I always find the coal argument unpersuasive. China has lots of coal, but they never really seemed to use it. England had large colonies in the New World well before coal became important. So, what are we explaining by way of what again?
It seems to me a lot of all this environmental determinism has been motivated by a desire for national outcomes to be a result of things other than culture and ideas. Some materialistic source has to exist so that "anybody who lived there would have succeeded," otherwise one has to admit that how society is rules and organized matters, as well as the cultures that exist in the society.
I can recommend Barbara Freese's book, "Coal: A Human History." Some things to keep in mind:
1. Humans had been cutting and clearing woodland in Great Britain for centuries for agricultural land, firewood, and building materials. Forested area declined steadily from the Norman invasion until the dawn of the industrial revolution, shrinking by over half by perhaps by as much as two thirds during that time. Big masts for the best ships were hard to get in Britain very early on, and this was a major export from North American forests.
2. Internal transport of bulk commodities via canal / river barge was relatively cheap and easy. Imports and exports to the continent was expensive and difficult, especially for things like coal and firewood which are heavy compared to their energy content and hard to move around.
3. There were deposits of coal in Wales and England which were particularly easy to extract. Because these was cheap local coal and increasingly scarce local wood, use of coal for heat surpassed that of firewood already in the early 17th century, 100 years before Newcomen and nearly 100 more before the 'high pressure' steam engine. Indeed, the Pilgrims and other early Puritan settlers used this fact to advertise to recruit more immigrants from England, because big bonfires are fun, they couldn't do them anymore, but North America had practically unlimited supplied of wood.
4. Speaking of Newcomen, it's important to keep in mind his building of the first steam pump was a consequence of England already having a well-developed coal-mining industry to the point where extracting untapped deposits ran into serious trouble with water seeping in which needed to be pumped out, and also a developed metallurgical industry (which commercial culture and legal system to incentivize it) which manufactured pumps and which needed a new way to power them besides human or animal power. Indeed, one of the reasons it took a while to move on from Watt's low-capacity atmospheric steam engine to the high powered ones was legal - Evans decided to wait for Watt's (30-year!) patent to expire!
I haven’t read the book yet either, but it appears he is trying to explain the Industrial Revolution and the unprecedented improvements in living standards and lifespan of the past two and a half centuries. I agree with your emphasis on culture, ideas and institutions, but would offer that an energy breakthrough is also necessary (I would consider it necessary but in no way sufficient). Absent fossil fuels humans were limited to the resource constraints of solar energy conversion.
I agree that energy use is important, but argue that it is downstream of culture and ideas. It isn't so much a question of where fossil fuels were, because they are damned near everywhere, but rather why did one society start to seriously utilize them instead of others with equal accessibility.
To use a sports analogy, if I get in a boxing match with Evander Holyfield and get wrecked, it would be uninteresting to explain it by Holyfield being a better boxer than me, when what you want to know is "How do some people become better boxers than others?" A sloppy economic historian might say "Oh, Holyfield had access to a really good gym!" but, yea, sure he did, but so do I, I just don't do anything with it, so it isn't really an answer. At best it identifies an important requirement, but doesn't really explain what we care about when it is generally not a binding requirement (that is, lots of people have access to gyms whether or not they become good boxers).
Spain had much larger colonial holdings than the British did until very late. The typical English story also emphasizes the role of Bacon in encouraging the scientific method. So, at the time Bacon was writing and after his death, the empirical revolution was concentrated in England. On the Continent at the same time during the 16th-17th centuries, academic pursuits were focused on supporting the religious wars and also keeping the decay of Spain at bay. Germans did not start adopting the research university model until the early 19th century. Obviously there was a lot of coal in Germany, but the industrial-scientific revolution did not take root there until the religious battles were mostly settled.
The main English colonies that were more of a benefit than a burden to the mother country did not really start producing those benefits in large amounts until the with the Battle of Plassey of 1757. The American colonies put the British in the red from the Seven Years' War, and then they lost them entirely in the familiar events of the 1770s and 80s. So, I think that all supports your point of view versus the natural resource determinism point of view.
I think you are looking at this wrong. Kind of backwards. Coal shifted the pareto curve for what the very best society could accomplish. What China did or didn't do is irrelevant to that.
