The End of Burning
For millions of years, fire was our main form of energy. With renewables, it comes to an end
Last week I wrote a post about how Americans originally hated coal. Back in the early 1800s, when coal stoves first came along for the household, Americans loathed them.
Why? Because they couldn’t see any flames: Coal stoves were closed tight. Historically, Americana had heated their homes with open wooden fires — and they loved seeing those flickering yellow-and-orange flames.
Who can blame them? A wood fire is one of the most hauntingly beautiful things to behold. The way flames flicker and dance makes them — and they shadows they cast — seem alive. The crackle and pop of logs is practically a form of ASMR. I’ve camped a ton (ten years in the Boy Scouts of Canada) and I’ve felt how campfires can mesmerize, and calm the twitchy modern mind.
So these were, interestingly, the big reasons people hated coal: Aesthetic and cultural. Technologically, the new energy source was not inherently worse. On the contrary, coal was far cheaper and more efficient than wood. (And given that early Americans had deforested big chunks of the northeast while heating their homes, coal was — ironically — the more sustainable fuel at the time, at least in the short-term goal of preserving 19th-century…
