by Naomi Klein
People used fossil fuels long before James Watt. In places that had wetlands and bogs, people dug blocks of peat out of the ground. Peat is ancient plant matter that is partly decayed. If left in the ground for a few more tens of millions of years, it could have become coal. Even dug out as peat, though, it was still burned to heat houses.
Coal was buried deeper in the ground than peat, and it was harder to get, but it burned hotter. By Watt’s time, coal-burning fireplaces or furnaces heated many British homes. In fact, the machine that Watt was asked to repair in 1763 was a Newcomen engine—an early steam engine, invented in 1712 by Thomas Newcomen, that was used mainly to pump water out of flooded coal mines.
At its simplest, a steam engine is something like a large teakettle. Only, instead of whistling out into your kitchen, the steam from the boiling water is trapped and used to power a machine. Just as a teakettle needs to be heated on a stove, a steam engine cannot heat water without energy from some kind of fuel.
Newcomen engines burned coal. The burning coal heated water in a container called a boiler, turning it into steam. The steam flowed into a sealed chamber with a tight-fitting moving part called a piston. The pressure of the steam pushed the piston, and the energy of the moving piston operated rods attached outside the chamber. The moving rods could drive a pump that would remove the water from a mine that had flooded.
When Watt repaired the university’s Newcomen engine, he saw that it was not very efficient. It wasted energy because the engine cooled at each stroke of the piston, meaning that the steam had to be constantly reheated. Several years later, Watt figured out how to redesign the steam engine. His version would be more efficient and vastly more powerful.
It took years for Watt to perfect his design and find the right partner to help him turn it into a business, but in 1776 the new engine was put to work. Its first job was powering the pumps that drew water out of flooded mines, as Newcomen’s engine had done.
Watt’s partner, Matthew Boulton, pointed out that the market for mine-draining pumps was limited, but many other kinds of work also needed power. At Boulton’s urging, Watt went on to invent a version of his engine that could power machines beyond pumps. In 1782 a sawmill ordered one of the new engines. The mill had been using twelve horses to provide energy to the machines that cut timber. Watt calculated that the work done by one horse was equal to lifting thirty-three thousand pounds a distance of one foot in one minute. (This is the origin of the horsepower unit of energy measurement.) His engine replaced all twelve horses.
By making modern industry possible, the steam engine—and the machines it powered, such as this train—changed the world. They also started changing its climate.
James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but he changed it in a big way. Strong and tireless, his engine ate coal from what seemed like a limitless supply, then churned out energy. It was the perfect machine for the way powerful people of Watt’s time and place had come to view the Earth and our relationship to it.
A WORLD FOR THE TAKING
Have you ever tried to describe your relationship with nature? Do you think it is pretty much the same as your society’s relationship with the natural world, or do you have ideas that don’t match what you see around you?
Humans have had many ways of thinking about their lives in the natural world. For example, the Haudenosaunee people (sometimes called Iroquois) have an ancient philosophy that calls for every decision to be evaluated based on its impact not just on generations alive today but seven generations into the future. Many cultures have philosophies that teach their members to be good ancestors as well as good citizens, doing nothing that would prevent future generations from having good lives. And as we heard from young people living on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, their culture teaches them to take no more than they need, and to give back to the land, so that it can continue to renew itself and support life.
These systems of living still exist among some groups, especially among Indigenous Peoples around the world. In much of the modern world, though, those systems gave way hundreds of years ago to a different view of the relationship between people and nature. People began to see nature as an object or a machine, something humans can and should control. From the sixteenth century on, this view took hold in Europe and its colonies, including what would become the United States. It is woven into our global economy, which values taking—or extracting—resources above all else. Some call this system extractivism.
If extractivism has a father, it is probably an English thinker and scientist named Francis Bacon (1561–1626). He is credited with convincing the educated classes to give up old notions of the Earth as a life-giving mother who deserves our respect—and, at times, our fear. To Bacon, humans existed apart from the rest of the natural world, and the Earth existed to be used. Humans were her masters. He wrote in 1623 that if we studied nature, “we could lead and drive her.”
The Earth, in this view, can be completely known. It can be controlled. This idea also appeared in the political writings of another Englishman, John Locke (1632–1704). Locke’s thinking helped shape modern notions of liberty. Part of that liberty was “perfect freedom” to use the natural world in whatever way humans wanted. In France, meanwhile, the great philosopher René Descartes wrote that humans were nature’s “masters and possessors.”
Here’s the trouble: if you are told that you own something, or are “master” of it rather than are a part of it, you might think you can do whatever you want with it, without facing any consequences. Such thinking, especially Bacon’s view of a knowable, controllable natural world, paved the way for the colonial activities of England and the other nations of Europe. Ships from these nations crisscrossed the globe to bring back the secrets of nature—and its wealth—to their crowns. At the same time, these voyages were also opportunities for the exploring countries to claim lands far from their own shores—as colonies. This turned the peoples already living on those lands into subjects of the colonizing nations, whether or not they wished to be.
