Notes - Coal - A Human History
November 24, 2025
Chapter 1: A Portable Climate
The Rejection and Redemption of Coal
In the summer of 1306, bishops, barons, and knights gathered in London for Parliament but were distracted by the obnoxious and acrid smell of burning coal used by blacksmiths and artisans. These nobles led popular demonstrations against the fuel, leading King Edward I to ban its use. Penalties for using coal included "great fines and ransoms" for first offenders and smashing the furnaces of second offenders.
Historically, human civilizations were limited by the energy that plants could capture from solar income, restricting the scale of economies and populations. Coal offered select societies the stored power of millions of years of solar income.
Coal as a Portable Climate
In the mid-1800s, writers celebrated coal as the foundation of civilization itself. Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson famously declared, "Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate". This metaphor captured the idea that coal allowed humanity to transform nature's cold world into one more comfortable and civilized. Another writer stated flatly: "With Coal, we have light, strength, power, wealth, and civilization; without Coal we have darkness, weakness, poverty, and barbarism".
Some observers believed that the unequal global distribution of coal (heavily favoring 19th-century British and American territories) was not chance, but a prophecy written by God to secure a "controlling influence on the affairs of the world" for the energetic Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
Modern Context and Global Threat
The author's fascination with coal stems from her work as an environmental attorney focusing on global warming. Among the fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), coal creates the most greenhouse gases for the energy obtained. Although climate change is a grave threat, the US currently burns more coal than ever, almost entirely for electricity.
Chapter 2: The Best Stone in Britain
Deep Time: The Carboniferous Period
Coal formation began about 300 million years ago, in a period named the Carboniferous, when giant, primeval jungles covered Britain. Dominant plant life included the towering lepidodendron (up to six feet in diameter and 175 feet high) and the sigillaria, a tree sometimes described as "grotesque" and resembling a "huge barrel". The jungles teemed with insects of mammoth proportions, such as cockroaches reaching a foot in length, dragonflies with thirty-inch wingspans, and six-foot millipedes. During this time, early back-boned ancestors (amphibians) were evolving into reptiles.
These jungles were periodically inundated by rising seas, burying the dense vegetation under marine sediment and trapping the solar energy.
Early Coal Usage and Association with Death
After the Romans (who had used coal and its related mineral, jet, for jewelry) left in the 5th century, the English ignored their abundant coal reserves for four centuries. When usage resumed in the late 1100s, coal was known as "sea coal," likely because it was shipped by sea to distant markets, or possibly because the North Sea exposed outcrops and deposited chunks on beaches.
Early coal lands along the Tyne were owned by the Roman Catholic Church, and the first miners were often serfs. The "humble" nature of the coal meant the crown did not claim ownership over it, unlike precious metals.
Coal earned a sinister image in the Middle Ages. During the Black Death (plague), one witness described the black swellings (buboes) as looking like "broken fragments of brittle sea-coal". The subsequent population drop led to a slump in the coal trade.
The Fuel Crisis and Rise of Pollution
By the 1500s, wood supplies in England were disappearing due to the lucrative wool industry (clearing land for pasture) and the iron industry (consuming large quantities of charcoal). The resulting fuel shortage was felt acutely in rapidly growing London, where wood prices rose sharply.
The widespread adoption of chimneys by the mid-1500s allowed people to switch from wood to coal. This meant warmth was channeled into the home, while the resulting pollution was sent to be "suffered by the world at large".
London's air quality deteriorated rapidly. In 1661, writer John Evelyn published Fumifugium, lamenting that London resembled the "Suburbs of Hell". The smoke left a "sooty Crust or Furr" everywhere, corroding "Iron-bars and hardest Stones". Indoors, soot destroyed tapestries, leading to the use of wainscoting. Evelyn blamed coal for lung ailments.
Early Health Statistics
John Graunt, considered the founder of statistics, analyzed London's mortality records in 1662. He found that infant and childhood mortality was appallingly high, and lung-related deaths accounted for a fifth to a quarter of all deaths, likely hastened by the polluted air. Despite the deadly pollution, the poor had no choice but to burn coal, as a lack of heat would have killed them quickly, and firewood was too expensive.
