Infinite Coal

Why Britain's energy path gave rise to an ideology of endless growth

Despite the warnings of climate scientists, the world remains dangerously addicted to fossil fuel. Why has it been so difficult to break this habit? In a major new account, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson suggests that the planetary emergency has profound historical roots reaching back to the making of the first fossil fuel economy in eighteenth-century Britain. Rather than look for a single dramatic rupture centered on the steam-powered factory system, in Infinite Coal Albritton Jonsson shows that there was a much more gradual and multidimensional development of the first coal economy, stretching from the deep mine and ironworks to the household and the global food system.

Albritton Jonsson explores not only the material forces behind the British energy path but also how ideas about fossil fuel energy reoriented politics and society toward a new ideal of growth. At the same time an environmental and political history of Britain’s energy transformation, Infinite Coal explains why and how coal became so deeply embedded in our way of life. Albritton Jonsson argues that the most important legacy of Britain’s early fossil fuel economy is fossil cornucopianism—the idea of a bountiful, never-ending energy source—which still haunts modern politics and economics.