You are correct that culture is important. No doubt. When dominance moved from the Roman Empire to feudalism to capitalism these were big changes too. But a big hierarchical society wasn't something new. Capitalism wasn't something new. I suggest these were movements on the existing pareto curve. Fire (controlled, cooking), agriculture, and fossil fuel were new and changed the game.
As Swami said, coal was necessary but not sufficient.
Three hundred years ago, with transport costs high, even if you had an entrepreneurial culture and good laws, if you had no easily accessible fuels, you weren't going to have an industrial revolution. And, no, easily accessible fossil fuels were not "damned near everywhere".
Even if I trained as hard as Evander Holyfield, he would beat the crap out of me. Look at my body and you'll see I don't have the coal.
I am sorry, but you are simply incorrect. The industrial revolution was underway before the use of coal or other fossil fuels in transportation. Transportation was mostly by water when possible, and as others have mentioned, the first serious use of steam power was to drive pumps to drain mines.
Jack Goldstone has pointed out that there have been numerous "efflorescences" in economic history, times when new technology leads to an increase in standard of living but the technology stagnates and population increase eats up most of the productivity gain. I completely agree that we can see the beginnings of the industrial revolution before the use of coal and other fossil fuels in transportation. But without easily available coal, it would have been just another efflorescence
Coal is easily accessible in many places around the world, with technology that was available in the beginning of the industrial revolution, or even circa 1500-1600. Anywhere that had salt mines, iron or copper mines, etc. had the technology to mine coal. The Romans and ancient Chinese were mining coal. It was in the first decade or two of the 1700's that coal started being used to smelt steel in Britain. It wasn't like it was some mysterious, crazy material that no one ever thought to use before, locked up deep within the earth. Coal is all over the place and mined for thousands of years. Wood/charcoal continued to be used for various reasons, but lack of coal or how to mine it wasn't one of them.
I think we may be "in violent agreement". Coal is certainly accessible in many places. But those places didn't have the other pre-conditions for an industrial revolution. Coal was necessary to get from an efflorescence to a continuing advance in useful technology. That advance required a continuing supply of concentrated energy. There would never be enough land to grow the amount of wood--or charcoal derived from it--required.
False. It is a replacement for wood, not only in heating homes but importantly in iron/steel manufacturing (which uses an absolute bonkers amount of wood). The early "rail roads" were not powered by steam engines but by animals, used to move coal and ores to water transit.
I wish a transcript were available. I just can't listen. I would be interested to know whether they discussed humans now occupying nearly all niches and whether and why that is necessary.
I know it's deeply unfashionable to invoke hubris in human affairs anymore - and I am certainly aware of my own inclinations, differing sharply from those of others on these blogs - but in re his and Razib's "degrowth economics" is a "deadend for dynamic human flourishing" whatever that precisely signifies to them - I do wonder if there is a little gap for Hubris to slip her foot in.
That gap would be the assumption that there is only simple human choice where "degrowth" is concerned.
On the Sean Carroll Mindscape podcast it did not sound very novel. Big innovations involve big increases in energy use. Sure. We need cheaper sources of energy than fossil fuels. Paradoxically (in static equilibrium terms) subsidizing alternatives with a tax on net CO2 emissions, while increasing R&D and removing regulatory barriers to development of alternatives will reduce the costs of alternatives
Sounds pretty standard. There might be sub heading under agriculture in that grains can be transported especially by sea at low lost and making possible continental scale empires.
Low marginal cost electricity will be the next stage.
Possibly Olivia Judson. See her online article The energy expansions of evolution.
For various books on the effects of energy transitions on evolution and/or progress, see also Astrid Kandor, Robert Bryce, Frank Niele, Reiner Kummeland and/or Vaclav Smil.
Might be Vaclav Smil's "Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities"
Personally, while the history is fascinating, I don't get the impression there is actually some great non-obvious insight in these works that has much bearing on our future trajectory.
"Evolutionary processes like biological life or human activities expand until they hit hard limits on key resources. Equilibria change slowly so long as those limiting factors remain what they are. Innovations, whether natural or artificial, that overcome the most important limit or bottleneck can cause a 'breakout' of rapid change and expansion until some new bottleneck is reached and puts a stop on it."