Chapter 3: Launching a Revolution
Life and Death in the Coal Mines
By the 1700s, coal mines had become massive industrial enterprises, but mining remained extremely dangerous. Miners were treated as social outcasts. In Scotland, entire families were bound for life to the mine, constituting a form of industrial serfdom, sometimes accepting only a pair of shoes for bondage. If they ran away, they could be subjected to "torture in the irons".
Miners faced three deadly gases, all variations on carbon:
- Choke Damp (Carbon Dioxide): Caused sudden suffocation.
- White Damp (Carbon Monoxide): A silent poison, sometimes inexplicably described in old texts as having a fragrant "smell of violets". Later, canaries were used as early warnings because their dramatic toppling was easier to detect than a mouse's "pinkness in the snout".
- Fire Damp (Methane): Caused catastrophic explosions, sometimes shooting victims "out of the mouth of the mine like bullets out of a gun". Due to increasing depth and danger in the 1600s and 1700s, local newspapers like the Newcastle Journal stopped reporting on these common, deadly explosions.
The Water Problem and the Invention of Steam
The greatest physical constraint on deeper mining was water. Early drainage involved narrow, dangerous gravity tunnels (up to five miles long). When this failed, water had to be lifted, often by devices powered by fifty or sixty horses. This costly necessity created an incentive for finding a better mechanical solution.
The Royal Society focused scientific attention on pumping technology. Thomas Newcomen, snubbed by the scientific elite, created the first practical steam engine (the "fire engine") around 1712. It used steam to create a vacuum, allowing atmospheric pressure to drive the piston. This engine was a huge success in the coal fields, replacing as many as fifty horses.
In the 1760s, James Watt realized the Newcomen engine wasted heat by constantly cooling and reheating the cylinder. His revolutionary idea was the separate condenser, allowing the cylinder to stay hot. Watt partnered with Matthew Boulton at the renowned Soho manufactory. Watt's improved engine quickly began working in coal mines and iron foundries in 1776.
Industrial Revolution Triumphs
The iron industry, long constrained by a dependence on wood/charcoal, adopted coal after learning to bake it into coke to remove impurities. Watt’s powerful steam engines provided the huge blasts needed to run massive furnaces, making Britain the world's most efficient iron producer.
Steam power accelerated the Industrial Revolution, leading to much larger, mechanized factories concentrated in urban areas (unlike dispersed water-powered mills). Britain's dependency on coal was unmatched, mining five times more coal than the rest of the world combined by 1700. By 1851, thanks to its coal, Britain was recognized as the "workshop of the world".
Chapter 4: Full Steam Ahead
Manchester: The Coal-Fired City
The nineteenth-century industrial hub of Manchester was founded on American cotton and local coal. It was viewed as a dual symbol of industrial success and social misery, described by Alexis de Tocqueville as the place where "civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage". The city’s identity was defined by the black smoke from its "nearly 500 chimneys".
Coal animated, illuminated (via coal gas lights allowing work before dawn and after dusk), colored, scented, and generally saturated the world of the industrial workers. This massiveness led to large factories (some cotton mills had over a thousand workers). Workers, subjected to the demanding rhythm of the steam engine, were often reduced to simple, repetitive movements.
Social Misery and Disease
Child exploitation was rampant. Small children (five to eight years old) served as "trappers," sitting alone in the dark mine tunnels for twelve hours to open and close ventilation doors. Other children were forced to haul coal through low tunnels, appearing "chained, belted, harnessed like dogs in a go-cart".
Rapid urbanization led to slums where health declined dramatically. In Manchester in the 1840s, more than 57% of laboring-class children died before the age of five, resulting in an average life expectancy of only 17 years for the poor. Due to pollution-blocked sun ("a disc without rays") and poor conditions, rickets, known elsewhere as "the English disease," became an epidemic. The intense misery witnessed in Manchester by Friedrich Engels shaped his radical ideology and co-authorship of The Communist Manifesto.