Wealthy Europeans in this era imagined themselves to be all-powerful over nature and over non-Christian humans who lived in ways that were more connected to nature. That mood was captured by a clergyman who wrote in 1713, “We can, if need be, ransack the whole globe, penetrate into the bowels of the Earth, descend to the bottom of the deep, travel to the farthest regions of this world, to acquire wealth.” It was a culture of triumphant taking, including seizing and enslaving non-European people. And with visions of Earth as a bottomless vending machine, full of resources waiting to be taken, the dream of extractivism was born.
All that was missing was a reliable source of energy to make that dream a reality.
REVOLUTION
For the first couple of decades, the new steam engine was a tough sell. Water wheels—the way most factories were powered—had a lot going for them. Water was free, while the steam engine needed to be fed with coal, which had to be constantly bought. The steam engine did not provide significantly more power either. Large water wheels, in fact, could produce several times more horsepower than their coal-powered rivals.
But as Britain’s population grew, two things tipped the balance in favor of steam power. One advantage was that the new machine was not subject to nature’s changes. As long as there was coal to feed it, the steam engine worked at the same rate all the time. The rate at which water flowed in rivers, or rose and fell with the seasons, did not matter.
The other advantage of the steam engine was that it worked anywhere. Water wheels had to be built alongside waterfalls or rapids, but steam-powered factories did not need any particular kind of geography. Factory owners could move their operations from remote towns or the countryside to big cities such as London. In the cities, with plenty of willing workers at hand, owners could easily fire troublemakers and crush workers’ strikes. And fuel for the steam engines was no problem in cities, as well. After steam-powered locomotives were developed, new coal-burning trains hauled
loads of coal from the mines to the new machinery of the industrial centers, wherever they were located.
In the same way, when Watt’s engine was put in a boat, crews were free from depending on the winds. This made it even easier for Europeans to reach and claim countries in distant lands. At a meeting in honor of Watt in 1824, the Earl of Liverpool said, “Let the wind blow from whatever quarter it may, let the destination of our force be to whatever part of the world it may, you have the power and the means, by the Steam Engine, of applying that force at the proper time and in the proper manner.”
It soon became clear, though, that, as you saw in chapter 3, fossil fuels required sacrifice zones—including the black lungs of the coal miners, the polluted waterways around the mines, and the enslaved bodies of Africans who were swept up in the Industrial Revolution, so you will soon see. But those prices were seen as worth paying for coal’s promise of freedom and power for those who owned the mines, factories, and shipping companies. With their portable energy source, industry and colonialism could go wherever labor was cheapest and easiest to take advantage of, and wherever valuable resources could be had. Coal represented total control of other people and of nature. Bacon’s dream had come true. It supercharged the Industrial Revolution.
At the same time, the sense that people could take whatever they needed from the natural world, whenever they wanted and for as long as they wanted, affected people at all levels of society. It went along with a desire to buy and possess new things, because coal-powered factories could now manufacture mass quantities of goods for people to consume.
No wonder that the time of Watt’s steam engine was also a time of explosive growth in British manufacturing. Cotton is just one example. Britain imported raw cotton that was grown in other parts of the world. The vast majority of it was picked in the United States and the Caribbean by enslaved people who had been kidnapped in Africa, or who were descended from those Africans. Once the cotton reached Britain, textile mills turned it into finished cloth and manufactured clothing. British merchants then sold these products not just at home but around the world too.
This was a revolution. Two things made it possible: coal at home to power the factories and the boats, and the labor of enslaved workers elsewhere to provide the cotton. Under this system, both the land and the people who worked it were treated as objects that could be exploited without limit.
This was the start of modern capitalism. The flood of new mass-produced manufactured products was matched by new markets to buy them. Before, most people had gotten what they needed from local craftspeople and small farms. Now the economy became centered on the market, the overall buying and selling of goods, sometimes items that had been shipped long distances.
One of the main features of this new economic model was—and still is—consumerism. In a market economy, people’s role is to be consumers. Advertisements constantly urge them to buy new goods and replace old ones. Even some political speeches carry the message that it is citizens’ duty to spend and buy.
The Industrial Revolution was not limited to Britain, home of Watt’s steam engine. The revolution spread, first to western Europe and North America. And because it was powered by coal, this spreading revolution also marked the beginning of the human-made changes to the atmosphere that blankets our planet. That is because coal—like oil and natural gas, which came into wide use later—gives off greenhouse gases when it burns, and some of those gases remain in the air for a very long time.
Just how long a greenhouse gas remains in the air depends upon the type of gas. There are four main types: methane; nitrous oxide; carbon dioxide (CO2); and a group of chemicals called fluorinated gases, which include hydrofluorocarbons, used in refrigeration and air-conditioning. Each type of greenhouse gas has a different staying power once it is part of the atmosphere.