"Maintaining what we consider to be modern prosperity in terms of human comfort and consumption takes a lot of resources that must be cheap compared to be the value produced by the average human. Proposals for policies that involve significant cutbacks of the use of such key resources or increase in their relative cost are incompatible with increased average prosperity short of a major collapse in population, and claims to the contrary are wishful thinking at best."
"To the extent the prices and supplies of energy in its various forms still constitute a major bottleneck on human economic activity and average consumptions levels, producing a lot more, a lot cheaply, would create a lot of growth. Unless there is an unexpected breakthrough soon in the ability to produce energy from nuclear fusion cheaply, It is unlikely that it will be possible to make a lot more cheap energy anytime soon without a significant expansion in the use of either fossil fuels or nuclear fission with breeder reactors. Claims solar and wind tech will fill the gap at competitive market prices without subsidy are also wishful thinking, these technologies are more mature and limited than most people think."
"While energy is indeed a key resource, and as with any resource, an increase in availability and decrease in price would spur more production that is not viable at current prices, it's unclear to what extent this factor is really going to be the main driver of the future trajectory of development. Unlike for much of history since the dawn of the industrial revolution, a lot of recent growth in developed countries has happened without the apparent need for expansion in the use of energy to drive it. Population always used to expand to the limit everywhere, but in what is also a relative new development, population in developed countries has been shrinking, and in some places, dramatically so."
"On the other hand, computation needs electricity, and the more economically useful computation gets, the greater the demand for more energy. The recent blockchain-related energy use experience provides us with a little taste of what that might be like. And anything that would impede the ability to provide lots more cheap electricity to productive-computation systems would stymie growth wherever such circumstances existed."
"Since at some point - maybe sooner than anyone thinks - that is going to represent a trillion dollar bill sitting on the sidewalk waiting for someone to pick up, and because historically international cooperation and coordination has never been strong enough to prevent such bills from being picked up, it is likely that some state will pick it up, and every other state will have to choose between whether to follow its lead with regard to energy policy, or commit economic suicide."
There, that's your executive summary to over a dozen similar books combined. Big deal.
Excellent summary. I think you exactly put your finger on the issue: pointing out that energy use is important is great, but the type of answer we care about in terms of growth would be "why do some societies manage to discover new uses for energy, and find ways to exploit previously unused sources?"
It reminds me a bit of VD Hanon's point in "Carnage and Culture" about how it isn't useful to answer "Why did the Europeans defeat the Aztecs?" with "The Europeans had metal weapons and guns!" because the really useful question is "Why didn't the Aztecs develop metal weapons and guns? All the bits were there for it." (I am paraphrasing a lot of course :D )
Yes, energy is important, and yes, we would be dumb to try and cut it off because that would mean degrading to a lower type of society. The question then is "how do we improve our chances of finding and exploiting new sources of energy?" The answer to that is never "happen to have it lying around", because most sources of energy happened to be lying around for millennia.
I don't even like Rorty, but I've started to take a kind of philosophical pragmatist's view of such historical questions as the "ultimate root causes" and the specific details of the transition to the industrial revolution or the Great Depression or the Protestant Reformation or whatever. They are fascinating and stimulating as intellectual matters, but I've come to experience them as somehow simultaneously wearying since one "can't run the experiment" over again and there are far too many overlapping plausible major contributing factors which don't lend themselves to any kind of conclusory analysis. That sheer dumb luck plays an important role in human affairs cannot be doubted, but as it cannot be measured, it can neither be discounted or credited.
What we do know is that one can look at quite a number of places and times including plenty in European history where best as we can tell "all the bits were there" which, had they been put together in the ways we now know they can be, and then put to widespread use, would have meant immediate breakout capability for whatever society adopted them.
Chinese history is literally full of such examples of being nearly on the brink of the capacity for global domination had everything fallen into place at the time. Indeed, many of the inventions useful for European expansion in the Renaissance and later on had Chinese origins.
