ABSTRACT
Our energy crisis is not original. In the middle of the sixteenth century Britain began to run out of wood. By 1700 it had converted almost completely to coal. I learned this from an article by John U. Nef in Civilization, a collection from Scientific American. The effects of Britain’s conversion to coal were immense. It is a little humbling to realize that we are not the first to live through such a transition, and encouraging to know that our predecessors somehow survived. They even flourished. The transition was not without costs, but who can doubt that we will do better this time since we have the earlier example before us.
