Before the 30s crisis Economy

Energy in the Twentieth Century—The Early Part of the Century

What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914! The greater part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a low standard of comfort […] But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other

J. M. Keynes, 1919

An Italian economics historian has noted that “if the agrarian revolution can be seen as humanity’s process of controlling and increasing the number of biological converters, the Industrial Revolution appears as the beginning of a great exploitation of new energy sources through inanimate On one level, all the social and economic processes can be described by the flow of energy—as Vaclav Smil stressed, it is the “only universal

While economic development scholars highlight various causes that led to the Industrial one of the most vital is thought to be access to coal, as well as a long coastline to facilitate transport (which suggests that England did not become the cradle of industrialization by chance, nor through any special effort of its citizens). We can see this model in other countries, at least when it comes to certain highly developed regions, such as Catalonia and Basque Country in or Silesia in the German Reich/Poland. Africa, in turn, is the polar opposite; a continent with a relatively small shoreline in relation to its area (and few rivers) and limited coalmine resources. We can deduce the results on our own.

Between the dawn of the nineteenth century and the period directly before World War One, coal production per capita in Europe rose nearly twenty-four This statistic makes an even greater impact if we consider the demographic revolution that took place in this period. Let us take Spain, which is indisputably considered to be a country outside the continent’s industrial center—while in 1830 it used 12,000 tons of coal, in 1930 it used 9,189 million tons, or 766 times With regard to the early twentieth century, they were using almost twice as much in the 1930s. In 1927, Portugal, which was struggling with resource deficits, was extracting 8.5 times as much coal as

The twentieth century brought another crucial change: electrification. Back at the beginning of the century, “steam and water still provided more than 95 per cent of the mechanical power to American we should stress that, by that time, the USA was already far ahead of Europe technologically. Electric engines helped increase industrial production, as factories no longer had to be expensively adapted to enormous steam machines. The accessibility of electric power also opened new prospects for ordinary people, who now could enjoy safer and more stable lighting than what gas had provided. Not to mention the new household appliances, which made everyday life easier.

Of course, differences in electrification, on a continental scale and in various countries, remained considerable, even given the imperfection of statistics, which often overlook the smaller power stations that were an essential source of electricity. In 1929, Italy produced three times more electricity than Poland, and Germany ten times In the 1920s alone, Poland’s Silesian voivodeship created nearly fifty per cent of the country’s and “by the outbreak of World War Two a little under […] five per cent of the countryside was By way of comparison, in the USA around thirty per cent of agricultural homes had

Without the energy revolution, it would have been impossible to create the world of comfort that Keynes described.