For one of those centuries, a huge white marble statue of James Watt dominated St. Paul’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, commemorating a man who “enlarged the resources of his Country” and “increased the power of Man.” And Watt certainly did that: his engine massively accelerated the Industrial Revolution and the steamships his engine made possible subsequently opened sub-Saharan Africa and India to colonial pillage. So while making Europe richer, he also helped make many other parts of the world poorer, carbon-fueled inequalities that persist to this day. Indeed, coal was the black ink in which
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