Charles Brown wrote:
[CrashList] refresher course on why we are fucked
<http://www.igreens.org.uk/coal_running_out_in_1865.htm>
William Stanley Jevons was one of the greatest economists of the 19th
century. With Menger and Walras he was one of the three
co-discoverers of marginal utility theory, the idea that as we
consume more of something the value of each incremental unit
diminishes. We value a glass of water to stop us dying of thirst
much more than the same glass to help top up our swimming pools.
However, despite his great mind he fell into the Malthusian trap in
The Coal Question (1865). In this influential book he treated coal
as the essential resource for the British industrial economy and
argued that it was an exhaustible resource.
He worried about "our present rapid multiplication when brought into
comparison with a fixed amount of material resource" and feared that
Britain's industrial growth would come to a halt because its coal
reserves were running out. Worse still he argued "... it is useless
the think of substituting any other kind of fuel for coal."
"... some day our coal seams [may] be found emptied to the bottom,
and swept clean like a coal-cellar. Our fires and furnaces ...
suddenly extinguished, and cold and darkness ... left to reign over a
depopulated country."
Jevons, William Stanley. [1865, 1906] 1965. The Coal Question. New York:
Augustus M. Kelley.
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