The unforgivable sin: Why 19th-century thinkers condemned fossil fuel waste as a moral failure

“ Should such a thing at any time actually come to pass, it will indeed be a retribution to those who have for years been squandering their inheritance in many a wasteful manner of coal-consumption.
Thirty years ago, when so much small coal was wasted and wantonly consumed in order to dispose of it in the easiest manner possible at the pitmouths, and when only the best and largest coal was deemed to be of any value, louder and louder did scientific men speak in protest against this great and increasing prodigality. ”

“ Seeing, then, that our supply of coal has a limit, and that at the present increasing rate of consumption, the chief source of the wealth of Great Britain must necessarily be exhausted in a few more centuries, it behoves us to turn our mineral treasures to the best account, and to adopt every possible means of obtaining from our coal its whole available heat and force. The amount of avoidable waste of which we are guilty in the consumption of coal is enormous. ”

“ Are we, the consumers of coal, to write off all this as a dead loss, or have we gained any immediate or prospective advantage that may be deducted from the bad side of the account? I suspect that we shall gain sufficient to ultimately balance the loss, and, even after that, to leave something on the profit side.
The abundance of our fuel has engendered a shameful wastefulness that is curiously blind and inconsistent. As a typical example of this inconsistency, I may mention a characteristic incident. A party of young people were sitting at supper in the house of a colliery manager. ”

“ The mineral wealth of the country, the coal, iron, oil, gas, and the like, does not reproduce itself, and therefore is certain to be exhausted ultimately; and wastefulness in dealing with it to-day means that our descendants will feel the exhaustion a generation or two before they otherwise would. ”

“ All but a very small fraction of the heat thus escapes, and is lost to man and the world for ever; and surely we shall deserve the curses of our descendants if we continue recklessly to throw away a treasure which, unlike the oil in the widow’s cruse, is never renewed—for there is no contemporaneous formation of coal. Thanks to the enhanced price of coal during the last few years, some attention has been directed to contrivances 757for the economical consumption of coal in its domestic, as well as in its manufacturing, applications. ”

“ I believe, even practically unacquainted with the subject, will rise from the perusal of those statements without feeling that in the waste of a treasure of unique richness, and in the abandonment of an energetic and honest class of workmen to the dangers resulting from the absence of mental training, we have hitherto deserved as a nation but little credit for the stewardship of some of our finest coal-fields. ”

“ In coal we have the energy which plants absorbed from the sun ages ago, stored up in a potential form. The carbon atoms are ready to rush into union with oxygen atoms, and convert their energy of position into the energies developed by chemical action, viz., heat, light, &c. Energy is thus constantly shifting its form from actual to potential, and vice versâ, and exhibiting itself under the various transformations of force, as when sun-force changes to chemical action, chemical action to heat, heat to electricity, &c. ”

“ The truth is, we are now consuming not merely the wood which the sun-rays are building up in our own time, but in hewing down the forests we are using the sun-work of a century, while in coal we have the forests of untold ages at our disposal—the accumulated combustible capital stored up during an immense period of the earth’s existence. Upon this stored-up capital we are now living, our current receipts of sun-force being wholly inadequate to meet our expenditure. The coal is the sun-force of former ages; and it is from this we are now deriving the energy which performs most of our work. ”

“ Six months of compulsory wood and peat fuel, with total stoppage of iron supplies, would convince the people of these islands that waste of coal is even more sinful than waste of bread,—would lead us to reflect on the fact that our stock of coal is a definite and limited quantity that was placed in the present storehouse long before human beings came upon the earth; that every ton of coal that is wasted is lost for ever, and cannot be replaced by any human effort, while bread is a product of human industry, and its waste may be replaced by additional human labor ”

“ The enormous and constantly increasing output of coal and iron necessarily means the approach of the day when our children's children, or their children's children, shall dwell in an ironless age—and, later on, in an age without coal—and will have to try to invent or develop new sources for the production of heat and use of energy. But as regards many another natural resource, scientific civilization teaches us how to preserve it through use. The best use of field and forest will leave them decade by decade, century by century, more fruitful ”

