I see, so you're saying the author of the post got the order wrong.
In other words, Britain discovered coal, to some extent, then started using it earnest and neglected the forest-as-fuel-source infrastructure that was needed to keep repopulating the forests.
So you're arguing that deforestation was a consequence of using more coal, not a driver of using more coal.
So the question still remains, why was coal only discovered then? What prevented people from using coal earlier?
> In other words, Britain discovered coal, to some extent, then started using it earnest
Coal was known and used in antiquity. It has the same problem as oil: extraction was difficult and expensive except where it was on the surface or just below it.
People used more coal where good quality coal was easily accessible. They turned to more extensive mining and extraction as population growth and deforestation made wood more expensive - prior to that it was cheaper and easier to cut down trees that would regrow themselves if managed even half-heartedly. Once a steady supply of cheap coal was established it accelerated deforestation in a feedback loop.
* The sophistication of forest management varied a lot across civilizations and time within the same civilization, but very few took a "clear-cut everything" attitude. Clear-cutting was usually done to make farmland to grow more food, not for the lumber itself per-se.
It is an established fact that deforestation was the consecuence of coal mining. Britain consumed way more wood as tunnel/mining frame than as firewood.
It was known and used, just that there wasn't enough incentive for massive extraction so it wasn't searched. It's population growth and in conjonction with it urbanisation, electrification and railroads that lead to the search of more efficient energy source.
Nothing really prevented people from using coal earlier and they did but keep in mind that town where smaller and people scattered about in lots of smal villages. It was easier to collect wood.
Remember that by the end of 18h century, only a handful of cities barely reach a million inhabitant.
The first steam locomotive was built by a cornishman. He was interested in pumping out mines, but not coal mines, as they didn't have coal. The resultant need for efficient use of the imported Welsh coal may have been the driver of the next evolutionary step and then allowed the miniaturisation which led to locomotives.
(The Cornish steam engines also come up a lot due to them doing a lot of improvements that Watt held back with patent shenanigans, and a collaborative approach to their improvements)
Before electricity was a thing the steam engines were also used to pump water which then ran machinery hydraulicly, like cranes. Which piggybacked on improvements in civic water supplies.
Look, we use wood at home now, and given the chimneys in this house everyone else here has always done that too (or the house wouldn't have made it).
My point is that this sort of transition isn't immediate and universal. Some people had the motivation and opportunity to use coal, there were lots of advantages and it spread... slowly... at the same time the infrastructure to extract and distribute it developed.
People did use coal earlier, I'd say the increased mining activity came before the deforestation, but it's a slow ramp up over centuries so gets a bit chicken and egg.
Wikipedia has an interesting history that includes Roman usage. Note the final cite, which has the traditional "we ran out of wood" story is cited to a 19th century source.
> After the Romans left Britain, in AD 410, there are few records of coal being used in the country until the end of the 12th century. One that does occur is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 852 when a rent including 12 loads of coal is mentioned.[8] In 1183 a smith was given land for his work, and was required to "raise his own coal"[9]: 171–2 Shortly after the granting of the Magna Carta, in 1215, coal began to be traded in areas of Scotland and the north-east England, where the carboniferous strata were exposed on the sea shore, and thus became known as "sea coal". This commodity, however, was not suitable for use in the type of domestic hearths then in use, and was mainly used by artisans for lime burning, metal working and smelting. As early as 1228, sea coal from the north-east was being taken to London.[10]: 5 During the 13th century, the trading of coal increased across Britain and by the end of the century most of the coalfields in England, Scotland and Wales were being worked on a small scale.[10]: 8 As the use of coal amongst the artisans became more widespread, it became clear that coal smoke was detrimental to health and the increasing pollution in London led to much unrest and agitation. As a result of this, a Royal proclamation was issued in 1306 prohibiting artificers of London from using sea coal in their furnaces and commanding them to return to the traditional fuels of wood and charcoal.[10]: 10 During the first half of the 14th century coal began to be used for domestic heating in coal producing areas of Britain, as improvements were made in the design of domestic hearths.[10]: 13 Edward III was the first king to take an interest in the coal trade of the north east, issuing a number of writs to regulate the trade and allowing the export of coal to Calais.[10]: 15 The demand for coal steadily increased in Britain during the 15th century, but it was still mainly being used in the mining districts, in coastal towns or being exported to continental Europe.[10]: 19 However, by the middle of the 16th century supplies of wood were beginning to fail in Britain and the use of coal as a domestic fuel rapidly expanded.[10]: 22
Seems relevant that the coal mining areas worked out the way to use coal more cleanly in home furnaces a couple of centuries before the 'running out of wood' shift was supposed to have happened.
You might be able to trace whether the trees disappeared first in the areas where they had coal mines.
> In 1611, the agricultural writer Arthur Standish warned, ‘No wood, no kingdom.’ Deforestation, he claimed, threatened to undermine English agriculture, impoverish the poor, and provoke rebellions. In contrast, his contemporary Dudley Digges – a politician and investor in commercial and colonial ventures – took the opposite position. He argued that fears of wood scarcity were unfounded; a ploy by ‘beggars’ dwelling in forests and the greedy, feckless landlords who profited from these desperate tenants, both of whom wished to protect forests from conversion to more profitable uses. A third perspective was offered by the London merchant and deputy treasurer of the Virginia Company, Robert Johnson. Wood scarcity was real and incurable, and the only solution was to exploit abundant woods in the new English colony of Virginia.
There is one way around the chicken-and-egg problem. Surface coal is mined. Coal production goes up. Mines are made a little deeper. Coal production goes up more. Land is deforested for more agriculture now that there is an alternative fuel for heating and cooking.
Mines get deeper and start flooding more, pumping is more difficult and you have an "energy crisis" as coal mines struggle to keep up production and land has already been deforested.
So, to me, this provides the beginnings of an answer to "how else could the industrial revolution have happened?"
Choose a place that has slowly ramping up energy consumption so that they start supplanting it with coal until there's a threshold of it being profitable to mine coal in deeper wells.
What I still don't understand is why it took so long. Is it the critical mass of population and urban vs. rural population? Could it have happend in Asia, the Middle East or other parts of Europe? How long would we have had to wait if it hadn't happened in Great Britain?
While critical mass of population seems to be an important part, I feel like there are a fair number of other things that have to be in place to make it more economical to mine deeply.
Then there's the next step Bret discusses: the Newcomen engine apparently worked well enough for mining purposes that the next big improvement took 50 years and then it was James Watt that got involved.
"It is particularly remarkable here how much of these conditions are unique to Britain: it has to be coal, coal has to have massive economic demand (to create the demand for pumping water out of coal mines) and then there needs to be massive demand for spinning (so you need a huge textile export industry fueled both by domestic wool production and the cotton spoils of empire) and a device to manage the conversion of rotational energy into spun thread. I’ve left this bit out for space, but you also need a major incentive for the design of pressure-cylinders (which, in the event, was the demand for better siege cannon) because of how that dovetails with developing better cylinders for steam engines."
In other words, Britain discovered coal, to some extent, then started using it earnest and neglected the forest-as-fuel-source infrastructure that was needed to keep repopulating the forests.
So you're arguing that deforestation was a consequence of using more coal, not a driver of using more coal.
So the question still remains, why was coal only discovered then? What prevented people from using coal earlier?