I have two distinct impressions of coal, many years apart. The first occurred during my childhood. I was in Patton, Pennsylvania, visiting my uncle (who, despite being one generation removed, was sixty years my senior). He recalled his earliest memory, in kindergarten, hearing sirens blowing and church bells ringing. The teacher left the classroom, and when she returned, white-faced and stricken, she told everyone to go straight home. Along the way, he saw all the men in town running uphill, toward the entrance of the mine. In 2016, more than half a lifetime later, I was on a ship traversing the harbor in Duluth, Minnesota. An official from a Class 1 railroad stood beside me as we watched coal being loaded into a lake boat. He described a recent marketing trip to Southern California. Utility executives offered little encouragement about the potential for additional freight traffic into the region, noted that they had locked in 30-year contracts for inexpensive natural gas, and capped the discussion with the simple statement that “coal is dead.”Footnote 1
Well, not quite dead. Over the past century, coal has lost its status as the nation’s leading source of energy, and, thankfully, air pollution and mining accidents have decreased as well. Yet coal remains an important commodity, and one that has become highly politicized. It has joined immigration, reproductive rights, firearms, and sexual identity on the list of topics that make the writing of history akin to walking through a minefield. When talking with individuals who claim that excessive environmental regulations are hindering growth and eliminating American jobs, and those who assert that the carbon economy will destroy the Earth, there should be little difficulty in discerning their party affiliations.
Two books, published five months apart, are certain to feature prominently in discussions of energy policy, environmental justice, the nature of capitalism, and the future of the planet. In Black Gold, Bob Wyss offers a familiar—to academic audiences, at least—litany of the problems associated with coal, and with a system of unrestrained capitalist greed. Mark Aldrich’s The Rise and Fall of King Coal provides a more novel approach, one that highlights the considerable benefits that coal has provided to humanity, while emphasizing the virtues of a market-driven economy. Ostensibly, the two books are historical narratives, and neither makes policy recommendations nor engages directly in current political debates. However, both authors populate their narratives with unmistakable clues regarding their perspectives on climate change.
The two authors provide a comprehensive overview of a substance that has exerted an enormous influence over all aspects of American life during the past two hundred years. There have been relatively few academic or popular studies of the history of coal—and certainly nothing to compare with Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning opus on the petroleum industry.Footnote 2 Coal lacks oil’s immediacy (fueling one’s car with gasoline is an everyday occurrence) and its centrality to global affairs (Yergin’s book was published four months after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait). Coal seems a relic of a bygone era, along with transatlantic liners, steam trains, child labor, and horrific industrial accidents—each of which was directly linked to that phase of the carbon economy.
Studies focused directly on coal have often been regionally based, with an understandably large proportion associated with Pennsylvania.Footnote 3 The relationship between coal, internal improvements, and economic growth has also attracted considerable interest.Footnote 4 Historians have explored coal’s decline as part of the transition to new energy sources.Footnote 5 The coal industry was notoriously fragmented and difficult to control, perhaps explaining why relatively few works have addressed coal as a component of national energy policy.Footnote 6
Given the number of people who toiled—and died—in American mines, it is hardly surprising that labor historians have exhibited a keen interest in coal. Some studies focus on internecine conflicts between managers and workers, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while others detail government efforts to mediate those disputes.Footnote 7 Mining culture, often influenced by the social control of company towns, has been a fertile subject for research.Footnote 8 Unionization and the activities of labor leaders such as John Mitchell and John L. Lewis are also well represented in the scholarly literature.Footnote 9
Historians of business and technology, including Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., have acknowledged the importance of coal to industrialization and the rise of big business in the United States.Footnote 10 They have, however, rarely exhibited much interest in the management of the coal industry, given that producers were slow to exploit economies of scale, were not technologically innovative, rarely funded scientific research, eschewed vertical integration, and possessed anemic marketing capabilities.
Some discussion of coal has emerged indirectly, as part of a broader analysis of the development of electric utilities.Footnote 11 Related works have examined coal in the context of household energy use and the evolution of the consumer economy.Footnote 12 Efforts to control the pollution that was an undesirable byproduct of coal consumption have featured prominently in historical literature, with a particular emphasis on the role of women during the Progressive Era.Footnote 13
Yet, few books have combined coal’s emergence as a fuel, the labor employed to extract it, its effect on businesses and consumers, the role of public policy in shaping the production and distribution of coal, and its decline as an energy source. Black Gold and The Rise and Fall of King Coal address that deficiency. Given the current political and social controversies involving coal—and the hydrocarbon economy more generally—it is hardly surprising that their authors offer starkly different perspectives on the history of coal in the United States.
