But as energy scholar Vaclav Smil observes, “Even with the rise of industrial machines, the nineteenth century was not run on coal. It ran on wood, charcoal, and crop residues.” It was not until 1900 that coal reached the point of supplying half of the world’s energy demand. Oil was discovered in northwest Pennsylvania in 1859. But it took more than a century—not until the 1960s—for it to supplant coal as the world’s number one energy source. Even so, that hardly meant the end of coal, for consumption has continued to grow. As for natural gas, global consumption has increased 60 percent since
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