It is not quite that simple. It is arguable that the shift to coal and steam in the 1830s was as much due to the need to control labour as to a shortage of other energy sources. Up till then the main sorce of industrial power was water - the early capitalist spinning and weaving mills were water powered. This meant that they tended to be in rural areas with a smaller labour force. Labour had to be brought to the sources of power - river valleys at sites like New Lanark. The point about steam power is that it enabled mills to be located to big cities like Manxhester, Glasgow, Paisley where there was a plentiful supply of labour and wages were lower.
On the other hand, by the latter part of the 19th century the power being produced by steam may have exceeded the hydro power resources available. I dont know just when that happened. Had electricity been invented earlier than steam power - not in principle impossible, then the ability to transmit electric power from waterfalls to cities might have led to a considerable delay in the use of fossil fuels. The thermodynamic efficiency of hydro electric is of course much better than could be acheived with reciprocating steam engines. ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of [email protected] [[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, March 02, 2014 9:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Book about post-growth economy by Niko Paech Ron Peterson writes: > [Nico Paech's] claim that economic growth is primarily due to fossil > fuel consumption is strange when science and technology have > advanced the world economy more than fossil fuel consumption. Marx explained the Industrial Revolution by a quantum leap in productivity due to the large-scale direct cooperation organized by the capitalists. Marx overlooked the role of coal. Had England had to rely on wood and wind power, they would have burned down every last tree on the island and still not been able to lay the rails of the railroad network necessary for industrial division of labor. I.e., the industrial revolution would have fizzled out had there not been the so-called fossil fuel bonanza. A good book about this is E. A. Wrigley's Energy and the English Industrial Revolution http://www.amazon.com/Energy-English-Industrial-Revolution-Wrigley/dp/0511779615/ Ron also writes: > Wind power and solar power are becoming very competitive with fossil > fuel costs and plug-in hybrid automobiles show promise of cutting > gasoline consumption in half for most consumers. The problem is not the cost of renewable energy but the time to scale renewable energy and its necessary infrastructure (transmission, storage, smart grid) to replace the huge amounts of energy used today. Green electricity is relatively easy, it is harder to find an alternative to oil-driven transportation. Furthermore, we should not overlook the other limitations of this planet other than energy. If cheap and clean energy were available this would enable a level of human consumption ravaging the various other global boundaries, such as food and water (overfishing the oceans), chemical pollution, species extinction, phosphates. Here is a good TED talk by Rockstroem about his famous Nature article regarding planetary boundaries: http://youtu.be/RgqtrlixYR4 Niko Paech makes it crystal clear that continued growth of the world economy is impossible. There is no such thing as sustainable growth. Growth that looks sustainable in the rich countries goes at the expense of people living in the poor countries. Paech also says that continued growth is not necessary in the affluent countries today. He compares the need to increase per capital consumption in the rich countries with a gilded cage. Hans G Ehrbar _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