Bob Wyss and Black Gold
Bob Wyss acknowledges that “I’m a journalist, not a historian” (p. 5), and he brings a journalist’s sensibilities to Black Gold. The opening pages include a “Synopsis and Cast” for each chapter, humanizing his narrative by introducing readers to a broad array of miners, mine owners, government officials, industrialists, and reformers. His style is literary and eminently readable, easily accessible to diverse audiences. The account is based almost entirely on newspaper articles and published secondary sources (some of which, many decades old, have been superseded by more recent works). Aside from the names of a few scholars scattered through the text, there is little in the way of the historiography that populates a traditional academic monograph.
The narrative reflects Wyss’s concerns regarding global warming and the other deleterious effects that have been associated with the production and use of coal in the United States. He bookends his analysis with an account of the horrific 1947 explosion in a mine at Centralia, Illinois. The initial story underscores the human toll associated with labor exploitation, unsafe mining practices, and the relentless pursuit of profits by mine owners. The final chapter, set in the context of the 2022 anniversary of the disaster, suggests that the same forces are at work, with potentially more destructive consequences. “Again, ignorance, indifference, corruption, and greed prevail,” Wyss emphasizes. “We can see it in Centralia, in the history of coal, and in how society is currently addressing the rising level of climate change” (p. 212).
Instead of providing an overarching thesis, Wyss’s chapters offer brief vignettes that collectively “describe how coal has impacted American society, culture, and industry and the economy and environment” (p. 5). Some of those episodes describe the importance of coal to an emerging American industrial economy—experiments with the combustion of anthracite during and after the War of 1812; efforts to get that coal to market by water; and the symbiotic relationship between coal, steel, and railroads. Wyss details accidents and horrific working conditions, including the use of child labor and the “forced slavery” (p. 83) associated with the convict-leasing system. He repeats well-known (to historians, at least) accounts of the persecution of the Molly Maguires. Equally familiar is the overview of the collaboration between Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick and their 1892 strikebreaking and union-busting actions at the Homestead Steel Works. Such abuses persisted well into the twentieth century, Wyss notes, in company towns with substandard housing, wages paid in scrip, and exploitative prices at the company store.
If most Americans remained oblivious to those practices, by the beginning of the twentieth century, a few members of the privileged upper-middle-class elite demanded reform. As Wyss correctly notes, women (such as Salt Lake City’s Corinne Adams) were in the forefront of efforts to correct the “smoke nuisance.” The chapter on female reformers during the Progressive Era highlights a pattern that, as Wyss later explains, complicates twenty-first-century efforts to achieve climate justice and control the effects of global warming. Women like Adams were derided as being elitist and out of touch with economic reality. They confronted public apathy and entrenched opposition from powerful and well-funded business interests who were often openly skeptical of scientific evidence regarding pollution and who accordingly resisted regulations that might sideline workers or slow economic growth.
Adams and her counterparts in other cities experienced limited success in their quest for smoke abatement, yet Wyss provides a redemptive tale. During the 1930s, courageous politicians and civil servants in St. Louis, bolstered by scientists, waged a successful campaign to bring air pollution under control. They faced the prospect of an economic boycott of their city (by residents in the coalfields of southern Illinois), protests by lower-class residents (who could not afford alternate energy sources), and the necessity of subsidizing the importation of cleaner-burning coal from Arkansas. Their success had much to do with the visibly intolerable conditions in the city—and was later demonstrated by the obvious contrast between an East St. Louis that remained under a blanket of smog and the clean air in their community. “Everyone noticed the clear skies,” Wyss observes. “It became the talk of the city” (p. 160).
Wyss provides a mixed assessment of the role of organized labor in the coalfields. Curiously, he makes no mention of John Mitchell or the 1897 Lattimer massacre that contributed to his selection as president of the United Mineworkers of America the following year. Longtime UMWA president John L. Lewis does feature prominently in the book. Charismatic, corrupt, and deified by many miners, Lewis secured increases in wages and benefits, as well as improvements in mine safety. His intransigent behavior and willingness to jeopardize American military preparedness and the postwar reconversion process contributed to the declining significance of coal. Mechanization—something that Lewis accepted as inevitable—contributed to a precipitous decline in the number of coal miners, as well as their influence over the political process.
