18 Special report Stabilising the climate The Economist October 30th 2021
EconomicsandenergyFlows and fuel
I
f delegates tothe Glasgow copfancy a day out, they could do
worse than take a 50-minute train journey to Wemyss Bay and a
35-minute ferry journey across the Firth of Clyde to Rothesay on
the Isle of Bute. Rothesay’s charms as a resort have faded, but its
distance from the madding crowd and wonderful sea views re-
main. So do the lessons it holds about how fossil fuels became in-
tegral to industrial growth.
The first cotton mill in Rothesay opened in 1779, using the wa-
ter that flowed out of Loch Fad to power a new type of spinning
machine which was transforming the textile industry: Richard
Arkwright’s water frame. But the stream proved fickle and under-
powered. By 1800 the mill was running on steam engines based on
James Watt’s design. But shipping coal to the island was pricey,
and Rothesay’s industrial future looked increasingly bleak.
Robert Thom, an engineer, turned things round. In the 1810s he
increased the water supply with a dam and drainage cuts to feed it,and installed an ingenious, self-acting sluice to govern the flow of
water, ensuring its perfect evenness. The power for the mills dou-
bled, and the steam engines were retired.
The school-book version of Britain’s Industrial Revolution is
that the steam engine drove it by providing more power than pre-
viously possible. By the end of the 19th century that was true. But
to explain the rapid take-up of coal in the late-18th and early-19th
century only in terms of steam power is to put cart before horse-
power. As Andreas Malm of Lund University in Sweden points out
in “Fossil Capital” (2015), steam triumphed when there was still
lots of untapped hydropower. Even in the 1830s industry was not
taking out more than 10% of the water energy that was available in
the English Midlands. Although watermills were an old technolo-
gy, they were open to improvement by modern entrepreneurs like
Thom. And unlike steam engines, they rarely exploded.
What set steam apart were several advantages which appealed
to investors. The most important was the ability to build new
steam-powered mills close to old ones in towns which already had
textile industries, so long as a supply of coal was nearby. The
cheeks of cloth-producing factories could run up against the jowls
of garment producers. The owner of a new mill could get workers
from old ones without having to move them to some faraway river.
The large industrial cities which this produced also encour-
aged the flow of ideas and skills that made it quicker and easier to
improve steam. Watt’s development of the condenser did not just
improve one particular mill and steam engine, in the manner of
Thom’s changes at Rothesay. It made all
subsequent steam engines better, and built
improvement into the very idea of such
things. What is more, however good water
wheels might have become, they were nev-
er going to drive locomotives or ships, as
steam had begun to do.
Putting that engineering culture into
big cities spun it even faster. Alfred Mar-
shall, an English economist, waxed poetic
about this in the 1890s, noting that “The
mysteries of the trade become no myster-
ies; but are as it were in the air.” As the 19th
century wore on, growth was increasingly
driven by the more systematic pursuit and
application of technical knowledge, for
which the steam engine provided the para-
digm model. And it had ever greater
amounts of energy at its disposal.
Coal-powered machinery may not have
initiated the Industrial Revolution, let
alone created the new attitudes to capital,
growth and investment which underlay it.
But it universalised what began as some-
thing peculiarly British and parochial. It al-
lowed industry to be moved—indeed,
when boilers and pistons were attached
properly to appropriate wheels or propel-
lers, to move itself—around the world. And
as sustaining further growth required ever
more energy, it was later joined by other
fossil fuels, notably oil and gas.
Some, including Mr Malm, take the cen-
turies of structural intimacy between fossil
fuels and the capitalist system that was in-
augurated by England’s mill-owners and
mines to mean that one cannot get rid of
the first without also demolishing the sec-
ond. It is a matter of “Capitalism vs. the Cli-Energy choices shape economies—and could reshape them