Revolutionizing Transport
The constant need to move coal first prompted a wave of canal construction (the "canal mania") in the late 1700s, often initiated by coal owners. George Stephenson, a mechanical genius from the coal mines, later developed the steam locomotive, allowing coal to haul itself.
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway (1830) was the first dedicated line using only locomotives. Though it symbolized progress, its opening was marked by the accidental death of dignitary William Huskisson, crushed by a train, highlighting the danger and turmoil of the new era.
London's Killer Smoke
London, the largest city in the world (3 million residents by the 1860s), was an even larger polluter, called "a volcano with a hundred thousand mouths". The British resisted the efficient, fire-concealing stoves widely used on the continent, clinging to open fireplaces to see the "cheery flames" and avoid the "smell of burnt dust," thereby burning far more coal than necessary.
This resulted in worsening air quality and frequent "Great Stinking Fogs". The famous fog of December 1873 was so dense that visibility was reduced to a few yards. Though initial newspaper reports noted accidents and a few deaths by inhalation, later analysis showed the 1873 fog quietly killed 270 to 700 Londoners. An 1880 fog killed up to 1,100 people.
Chapter 5: A Precious Seed
Discovery in the New World
The first English colonists found a vast eastern American forest, a stark contrast to their wood-scarce homeland. They used and burned wood lavishly. Colonists had no need to search for coal, unaware that the continent held the world’s richest coal deposits. Upon discovery, this coal was viewed as a "precious seed," proving America's special destiny.
In the 1750s, bituminous (soft) coal was found near the Forks of the Ohio River (later Pittsburgh). Though the British seized the Forks in 1758, their primary interest was beaver pelts, not the coal.
Pittsburgh: American Industrial Pioneer
Mining began at Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh). By the early 1800s, Pittsburgh was known as the "Birmingham of America" and was the steam capital of the Western Hemisphere. It was visibly filthy, with a "dark dense smoke" that blackened the skin of the inhabitants. However, outside of Pittsburgh, American industrialization stalled due to the high cost of hauling coal over the Appalachian Mountains.
Anthracite Breaks the Bottleneck
Around 1790, Necho Allen accidentally discovered anthracite ("stone coal") in eastern Pennsylvania. Anthracite is cleaner (low-sulfur) and burns with very little smoke.
Early efforts to transport anthracite to Philadelphia using ninety-foot wooden flatboats called arks down treacherous rapids were commercially disastrous. When the few surviving boats arrived in Philadelphia in 1803, the coal was discarded because people did not know how to burn it.
Josiah White and Erskine Hazard eventually learned to use anthracite in their iron mill. White led a tough workforce to build 12 small dams, making the Lehigh River navigable and ensuring a competitive supply. These efforts, particularly the Schuylkill Canal (1825), launched "canal mania," and formed America’s first major inland transportation system for coal.
Anthracite country also became the "cradle of American railroading". Early wood-burning trains were notorious for spewing a "storm of fiery snow" that burned surrounding fields and rained hot cinders on passengers, forcing them to toss their burning umbrellas overboard.
Industrialization and Civil War
Anthracite (being naturally low in sulfur) was key to developing cheap iron production in the U.S. in the late 1830s. This broke the two major constraints on American industry: the lack of cheap coal and the lack of cheap iron. Mass production rose rapidly between 1835 and 1855, shifting industry to urban centers.
This industrial strength ensured a Union victory in the Civil War, as the North held a decisive advantage: a 38-to-1 lead in coal production over the agrarian South. Post-war, the coal-fueled railroad expansion accelerated the taming of the American West.
Chapter 6: The Rise and Fall of King Coal
The American Industrial Zenith
On May 10, 1876, the United States celebrated its Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. A major attraction was the enormous coal-fired steam engine that powered the machinery in the sprawling Machinery Hall. When President Ulysses S. Grant started the engine, eight miles of connecting shafts began to rotate, bringing fourteen acres of machinery to noisy life, symbolizing the nation's arrival as an industrial power.