The postwar “Fall” described in the final third of the book refers not merely to coal’s declining share of the American energy market but also to the erosion of the American industrial base, the collapse of storied companies like the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the disappearance of high-paying jobs for the working class. Coal nonetheless remained a potent force, economically, politically, and symbolically. So, too, in Wyss’s opinion, did capitalist greed. Large corporations fought a determined legal battle to deny compensation to thousands of victims of black lung and often declared bankruptcy rather than bear the expense of caring for the employees that they had consigned to an early death. They removed entire mountainsides to extract coal, taking advantage of permissive presidential administrations and complaining loudly about unwarranted, job-killing regulations when the political winds shifted. Environmentalists scored an occasional victory, forcing the closure of the Navajo Generating Station, curtailing acid rain, and blocking the construction of a coal export terminal in Longview, Washington, but they were less successful in their efforts to control strip mining. Wyss does not address perceptions that many present-day conservationists, like the Progressive Era’s Corinne Adams, are often representatives of the upper-middle-class elite. In that context, his comment that “most people, when shown a chunk of coal, would be hard pressed to identify it” (p. 7) reveals much about his intended audience.Footnote 14
Black Gold suggests that environmentalism is a straightforward battle between the American people and the corporations. Wyss does not explain why miners, who appear to be most directly harmed by exploitative capitalist greed and reckless business practices, side with mine owners rather than the reformers who are trying to save them. Despite his sympathetic portrayal of the hardships associated with life in company towns, he pays too little attention to rural Appalachian mining culture and its pervasive sentiment that urban elites are simultaneously mocking deeply held social values and depriving hard-working Americans of an opportunity to make a living.Footnote 15
The vignettes that Wyss describes have a common narrative thread. Irresponsible corporations, acting in the name of free-market capitalism, have imposed massive social costs in the form of broken bodies, ruined lives, and a devastated environment. At times, courageous individuals were able to shift the balance away from corporate arrogance and toward environmental justice. It is again time, Wyss suggests, for Americans to shake off their apathy and fight for a better future.
Mark Aldrich and King Coal
The Rise and Fall of King Coal offers a strikingly different interpretation of the economic, political, and social context surrounding that commodity. Mark Aldrich is an economist, and his book is replete with dozens of graphs and tables—as well as three appendices that provide ample statistical data to bolster his arguments. In contrast to some of the economic history literature, however, King Coal is written with a historian’s narrative sensibilities, and it is easily accessible to non-specialized audiences. Aldrich’s focus on coal reflects conclusions that he developed in three previous books. Larger firms tended to be more efficient and safer than smaller ones, government regulation (particularly during the Progressive Era) rarely achieved socially beneficial results, and market-driven economic growth made working conditions less onerous.Footnote 16
The same themes are evident in The Rise and Fall of King Coal, albeit with additional evidence on consumer choice. Rather than highlight the environmental and human costs associated with coal, Aldrich explores the relationship between free-market capitalism, innovation, and economic growth in “a bottom-up history emphasizing the role of markets in shaping past energy transitions, and how those choices have contributed to rising standards of living” (p. xviii). Those energy transitions, Aldrich emphasizes, have been driven by the gales of creative destruction so often associated with Joseph Schumpeter—an individual “who understood capitalism better than anyone since Karl Marx” (p. 7).
Aldrich asserts that economic incentives rather than public policies ensure optimal energy use and the greatest gains in social welfare. “There is little detailed policy history” in this book, he notes, “because politics played a minor role” (p. xx).Footnote 17 In contrast, Aldrich emphasizes, “[M]arkets are extraordinarily efficient, adjusting to surprises, killing bad ideas, and especially innovating to implement cheaper, better solutions to energy problems” (p. xix). In this analysis, markets reign supreme, answerable to only one guiding force—the relentless desire of ordinary Americans to live a richer and more comfortable life.
The market-driven exploitation of abundant resources, particularly coal, provides an answer to a question that animates much of this book: “how and why have Americans’ lives improved so dramatically in just a few generations?” (p. xvii). Perhaps surprisingly, given his economic training and his extensive reliance on data, Aldrich concludes that improvement is difficult to quantify. “Use of more energy, more efficiently, contributed to these gains and to increases in comfort that are simply not captured in statistics” (p. 47). Even though “the national product statistics never captured these gains in welfare,” Aldrich asserts, “[w]e are richer than our parents in ways we cannot measure, indeed, can barely comprehend, for the benefits we have gotten from energy have risen much more rapidly than has energy use itself” (p. 236).
