Hay, water and wind are ways of drawing upon the sun’s energy: the sun powers plants, rain and the wind. Timber is a way of drawing on a store of the sun’s energy laid down in previous decades – on solar capital, as it were. Peat is an older store of the sunlight – solar capital laid down over millennia. And coal, whose high energy content enabled the British to overtake the Dutch, is still older sunlight, mostly captured around 300 million years before. The secret of the industrial revolution was shifting from current solar power to stored solar power. Not that human muscle power disappeared:
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