Things like the Hierapolis sawmill (gears, levers, crank, connecting rod, water-wheel to power useful mechanical work), the existence of whatever institutions produced the Antikythera mechanism, force / reciprocating pumps, the Aeolipile, and a number of other astounding technological achievements meant the Romans were *this* close to industrialization for a long while.
My point is that my impression is that it's probably wrong to look at the precise moment the industrial revolution happened to tease out the recipe for that secret sauce. Instead, there is a kind of a broader lesson to be learned from all the times and places it -didn't- happen, but maybe could have, with insights that seem common-sensical to many young children in our age.
There is something really different about modern society and I guess what one might call the "industrial mindset" that seeks out, makes, and exploits these connections much easier and faster than what was normal throughout history, even in quite advanced and sophisticated civilizations. People starting to think in that way was probably just as important as anything else.
Yea, I think McCloskey largely nailed it with the Bourgeois Virtues series. When paired with Sowell's work on race and culture I think it makes a very strong argument that the stuff needed for the industrial revolution was all there, it was just a question of getting people with the right mindset to use it, and by extension a society that would allow them to do so.
I think a lot of academics miss that concept because, for them, production and industry just happen. They have no real experience working in industry and seeing first hand what different organizational structures and cultures can do with the same capital and materials. Culture is almost taboo as a potential source of difference, yet it seems to be one of the most important things, possibly the most important.
While we shoud defiinitely remove the obstacles to nuclear (and geothermal) power I think Solar still has enormous potential especially if it can be used at zero MC peak to power CCS. Whether solar + CCS +plus natural gas is cheaper than solar + battery is TBD
Lots of things have enormous potential but a potential which is still short of the potential that matters, which is the potential to beat the competition in a fair fight. Nuclear has that potential, but solar doesn't.
It's not just energy; it's commodified energy. ATP is a molecular energy store that can fuel many metabolic processes. It is an energy currency, as is grain. And coal. Money itself would have little value if it could not be exchanged for energy.
I always find the coal argument unpersuasive. China has lots of coal, but they never really seemed to use it. England had large colonies in the New World well before coal became important. So, what are we explaining by way of what again?
It seems to me a lot of all this environmental determinism has been motivated by a desire for national outcomes to be a result of things other than culture and ideas. Some materialistic source has to exist so that "anybody who lived there would have succeeded," otherwise one has to admit that how society is rules and organized matters, as well as the cultures that exist in the society.
I can recommend Barbara Freese's book, "Coal: A Human History." Some things to keep in mind:
1. Humans had been cutting and clearing woodland in Great Britain for centuries for agricultural land, firewood, and building materials. Forested area declined steadily from the Norman invasion until the dawn of the industrial revolution, shrinking by over half by perhaps by as much as two thirds during that time. Big masts for the best ships were hard to get in Britain very early on, and this was a major export from North American forests.
2. Internal transport of bulk commodities via canal / river barge was relatively cheap and easy. Imports and exports to the continent was expensive and difficult, especially for things like coal and firewood which are heavy compared to their energy content and hard to move around.
3. There were deposits of coal in Wales and England which were particularly easy to extract. Because these was cheap local coal and increasingly scarce local wood, use of coal for heat surpassed that of firewood already in the early 17th century, 100 years before Newcomen and nearly 100 more before the 'high pressure' steam engine. Indeed, the Pilgrims and other early Puritan settlers used this fact to advertise to recruit more immigrants from England, because big bonfires are fun, they couldn't do them anymore, but North America had practically unlimited supplied of wood.
4. Speaking of Newcomen, it's important to keep in mind his building of the first steam pump was a consequence of England already having a well-developed coal-mining industry to the point where extracting untapped deposits ran into serious trouble with water seeping in which needed to be pumped out, and also a developed metallurgical industry (which commercial culture and legal system to incentivize it) which manufactured pumps and which needed a new way to power them besides human or animal power. Indeed, one of the reasons it took a while to move on from Watt's low-capacity atmospheric steam engine to the high powered ones was legal - Evans decided to wait for Watt's (30-year!) patent to expire!
I haven’t read the book yet either, but it appears he is trying to explain the Industrial Revolution and the unprecedented improvements in living standards and lifespan of the past two and a half centuries. I agree with your emphasis on culture, ideas and institutions, but would offer that an energy breakthrough is also necessary (I would consider it necessary but in no way sufficient). Absent fossil fuels humans were limited to the resource constraints of solar energy conversion.