“ A time, however, will sooner or later come, when the whole available coal shall have been consumed. What will then be the fuel of the engines, and steamboats, and locomotives of the future? The reader may think that then it will only be necessary to burn wood. But wood is already being consumed from the face of the earth much more rapidly than it is produced. How, then, can it be available when coal fails? ”

“ We are living upon the hoards which the womb of our mother the earth has borne to our father the sun. But our mother is, in respect at all events of mineral wealth, past the age of conception; and every century brings us more rapidly near to the time when we shall, like spendthrifts, have lived out our capital. Already the end of coal is in sight. When, at the end of a vista however long, we begin to be able to foresee the exhaustion of other minerals, we shall face a problem appalling in [104] its nature. ”

“ The moral forces exerted by the individual human molecules are the true components which determine the resulting force and direction of national progress. It is the industry and skill of our workmen, the self-denial, the enterprise, and organizing ability of our capitalists, that has brought our coal so precociously to the surface and redirected for human advantage the buried energies of ancient sunbeams, while the fossil fuel of other lands has remained inert. ”

“ In the iron mills the puddlers have whitewashed the coal bunkers belonging to their furnaces. I need not here say how much pleasure it will afford me to arrange that any fellow members of the Institute who may visit the republic are afforded an opportunity to see for themselves this latest and most interesting development of the fuel question. Good Mother Earth supplies us with all the fuel we can use and more, and only asks us to lead it under our boilers and into our heating and puddling furnaces, and apply the match. ”

“ In these days of depression in manufacturing, the world over, it is specially cheering to be able to dwell upon something of a pleasant character. Listen, therefore, while I tell you about the natural gas fuel which we have recently discovered in the Pittsburg district. That Pittsburg should have been still further favored in the matter of fuel seems rather unfair, for she has long been noted for the cheapest fuel in the world. The actual cost of coal, to such as mine their own, has been between 4s. and 5s. per ton ”

“ It was impossible to disprove this, and I am always glad to believe that the poverty of our imagination is no measure of the world's resources. Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them. ”

“ The time had come for the American people to understand that the rapid and regular advance in the cost of living was due mainly to the terrific waste of the fertility of the soil, that had been going on for more than a hundred years. It was time for the farmer to learn that he was not in a position to throw stones at the lumberman who had wasted our forests, or at the mine owner who is wasting one-third of the coal in the process of mining ”

“ Human life, with its possible attainments, is far beyond valuation in money. We should reverse the tables; and instead of human life being estimated in dollars, the dollar should be valued only for what it can do for greater humanity. Dr. Holmes, Director of the United States Bureau of Mines, in illustrating waste of material resources, says that in producing one half billion tons of coal, we waste or leave underground one quarter of a billion tons. And then only eleven per cent of the energy in coal is utilized ”

“ Every other important bed of coal and ironstone could have been laid down on its separate map, showing its extent, depth, thickness, richness, and the places where it had and where it had not been gotten.
Every one who has had anything to do with coal mining, even as a spectator, must be aware of the great waste of money, labour, and materials, consequent on the division of property among many small owners, each having different and opposite interests. ”

“ The most effectual remedy would result from a general recognition of the fact that wherever smoke was produced, fuel was being consumed wastefully, and that all our calorific effects, from the largest furnace to the domestic fire, could be realised as completely, and more economically, without allowing any of the fuel employed to reach the atmosphere unburnt. ”

“ It would be a waste to let heat escape instead of utilizing it. Why roast the founders, when heat lost by radiation represents tons of coal?
"The stampers that made buildings shake five leagues off were also waste. Is it not better to forge by pressure than by impact, and it costs less—there is less loss.
"In these works, light, cleanliness, the space allotted to each bench, are but a simple question of economy. Work is better done when you can see what you do, and have elbow-room. ”

