Anthropocene.pdf - 0 views
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the first significant human use of fossil fuels—coal— arose during the Song dynasty (960–1279) in China [36,37]. Drawn from mines in the north, the Chinese coal industry, developed primarily to support its iron industry, grew in size through the eleventh century to become equal to the production of the entire European (excluding Russia) coal industry in 1700.
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the European coal industry, primarily in England, was beginning its ascent in the thirteenth century. The use of coal grew as did the size of London, and became the fuel of choice in the city because of its high energy density.
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energy constraints provided a strong bottleneck for the growth of human numbers and activity. The discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels shattered that bottleneck. Fossil fuels represented a vast energy store of solar energy from the past that had accumulated from tens or hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis. They were the perfect fuel source—energy-rich, dense, easily transportable and relatively straightforward to access. Human energy use rose sharply. In general, those industrial societies used four or five times as much energy as their agrarian predecessors, who in turn used three or four times as much as our hunting and gathering forebears [52].
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