I agree that energy use is important, but argue that it is downstream of culture and ideas. It isn't so much a question of where fossil fuels were, because they are damned near everywhere, but rather why did one society start to seriously utilize them instead of others with equal accessibility.
To use a sports analogy, if I get in a boxing match with Evander Holyfield and get wrecked, it would be uninteresting to explain it by Holyfield being a better boxer than me, when what you want to know is "How do some people become better boxers than others?" A sloppy economic historian might say "Oh, Holyfield had access to a really good gym!" but, yea, sure he did, but so do I, I just don't do anything with it, so it isn't really an answer. At best it identifies an important requirement, but doesn't really explain what we care about when it is generally not a binding requirement (that is, lots of people have access to gyms whether or not they become good boxers).
I concur, Doctor.
Spain had much larger colonial holdings than the British did until very late. The typical English story also emphasizes the role of Bacon in encouraging the scientific method. So, at the time Bacon was writing and after his death, the empirical revolution was concentrated in England. On the Continent at the same time during the 16th-17th centuries, academic pursuits were focused on supporting the religious wars and also keeping the decay of Spain at bay. Germans did not start adopting the research university model until the early 19th century. Obviously there was a lot of coal in Germany, but the industrial-scientific revolution did not take root there until the religious battles were mostly settled.
The main English colonies that were more of a benefit than a burden to the mother country did not really start producing those benefits in large amounts until the with the Battle of Plassey of 1757. The American colonies put the British in the red from the Seven Years' War, and then they lost them entirely in the familiar events of the 1770s and 80s. So, I think that all supports your point of view versus the natural resource determinism point of view.
I think you are looking at this wrong. Kind of backwards. Coal shifted the pareto curve for what the very best society could accomplish. What China did or didn't do is irrelevant to that.
You are correct that culture is important. No doubt. When dominance moved from the Roman Empire to feudalism to capitalism these were big changes too. But a big hierarchical society wasn't something new. Capitalism wasn't something new. I suggest these were movements on the existing pareto curve. Fire (controlled, cooking), agriculture, and fossil fuel were new and changed the game.
As Swami said, coal was necessary but not sufficient.
Three hundred years ago, with transport costs high, even if you had an entrepreneurial culture and good laws, if you had no easily accessible fuels, you weren't going to have an industrial revolution. And, no, easily accessible fossil fuels were not "damned near everywhere".
Even if I trained as hard as Evander Holyfield, he would beat the crap out of me. Look at my body and you'll see I don't have the coal.
I am sorry, but you are simply incorrect. The industrial revolution was underway before the use of coal or other fossil fuels in transportation. Transportation was mostly by water when possible, and as others have mentioned, the first serious use of steam power was to drive pumps to drain mines.
Jack Goldstone has pointed out that there have been numerous "efflorescences" in economic history, times when new technology leads to an increase in standard of living but the technology stagnates and population increase eats up most of the productivity gain. I completely agree that we can see the beginnings of the industrial revolution before the use of coal and other fossil fuels in transportation. But without easily available coal, it would have been just another efflorescence
Coal is easily accessible in many places around the world, with technology that was available in the beginning of the industrial revolution, or even circa 1500-1600. Anywhere that had salt mines, iron or copper mines, etc. had the technology to mine coal. The Romans and ancient Chinese were mining coal. It was in the first decade or two of the 1700's that coal started being used to smelt steel in Britain. It wasn't like it was some mysterious, crazy material that no one ever thought to use before, locked up deep within the earth. Coal is all over the place and mined for thousands of years. Wood/charcoal continued to be used for various reasons, but lack of coal or how to mine it wasn't one of them.
I think we may be "in violent agreement". Coal is certainly accessible in many places. But those places didn't have the other pre-conditions for an industrial revolution. Coal was necessary to get from an efflorescence to a continuing advance in useful technology. That advance required a continuing supply of concentrated energy. There would never be enough land to grow the amount of wood--or charcoal derived from it--required.
True or false: you need the steam engine for coal to become a valuable commodity.