Aldrich suggests that the negative environmental consequences associated with coal use (a subject that features prominently in Wyss’s account) can best be resolved through the allocative efficiency of the market, rather than government intervention. The depletion of American forests (America’s first energy crisis) fostered efforts to locate and extract coal and spurred innovations that enabled it to be burned more efficiently. The resulting increase in energy output stimulated rapid advances in manufacturing and transportation. The transition from wood to coal also reduced pollution within the home, sparing women and children from long-term exposure to smoke from badly ventilated open-hearth fireplaces.
Unlike Wyss, Aldrich suggests that the Progressive Era anti-smoke campaigns have limited relevance to current environmental issues. “The one topic relating to coal—pollution—that has been of most interest to modern writers was of secondary importance to contemporaries,” Aldrich notes (p. 7). He accordingly devotes one paragraph to early efforts at smoke abatement in Salt Lake City and St. Louis (Wyss accords them one chapter apiece).
The market rather than muckrakers provided relief from pollution, Aldrich suggests. By the 1920s, “policies chosen on economic grounds” (p. 104) induced large companies to reduce coal consumption or switch to cleaner-burning fuels such as oil and natural gas. Fortuitously, the profit motive coincidentally reduced emissions and improved public health (“the frosting on the cake,” Aldrich notes (p. 104)). His explanation echoes the work of scholars such as Steven Usselman, who concluded that railroads embraced safety innovations such as air brakes and automatic couplers only when increased efficiency (through the ability to operate longer, heavier, and faster trains) gave them an economic incentive to do so.Footnote 18 Aldrich thus offers a useful corrective to the work of earlier historians of environmental policy, but one that understates the potential for draconian government intervention should voluntarism prove insufficient—the “gun behind the door,” to use Thomas McCraw’s familiar analogy.Footnote 19
During the 1920s, consumer demand for cleaner, more comfortable, and less labor-intensive homes coincided with innovative business practices on the part of oil and natural gas producers. “[H]ere we focus on demand, and especially marketing,” Aldrich indicates, “for if exploitation was as important as energy abundance in creating energy supplies, marketing was central to the importance of energy demands” (p. 129). Coal producers “rarely engaged in advertising or sales promotion” and were thus “ill-prepared to counter the marketing campaigns that would soon come from the gas utilities” (p. 131). Coal’s upstart competitors formed trade associations and forged alliances with companies that manufactured stoves, furnaces, and other appliances. Visually enticing advertisements informed housewives that oil heat would eliminate the soot that blackened their walls, banish space-consuming coal bins from basements, and ensure that they would no longer need to stoke furnaces or remove coal ash.
Kerosene briefly flourished as a cooking fuel, giving rural households an alternative to coal. Aldrich suggests that historians have slighted the importance of kerosene, whose story conforms to his assessments of resource conservation and the power of markets.Footnote 20 Just as coal saved American forests from the woodsman’s axe, kerosene replaced whale oil, sparing cetaceans from extinction. Regulatory efforts to protect consumers from adulterated and potentially explosive kerosene—the product of unscrupulous small-scale entrepreneurs—proved ineffective. It was Standard Oil, the massive corporation that was a favorite target of Progressive-Era reformers, that developed a uniform, safe product that saved lives and improved living standards.
As historians such as Ruth Schwartz Cowan and Susan Strasser have suggested, improved technology raised domestic expectations and could thus increase the effort that women expended in the home. Aldrich does not dispute those conclusions, and he cites sources that include a 1927 advertisement extolling the benefits that women could gain from temperature-controlled gas stoves—“they bake twice as much as they did before.”Footnote 21 He nonetheless suggests that the transition to oil, natural gas, and kerosene “collectively lightened the labors of men and women alike” (p. 176). Liquid fuel also enabled women to do different types of work—selling household products as part of a foray into the market economy or finding employment outside the home. By banishing coal from the kitchen, moreover, market-driven technological transformations improved comfort, while allowing families to choose whether they would devote newfound gains in efficiency to a cleaner home, more baked goods, or increased income.