The Molly Maguires and Corporate Consolidation
The simultaneous trial of the alleged secret society, the Molly Maguires, highlighted the intense conflict in the anthracite coal region. These Irish Catholic coal-mining terrorists were blamed for advancing their interests through arson, beatings, and the systematic murder of coal bosses. Their notoriety was amplified by Franklin B. Gowen, the powerful president of the Reading Railroad. Gowen championed the "gospel of bigness" for American industry and sought stability by controlling both unionization and competition. He secured a law allowing the Reading to buy up most of the area's coal mines and, in 1873, created the nation’s first major industry-wide cartel (the "pool") with other railroads to fix prices. Following a long strike in 1875, Gowen, acting as special prosecutor while still running the railroad, led the high-profile murder trials against the accused Mollies. Gowen, sometimes dressed in formal evening clothes in court, successfully linked the miners' violence to union activity. As a result, twenty Mollies were hanged and the effort to organize anthracite miners was suppressed for a generation.
The Rise of Bituminous and the UMW
By the late 1890s, the U.S. surpassed Britain as the world leader in coal production. While anthracite production stagnated, soft or bituminous coal production soared due to its wider distribution across 33 states, fueling Midwestern industries and cities. Unlike anthracite, the competitive soft-coal industry was receptive to unionization, leading to the formation of the United Mine Workers (UMW), led by John Mitchell. In the anthracite fields, working conditions remained brutal, with thousands of "breaker boys" (aged five to eight) doing the backbreaking job of sorting coal above ground, and underground mules going years without seeing the sun. Miners also developed a close relationship with mine rats because the animals' scurrying away was believed to warn of subtle shifts that preceded cave-ins.
The 1902 Strike and Domestic Life
In May 1902, Mitchell led nearly 150,000 anthracite miners in a large, well-managed strike that gained public sympathy due to Mitchell's image as "the prince of moderation". The resulting coal shortage led to incidents like the Arcola coal riot, where town leaders, including bank presidents and ministers, took coal from a railroad train when the railroad refused to sell to the town. The strike was resolved after President Roosevelt intervened.
Coal's influence extended to the American home, where enclosed cast-iron stoves replaced open fireplaces, causing the open fire (the domestic focal point since pre-human times) to vanish. Operating a coal stove was demanding, requiring about an hour a day of tending, including stoking, sifting, and polishing the surface with black-lead (graphite).
Smoke Abatement and King Coal’s Exit
The 1902 strike highlighted the split between clean anthracite cities and polluted bituminous ones. In cities like New York, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie warned that using soft coal would ruin the city’s "pure atmosphere". The "municipal housekeeping" movement, led by women's clubs, began lobbying for smoke abatement ordinances, seeing coal smoke as a moral and health threat. Some activists linked smoky, sunless homes to "low, sordid murders" and mood problems that drove husbands "to drink". Early studies, such as one in Pittsburgh in 1914, began confirming the link between smoke and pneumonia deaths. The focus shifted to efficiency, arguing that 8 percent of the nation’s coal was wasted as smoke. Efforts were reversed during World War I, when the federal government declared "war meant smoke". After World War II, coal lost its market dominance to natural gas and fuel oil, leading to the collapse of the anthracite industry and a fall in coal's share of U.S. energy use to under 29 percent by 1955. King Coal receded from its visible, central role in American politics and industry.
Chapter 7: Invisible Power
The Power Plant Era
The modern coal era is defined by massive, centralized power plants, such as the Sherco facility in Minnesota, whose massive boilers consume about 6.5 million tons of coal a year. This concentration transforms coal into "squeaky-clean electrons," making its use and pollution invisible to consumers.
Dispersion and Acid Rain
The dispersion of pollutants through tall smokestacks (reflecting the attitude that "the solution to pollution is dilution") simply spread the damage. The London Black Fog of 1952 killed 4,000 people due to high concentrations of sulfur dioxide (SO2). In the U.S., SO2 emissions peaked around 1970. In the late 1960s, SO2 was linked to acid rain across Scandinavia and the Adirondack Mountains, causing fish disappearance, tree death, and in Sweden, contaminating water that turned people's hair green. The 1990 U.S. Acid Rain Program led to substantial SO2 cuts, often benefiting downwind states and saving thousands of lives.