False. It is a replacement for wood, not only in heating homes but importantly in iron/steel manufacturing (which uses an absolute bonkers amount of wood). The early "rail roads" were not powered by steam engines but by animals, used to move coal and ores to water transit.
I wish a transcript were available. I just can't listen. I would be interested to know whether they discussed humans now occupying nearly all niches and whether and why that is necessary.
I know it's deeply unfashionable to invoke hubris in human affairs anymore - and I am certainly aware of my own inclinations, differing sharply from those of others on these blogs - but in re his and Razib's "degrowth economics" is a "deadend for dynamic human flourishing" whatever that precisely signifies to them - I do wonder if there is a little gap for Hubris to slip her foot in.
That gap would be the assumption that there is only simple human choice where "degrowth" is concerned.
On the Sean Carroll Mindscape podcast it did not sound very novel. Big innovations involve big increases in energy use. Sure. We need cheaper sources of energy than fossil fuels. Paradoxically (in static equilibrium terms) subsidizing alternatives with a tax on net CO2 emissions, while increasing R&D and removing regulatory barriers to development of alternatives will reduce the costs of alternatives
Sounds pretty standard. There might be sub heading under agriculture in that grains can be transported especially by sea at low lost and making possible continental scale empires.
Low marginal cost electricity will be the next stage.
OT but my recent interview with Brink Lindsey may be of some interest here. Part one: https://youtu.be/Nqd0Q5U6J4M?si=uXtcmXobQ8rZ8af9
There was a scientist ~5 years ago who had a book with a similar thesis IIRC. I've spent a few minute googling but I can't find (her) name/book.
Possibly Olivia Judson. See her online article The energy expansions of evolution.
For various books on the effects of energy transitions on evolution and/or progress, see also Astrid Kandor, Robert Bryce, Frank Niele, Reiner Kummeland and/or Vaclav Smil.
Might be Vaclav Smil's "Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities"
Personally, while the history is fascinating, I don't get the impression there is actually some great non-obvious insight in these works that has much bearing on our future trajectory.
"Evolutionary processes like biological life or human activities expand until they hit hard limits on key resources. Equilibria change slowly so long as those limiting factors remain what they are. Innovations, whether natural or artificial, that overcome the most important limit or bottleneck can cause a 'breakout' of rapid change and expansion until some new bottleneck is reached and puts a stop on it."
"Maintaining what we consider to be modern prosperity in terms of human comfort and consumption takes a lot of resources that must be cheap compared to be the value produced by the average human. Proposals for policies that involve significant cutbacks of the use of such key resources or increase in their relative cost are incompatible with increased average prosperity short of a major collapse in population, and claims to the contrary are wishful thinking at best."
"To the extent the prices and supplies of energy in its various forms still constitute a major bottleneck on human economic activity and average consumptions levels, producing a lot more, a lot cheaply, would create a lot of growth. Unless there is an unexpected breakthrough soon in the ability to produce energy from nuclear fusion cheaply, It is unlikely that it will be possible to make a lot more cheap energy anytime soon without a significant expansion in the use of either fossil fuels or nuclear fission with breeder reactors. Claims solar and wind tech will fill the gap at competitive market prices without subsidy are also wishful thinking, these technologies are more mature and limited than most people think."
"While energy is indeed a key resource, and as with any resource, an increase in availability and decrease in price would spur more production that is not viable at current prices, it's unclear to what extent this factor is really going to be the main driver of the future trajectory of development. Unlike for much of history since the dawn of the industrial revolution, a lot of recent growth in developed countries has happened without the apparent need for expansion in the use of energy to drive it. Population always used to expand to the limit everywhere, but in what is also a relative new development, population in developed countries has been shrinking, and in some places, dramatically so."
"On the other hand, computation needs electricity, and the more economically useful computation gets, the greater the demand for more energy. The recent blockchain-related energy use experience provides us with a little taste of what that might be like. And anything that would impede the ability to provide lots more cheap electricity to productive-computation systems would stymie growth wherever such circumstances existed."
