradition of humane science’. 18