Some methane comes from natural sources, such as the decay of plant material. But humans also produce methane by extracting fossil fuels from the ground, raising livestock, and piling up masses of waste in dumps and landfills. Methane lingers in the atmosphere for about twelve years.
Nitrous oxide lasts even longer, about 114 years. It is released into the air by nitrogen fertilizers, livestock waste, and some industrial processes.
Fluorinated gases play a smaller role in warming the world than the other greenhouse gases, but some of them linger in the air for thousands of years.
Worst is carbon dioxide (CO2). Carbon dioxide is increased in the atmosphere by the use of fossil fuels and by deforestation, the large-scale cutting down of trees. Some of this CO2 is absorbed by the ocean, but the rest stays in the atmosphere for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Some of the sun’s energy reflects back into space from the atmosphere. The rest reaches the Earth’s surface, which reflects more of it back toward space. But greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap part of this reflected energy, raising global temperatures. The major greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and a group known by various names, including fluorinated gases and haloalkanes.
This release of carbon dioxide is by far the biggest human-made contribution to climate change. And the most climate-changing activity of all is burning fossil fuels, especially coal. That brings the story back to coal, the steam engine, and what happened as the Industrial Revolution tightened its grip.
Deadly Pea-Soupers
Fog has been part of London’s weather since ancient times. The British capital city sits in a valley with the River Thames flowing through it. When water vapor forms above the river, it can spread through the city, filling the streets with cool gray mist.
During the nineteenth century, though, London’s fogs changed. They came more often, they were denser and thicker, and they sometimes had a biting sting that made people’s eyes and throats burn. These were not fogs but smogs—combinations of fog mixed with smoke and soot, mostly from coal fires. The smogs’ dirty yellowish color earned them the nickname “pea-soupers.”
In her 2015 book London Fog: The Biography, Christine L. Corton writes that the peak years on average for London fogs and smogs were the 1890s. During that decade, the city was blanketed for an average of sixty-three days each year. But the worst year, by far, came later. It was 1952, the year of the Great Smog.
It started as a normal fog on December 5. Soon, though, the fog turned yellow-brown. It was mixing with pollution from the chimneys of houses, the smokestacks of factories, and the exhaust pipes of cars and buses. By the next day it was clear that this pea-souper was worse than usual. A weather system had stalled over the river valley, and there was no wind. A thirty-mile-wide (forty-eight-kilometer-wide) mass of cold, smoggy air was trapped over London as if in a bowl.
Like all pea-soupers, the Great Smog was a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, which had brought a steady increase in the use of coal by industry and power plants, as well as in the fireplaces and furnaces that people used to heat their homes. The coal that caused much of the pollution in nineteenth- and twentieth-century London was rich in sulfur, which gave the smog its yellowish color and its sting. Sulfur also added the stench of rotten eggs. The smog left a greasy black film on everything it touched, including people’s faces.
Before long, the Great Smog was the worst that London had known. Drivers abandoned their cars because they could not see the streets. Trains and flights were canceled. Birds crashed into buildings and died. Movie theaters closed because the smog had gotten into buildings, blocking people’s views of the screens. Crime did well, though. Criminals found it easy to disappear into the smog after a robbery or burglary.
Nelson’s Column, a London landmark, was barely visible at noon during the Great Smog of 1952.
Finally, after five days, the weather changed, and wind swept the smog out of London. But the effects of the Great Smog would be felt for a long time. Thousands of people became sick and died from lung diseases such as bronchitis and pneumonia. Experts today think that the number of people who died because of the G
reat Smog was eight thousand or even higher. The very young, the elderly, and smokers were hardest hit.
Four years after the Great Smog, the British government passed a Clean Air Act to limit the use of coal in cities. And as coal faded from the scene, pea-soupers became less common. Additional deadly smogs and smog-related deaths occurred, but never another ordeal as severe as the Great Smog of 1952. After that major disaster had harmed thousands of people, the government stepped in—a sign that big change is possible when people’s lives and health are at stake. And if that kind of change happened in London in the 1950s, it can happen anywhere today.
WARNING SIGNS
The Industrial Revolution was when Europeans first harnessed fossil-fuel power. For a couple of centuries after that, they seemed to have bent nature to their will, just as Francis Bacon had instructed. Since that time, though, we have remembered something that all of our ancestors used to know: all relationships in nature involve give-and-take. We now understand that the world is full of connections and that one thing always leads to another. When we harnessed fossil fuels, we did not do away with the give-and-take of relationships in nature. We merely delayed it.
For centuries we took fossil fuels out of the ground. Today the built-up effects of that burned carbon are giving us a more ferocious natural world: longer and drier droughts, fiercer wildfires, stronger storms, increased risk of poor health, and more. Esperanza Martínez, an ecologist from Ecuador, writes, “It has become clear over the last century that fossil fuels, the energy source of capitalism, destroy life—from the territories where they are extracted to the oceans and the atmosphere that absorb the waste.”