“ With the end of the coal age already well in view, we can only conjecture what the sources of mechanical power will be a hundred years hence. Before we have quite exhausted our coal measures and begun to draw more liberally on our stores of petroleum, we shall no doubt have abandoned altogether so wasteful a contrivance as the steam engine. There is a clumsiness almost barbarous in the roundabout employment of coal to produce heat, the steam engine to utilise only a miserable fraction of the potential energy even of the part of the coal which we do not fatuously allow to escape as smoke ”

“ In my walks to and from the factory there lay numerous open lots or commons, all of which afforded abundant evidence of the extent to which this public wastefulness was carried. Heretofore I had passed on without noticing much about them. But now I observed that they were heaped up with great piles of coal-ashes, from which cropped out large quantities of the unburnt mineral, as black and shining as when it came from the mines. There were thousands of loads of this residuum, in which many hundred tons of pure coal must have been thus wastefully thrown away. ”

“ For the individual firm such expenses, which enable it to absorb part of a rival's trade, may be an economy: to the consumer of milk or coal—to take two flagrant instances—they are pure loss. Nor, as is sometimes assumed, are such wastes confined to distribution. Technical reasons are stated by railway managers to make desirable a unification of railway administration and by mining experts of mines. ”

“ But I have never seen parents explaining to their children on the hearth the effect of coal-getting on the family life of the collier, to the end that the children might learn to understand the price of coal in sweat, blood, and tears. The householder is interested only in the other insignificant part of the price of coal. And this is odd, for the majority of householders are certainly not monsters of selfish and miserly indifference to the human factor in economics. ”

“ Having secured an economical production, in which we should no longer commit the crime of killing a thousand miners every year, we should distribute the coal cheaply to our local authorities, who would act as distributing agents. The army of coal merchants and their clerks and the thousand and one artful dodges of the retail coal trade would disappear, and the public would secure their coal economically. ”

“ In the holocaust in the Rhondda in 1905 many children perished. Not infrequently three generations of a single family may be found working in the same colliery. Few people out of the industry know that 44,000 boys work in our coal-pits.
With our collieries in our own hands we should not only keep boys out of the mines, but use every possible mechanical appliance to reduce the number of men required to get the coal. We should seek for new appliances to displace labour from such an unhealthy and dangerous calling. To the same end we should seek to prevent the waste of coal in every direction. ”

“ From first to last private coal production and private coal distribution are wasteful of life, material, and labour. Of our output of 260,000,000 tons of coal less than 10,000,000 tons are mined by machinery! In nine-tenths of our coal-mines coal-cutting machines are unknown! Thus a vast amount of unnecessary hand labour is used in a degrading and dangerous occupation. From a national point of view it is undesirable that a single unnecessary man should descend the mines. ”

“ We should thus get gas so much better that two burners would do the work now obtained from three. We should get all we require for lighting purposes and plenty more for heating; the intermediate profits of the coal merchant would be abolished, and our solid fuel of far better quality could be supplied twenty or thirty per cent cheaper than at present, provided always that the gas monopoly were abolished, “a consummation most devoutly to be wished for.” ”

“ If the recent very mild suggestion of a coal-famine does something towards placing coal on a similar pedestal of popular veneration to that which is held by the “staff of life,” the million a week that it has cost the coal consumer will have been profitably invested.
Many who were formerly deaf to the exhortations of fuel economists are now beginning to listen. “Forty shillings per ton” has acted like an incantation upon the spirit of Count Rumford. ”

“ I have said repeatedly that it is not physical difficulties but market value that will determine the limits of our coal-mining. This, like all other values, is of course determined by the relation between demand and supply. Fuel being one of the absolute necessaries of life, the demand for it must continue so long as the conditions of human existence remain as at present, and the outer limits of the possible value of coal will be determined by that of the next cheapest kind of fuel which is capable of superseding it. ”

“ For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. ”