Even as economic growth was just taking off, some economists were already pessimistic. Coal, wrote William Stanley Jevons in 1865, is \u201cthe mainspring of modern material civilisation\u201d. Yet it was finite and would soon run out. Although more could be found by digging deeper, it would be increasingly expensive to extract and these higher costs would reduce the competitiveness of Britain\u2019s manufacturers. After all, in other countries the black fuel was still in sight of daylight. Efficiency gains\u2014using less coal to produce the same amount of stuff\u2014would not save the country. Indeed, cleverer use of limited resources would simply provide an incentive to burn even more coal, which would, paradoxically, lead to an even faster use of British reserves. There was no escape, the Victorian economist believed. Coal would be exhausted and the country was likely to \u201ccontract to her former littleness\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Even as economic growth was just taking off, some economists were already pessimistic. Coal, wrote William Stanley Jevons in 1865, is \u201cthe mainspring of modern material civilisation\u201d. Yet it was finite and would soon run out. Although more could be found by digging deeper, it would be increasingly expensive to extract and these higher costs would reduce the competitiveness of Britain\u2019s manufacturers. After all, in other countries the black fuel was still in sight of daylight. Efficiency gains\u2014using less coal to produce the same amount of stuff\u2014would not save the country. Indeed, cleverer use of limited resources would simply provide […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-919468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-2-live-mint","category-live-mint","category-newspapers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=919468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919468\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=919468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=919468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=919468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}