"Since at some point - maybe sooner than anyone thinks - that is going to represent a trillion dollar bill sitting on the sidewalk waiting for someone to pick up, and because historically international cooperation and coordination has never been strong enough to prevent such bills from being picked up, it is likely that some state will pick it up, and every other state will have to choose between whether to follow its lead with regard to energy policy, or commit economic suicide."
There, that's your executive summary to over a dozen similar books combined. Big deal.
Excellent summary. I think you exactly put your finger on the issue: pointing out that energy use is important is great, but the type of answer we care about in terms of growth would be "why do some societies manage to discover new uses for energy, and find ways to exploit previously unused sources?"
It reminds me a bit of VD Hanon's point in "Carnage and Culture" about how it isn't useful to answer "Why did the Europeans defeat the Aztecs?" with "The Europeans had metal weapons and guns!" because the really useful question is "Why didn't the Aztecs develop metal weapons and guns? All the bits were there for it." (I am paraphrasing a lot of course :D )
Yes, energy is important, and yes, we would be dumb to try and cut it off because that would mean degrading to a lower type of society. The question then is "how do we improve our chances of finding and exploiting new sources of energy?" The answer to that is never "happen to have it lying around", because most sources of energy happened to be lying around for millennia.
I don't even like Rorty, but I've started to take a kind of philosophical pragmatist's view of such historical questions as the "ultimate root causes" and the specific details of the transition to the industrial revolution or the Great Depression or the Protestant Reformation or whatever. They are fascinating and stimulating as intellectual matters, but I've come to experience them as somehow simultaneously wearying since one "can't run the experiment" over again and there are far too many overlapping plausible major contributing factors which don't lend themselves to any kind of conclusory analysis. That sheer dumb luck plays an important role in human affairs cannot be doubted, but as it cannot be measured, it can neither be discounted or credited.
What we do know is that one can look at quite a number of places and times including plenty in European history where best as we can tell "all the bits were there" which, had they been put together in the ways we now know they can be, and then put to widespread use, would have meant immediate breakout capability for whatever society adopted them.
Chinese history is literally full of such examples of being nearly on the brink of the capacity for global domination had everything fallen into place at the time. Indeed, many of the inventions useful for European expansion in the Renaissance and later on had Chinese origins.
Things like the Hierapolis sawmill (gears, levers, crank, connecting rod, water-wheel to power useful mechanical work), the existence of whatever institutions produced the Antikythera mechanism, force / reciprocating pumps, the Aeolipile, and a number of other astounding technological achievements meant the Romans were *this* close to industrialization for a long while.
My point is that my impression is that it's probably wrong to look at the precise moment the industrial revolution happened to tease out the recipe for that secret sauce. Instead, there is a kind of a broader lesson to be learned from all the times and places it -didn't- happen, but maybe could have, with insights that seem common-sensical to many young children in our age.
There is something really different about modern society and I guess what one might call the "industrial mindset" that seeks out, makes, and exploits these connections much easier and faster than what was normal throughout history, even in quite advanced and sophisticated civilizations. People starting to think in that way was probably just as important as anything else.
Yea, I think McCloskey largely nailed it with the Bourgeois Virtues series. When paired with Sowell's work on race and culture I think it makes a very strong argument that the stuff needed for the industrial revolution was all there, it was just a question of getting people with the right mindset to use it, and by extension a society that would allow them to do so.
I think a lot of academics miss that concept because, for them, production and industry just happen. They have no real experience working in industry and seeing first hand what different organizational structures and cultures can do with the same capital and materials. Culture is almost taboo as a potential source of difference, yet it seems to be one of the most important things, possibly the most important.
While we shoud defiinitely remove the obstacles to nuclear (and geothermal) power I think Solar still has enormous potential especially if it can be used at zero MC peak to power CCS. Whether solar + CCS +plus natural gas is cheaper than solar + battery is TBD
Lots of things have enormous potential but a potential which is still short of the potential that matters, which is the potential to beat the competition in a fair fight. Nuclear has that potential, but solar doesn't.
I don't know why you say that. Clearly the cost of energy storage continues to fall. Has the cost of solar energy production reached a minimum?
It's not just energy; it's commodified energy. ATP is a molecular energy store that can fuel many metabolic processes. It is an energy currency, as is grain. And coal. Money itself would have little value if it could not be exchanged for energy.