So influential was Jevons’s jeremiad about what would now be called ‘peak coal’ that it led to a newspaper-led ‘coal panic’ of 1866, to William Gladstone’s budgetary promise of that year to start paying down the national debt while coal lasted and to a Royal Commission on the coal supply. Ironically, this was the very decade when vast coal reserves were discovered all over the world and petroleum drilling began in earnest in the Caucasus and North America.