The Modern Pollutant Burden
Despite controls, coal pollution is responsible for several major environmental and health issues:
- Haze and Smog: Tiny sulfate particles, formed from SO2, severely limit visibility in the Eastern U.S. (average visibility is only fourteen miles). Coal plants also contribute significantly to smog (ozone), which triggers asthma attacks and irreversibly damages lungs.
- Mercury: Coal plants are the largest source of atmospheric mercury, a neurotoxin that causes poor school performance in an estimated 60,000 babies born yearly in the U.S..
- Particulates (PM): SO2 and nitrogen oxides transform into ultra-fine particulate matter that penetrates deep into the lungs. This PM pollution is estimated to cause over 30,000 deaths a year from power plant emissions alone, nearly matching the annual death toll from traffic accidents (42,000 in 2000).
Structural Shifts in the Coal Industry
To meet environmental rules, power plants either "scrub" emissions or "switch" to low-sulfur coal. This forced a massive shift, moving more than half of U.S. coal production west to low-sulfur surface mines. In Appalachia, the desperate search for remaining low-sulfur seams has led to controversial "mountaintop removal" mining.
The Threat of Global Warming
The fundamental threat from coal is its release of carbon dioxide (CO2), the planet's most important greenhouse gas. Compared to other fossil fuels, coal creates the most greenhouse gases for the energy obtained. The IPCC predicts warming between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. Consequences include rising seas, widespread extinctions, and severe ecosystem disruption. The National Academy of Sciences warns that "abrupt climate change" is possible, especially when the climate is forced to change rapidly. In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol marked a global, though modest, attempt to shift away from fossil fuels. Conversely, the U.S. coal industry saw a resurgence (the "coal rush") after helping George W. Bush win the 2000 election, leading to plans for nearly ninety new coal plants.
Chapter 8: A Sort of Black Stone
China's Early Coal Dependence
China burns more coal than any other nation, relying on it for roughly two-thirds of its total energy use. China began using coal centuries before the West. Marco Polo, visiting in the 13th century, noted the use of "a sort of black stone" because wood supplies were already inadequate for the immense population's need for cooking and heating. During the Northern Song dynasty (960–1125 A.D.), China achieved large-scale iron production. Facing acute deforestation, China figured out how to make coke from coal around the 11th century A.D., solving the fuel crisis centuries ahead of Britain. The capital, Kaifeng, was a metropolitan center possibly unsurpassed globally before the 19th century.
Mining Under Foreign and Communist Rule
China has 5 million miners (as of 1996), relying heavily on cheap labor over machinery, leading to catastrophic safety statistics, such as 10,000 Chinese miners dying in accidents in 1991. Conditions in small mines, like one visited in Inner Mongolia, were extremely dangerous: miners worked eight-hour shifts underground, often crouching, without eating or standing upright, lit only by flashlights. In the late 1800s, Chinese officials sought to "self-strengthen" the nation through industry. When the first major modern enterprise, the Kaiping mines, faced a capital shortage, they turned to British interests who brought in Herbert C. Hoover. During the Boxer Rebellion, Hoover took control of the mines, a move Chinese nationalists later saw as having been "fleeced" by a "Yankee man of straw".
The Great Leap Forward
Under Mao Zedong, the disastrous Great Leap Forward (1958–1960) aimed to surpass Britain's steel production by mobilizing a hundred million Chinese to make steel in primitive "backyard steel furnaces". The transportation system was overwhelmed moving coal and ore, often by hand-pulled carts. The resulting metal was often useless, called "cattle droppings," contributing directly to the greatest famine in human history (1959–1961), which killed tens of millions.
