“This trainwreck is often referred to as the “carbon economy.” The carbon economy began when the primary motive force in human industrial production, transportation, and heat production moved away from organic sources—human and animal power or water and wood power—and substituted instead fossilized carbon—coal, oil, and other fossil fuels. Calling it an economy adds some heft to the arrangement, making it harder to imagine ever altering.”
“The very notion of a carbon-based economy relies on a cluster of other concepts like “modernity,” “capitalism,” and “industrialization.””
“It was only when canals were built to take the coal to market that people in New York began to regularly use the coal to heat their homes. It wasn’t geologic proximity, but rather the human ability to overcome distances, that allowed nations to power industrial life with coal.”
“Because transportation is something that happens only if someone decides to undertake it, historians these days are trying to punch holes in the inevitability argument by looking at at the way energy was moved around in the early days of the fossil fuel economy. The Arizona State professor Christopher Jones’s new book Routes of Power is at the front of the pack. Putting transportation at the center of the story, Routes of Power makes the coming of the fossil fuel economy a more contingent story, one with human actors making decisions about how to move fuel, what sorts of social arrangements need to be in place to do so, and the efforts to bring them into being.”
“By looking historically at the movement of energy, Jones is able to show how carbon-based economies are created by people, not simply geographical luck. In so doing, he traces the lines of escape, the moments when things might have gone differently—and, by implication, might yet go differently.”
“The coal boosters decided to trade sunk costs for sunk coal. The fixed costs of canal construction did not change much as traffic increased, meaning that any dollar of freight was very near to a dollar of profit, or, more likely, a dollar to repay the creditors who financed the canal construction. As a result, canal companies became coal marketers and regional economic developers, a process that Jones calls “supply driving demand.” They paid to develop new uses for coal, investing in ventures to use gas derived from coal in urban street lighting. And most of all, they kept the price low and the supply steady, enabling businesses in coastal, urban markets to reliably depend on their fuel for the fixtures—warm and smokeless domestic coal ovens, powerful coal-burning steamships, fast steam-powered streetcars—of a new, modern way of life. The result was ever-increasing fossil fuel consumption, all the product of the arrangement and financing of coal canals.”
“The distribution of fossil fuel had a tendency to move far too much energy to places where there is none, creating in the process a local opportunity for industrial uses of cheap energy. Jones argues that this oversupply was a deliberate outcome of the plans of transportation networks to increase consumption of goods along their lines. Oversupply lowered the price of the fossil fuels, often to the point of very low profits for producers. In the coal business, where railroads often supplied the capital to start the mining companies, this meant that the railroad would take a loss on the capital invested in mining companies in order to maintain profits on something else, like, say, the transportation of steel beams for manufacturers who benefited from cheap coal along their lines.”
“Jones argues that Americans created the transportation networks for fossil fuels but then were left subservient to them—that sunk costs drove ever-increasing consumption, leading inevitably to the contemporary trainwreck. Things have changed, but nineteenth century Americans understood that the fossil economy was a human creation. Jones gives us the story of how they brought it into being.”
“Jones’s book proves that energy is nothing without its transportation. Energy still has to be transported; today, more energy is transported over longer distances than ever before. Historical narratives are usually not the best place to look for cut-and-dry solutions to contemporary problems, but Jones’s story does make clear that the circulation of energy—not simply the energy itself—is what makes the fossil fuel economy work.”