America’s two-century search for a more perfect power
coal
The Amnesiac Civilization and Energy
I picked up Vaclav Smil’s Energy at the Crossroads yesterday at Moe’s in Berkeley. A historian of technology at the University of Calgary, he points out that our large-scale “prime movers” were created before 1920. Turbines and internal combustion engines do almost all human work — and that gives them incredible social and technical inertia. [...]
Coal: Solidified Sunbeams (Planted for Humanity)
Here we have one of the most poetic descriptions of coal that you’re likely to see. It’s from a National Geographic article written in the throes of World War I and titled, “Coal—Ally of American Industry.” The picture is captioned: Beneath These Bare Rocks Lie the Solidified Sunbeams Stored by Provident Nature for Resourceful Man. [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