Modern Pollution and Reform
Today, China's rapid industrial growth and heavy coal use have created a severe pollution crisis. Air pollution is estimated to cause 1.6 million deaths yearly (playing a role in one in every eight deaths). Frequent dust storms pick up pollution and carry it across the Pacific, even violating U.S. air standards in North America. Southern China also suffers from severe acid rain due to SO2 emissions. In recent years, China has launched a "war on air pollution". In Beijing, SO2 levels were reduced by 41 percent between 1998 and 2000. China is now the largest market for wind and solar power. Chinese planners intend to cap coal use by 2020 and continue expanding power capacity, claiming the right to increase greenhouse gases as they develop their economy.
Chapter 9: A Burning Legacy
Coal’s Legacy and the CO2 Problem
Coal was fundamental to Britain's rise, creating the industrial revolution, and triggering key innovations like the steam engine and railway. The most critical long-term problem created by coal is the release of carbon dioxide (CO2), the "essence" of coal.
The Quest for Alternatives
The main technological fix proposed for CO2 is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), which involves capturing CO2 and storing it in underground formations. This is complex and risky due to the long-term uncertainty of storage; for example, a naturally sequestered CO2 pocket at Lake Nyos in Cameroon once ruptured and smothered 1,700 people. CCS is viewed as a feature of futuristic coal plants decades away. A more promising energy future envisions a world running on hydrogen, made from water using renewable sources like wind and solar. Hydrogen could be used in power plants or fuel cells with the only emission being water vapor, allowing humanity to finally harvest energy efficiently from solar income.
The Benefits of Decarbonization
Moving away from large, centralized coal plants toward small, dispersed energy sources (like rooftop solar and wind turbines) would accelerate technological growth and make the energy system inherently less vulnerable to disruption. It is estimated that abandoning coal would save tens of thousands of lives yearly in developed nations (and hundreds of thousands in China) by eliminating fine particulate pollution. This power dispersal could also prompt a parallel dispersal of political and economic power.
Chapter 10: Tipping Points: Epilogue to the New Edition
The Coal Rush and the Carbon Budget
The 2003-2007 "coal rush," where over 150 new coal plants were announced in the U.S., was largely blocked by concerted opposition from environmental groups. However, the U.S. Congress failed to pass comprehensive climate legislation like the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill (2009) due to opposition heavily funded by oil and coal interests (like the Koch brothers and coal baron Bob Murray). To contain warming below two degrees Celsius, the world is restricted to a "carbon budget," which we are predicted to exhaust by 2040. This means leaving the vast majority (92-95%) of U.S. coal reserves buried. The problem is urgent because global warming is now "unequivocal," and the melting of ice sheets suggests sea levels could rise several meters in the long term.
The Coal Crash and Policy Tipping Points
The U.S. power sector's carbon emissions peaked in 2007 and have fallen since, reflecting a shift to natural gas and renewables. Coal's share of U.S. power fell to 39% by 2014. Observers now call this a "coal crash" as top producers face massive devaluations and bankruptcies. The EPA's Clean Power Plan (CPP), aiming to cut power-sector emissions by 32% by 2030, is the largest climate step taken by the nation. While job losses are acute in coal regions (especially central Appalachia), the national shift has seen the solar industry alone employ nearly twice as many people as coal mines.
Technological Acceleration
The only way coal can remain a major energy source is through Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), which is costly (increasing energy prices by about three-quarters) and largely unproven at a commercial scale. Meanwhile, solar power costs have fallen 99 percent since 1980. This technological progress, coupled with soaring battery technology (like Tesla's "gigafactory"), threatens to shatter the traditional centralized utility business model that coal originally created.
China and the Moral Imperative
Despite its massive coal consumption, which makes it the world's top greenhouse gas polluter and contributes to the 1.6 million Chinese deaths yearly attributed to air pollution, China launched a "war on air pollution". China is now the largest market for wind and solar power and has committed to capping its coal use. The movement against coal is gaining moral momentum, with institutions being urged to divest from fossil fuels. Ultimately, the collective force of these technological, economic, and moral shifts is expected to reach a tipping point that will finally eliminate coal from the global scene.