The insights of William Stanley Jevons, though set down long ago, make a profound contribution to the current debate over energy efficiency and energy-conservation policy, and not just to the debate over the role of renewable energy in modern society. …
A contributor to Grist, which advertises itself as “a blogful of leafy green goodness,” is saying NO to a carbon tax and YES to a take-no-prisoners cap-and-trade program. A comment on the post succintly lays out the blueprint of a stringent cap-and-trade program:…
Each renewable energy, Jevons explained, was either too scarce or too unreliable for the new industrial era. The energy savior was coal, a concentrated, plentiful, storable, and transportable source of energy that was England’s bounty for the world.
There was no going back to renewables. Coal–and that included oil and gas manufactured from coal–was the new master of the master resource of energy in the 18th and 19th centuries. As Jevons stated in the introduction (p. viii) of The Coal Question (1865):…