The Teeming Earth

I TEACH A COURSE each year on the history of energy in the United States. Coal, the foodstuff of the early Industrial Revolution, plays—no surprise—an outsize role. I begin by mentioning its origins as dead plant tissue in the Carboniferous Period—tissue that, with enough heat, time, and pressure, has condensed into veins of black near-stone dense with carbon. We move on to mill towns and accelerated transportation in the 1800s, then to turn-of-the-century miners’ unions and postwar carbon emissions. The course amounts to a semester-long argument that the world as we now live it was made from burning fossils.