Commendably, Aldrich acknowledges the role of government in fostering economic development and higher standards of living. “Public policies did matter, and sometimes they mattered a lot,” he concedes. Yet he emphasizes that those policies “were important largely because they augmented market activities, often producing information to improve outcomes” (p. 8). Legislatures stipulated that landowners held title to subsurface mineral rights. Beginning in the 1820s, states funded geological surveys. The federal government investigated boiler explosions, facilitating the use of coal on steamboats. “[M]odest assists from governments” (p. 44) supported the construction of canals and railroads that hauled coal to market. The United States Bureau of Mines and the Bureau of Standards funded research to determine better methods for extracting and burning coal.
Government efforts to intervene in markets and craft a sensible national energy policy have been far less successful, Aldrich cautions. The problem was particularly acute during the Progressive Era, when ostensibly dispassionate experts—backed by politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt—accused coal producers of profligacy and waste. Inefficient mining practices, they asserted, left vast quantities of coal in the ground and ensured that the nation would soon exhaust its scarce energy reserves.Footnote 22 Resource scarcity and the concomitant need for government-managed conservation efforts extended to other forms of fuel. Pessimistic assessments of petroleum reserves, particularly during World War I, led to recurring warnings regarding “peak oil.” Chicken Little syndrome reemerged during the 1920s, when federal officials were convinced that supplies of natural gas would soon disappear. The consistent theme of resource pessimism, Aldrich emphasizes, produced economically indefensible (i.e., non-market-driven) recommendations for continued reliance on coal.Footnote 23
The true energy experts and most successful conservationists, Aldrich emphasizes, worked for industry rather than the government. Mine owners left coal in the ground because it would have cost more (in terms of money and energy) to extract it than what that coal was worth. They surmised, correctly, that coal reserves were far larger than government experts had predicted. Market-driven discoveries of new oil and gas fields occurred soon after public officials cautioned that those resources would soon be exhausted. Conservation—induced by market forces and the remorseless quest for greater efficiency, rather than government edict—stimulated innovations that husbanded scarce resources. That process began early in the nineteenth century, when the depletion of forests adjacent to rivers and other transportation arteries raised wood prices and prompted the use of coal as a substitute fuel, thus saving at least a portion of the American wilderness from destruction. Rising coal prices provided an incentive for corporations to develop new ways to use “waste” steam and other byproducts from combustion. Scarcity also stimulated efforts to locate additional energy reserves and prompted a gradual transition to alternate fuels such as oil and gas—a market-driven process that coincidentally reduced pollution.
Environmentalists might blanch at an assertion that the removal of entire mountaintops facilitated conservation, but Aldrich suggests that could be the case. “Strip mining,” he notes, “saved forests” (p. 210), largely because it precluded the use of vast quantities of timber to support the roofs of underground mines. “For some contemporaries,” moreover, “stripping was a form of resource conservation because it sacrificed low-quality farmland for higher-value coal, which seemed an acceptable trade-off between different resources” (p. 211). Strip mining also reduced the waste that so bedeviled Progressives. The most important benefit, however, came in the form of safety. Despite steadily increasing government regulations affecting underground mines, accident rates remained stubbornly high. Surface mining eliminated the risk of explosions, cave-ins, and respiratory ailments. Productivity contributed to safety, as it did on the railroads. By increasing efficiency (and thus reducing the number of employee-hours required to mine a ton of coal), stripping saved lives.
All economic activity requires a series of trade-offs, something that Aldrich understands very well. Yet it is often difficult to quantify the costs and benefits of those options. In terms of property values, a coal mine may be worth more than a cornfield, but are the aesthetics of a pristine mountain vista more desirable than the coal taken from a strip mine?Footnote 24 Bob Wyss does not address that question directly, but his condemnation of mountaintop removal (“The impacts were overwhelming” (p. 183)) leaves little doubt about his assessment. Providing his perspective on the legislative assignment of mineral rights to property owners—one of the structuring characteristics that Aldrich mentions—Wyss notes that “[i]n Appalachia, these open mines were legally feasible because of an accident of history. Back in the 1880s, salesmen enticed farmers to sell off their mineral rights” (p. 182). Those financial transactions doubtless conformed to the dictates of the capitalist marketplace. They also reflected information asymmetry and the tendency of powerful and well-funded interests to exploit individuals who lacked the knowledge to understand what they were relinquishing or how their decisions would affect their descendants.Footnote 25
If Aldrich glosses over the uneven distribution of economic agency, as well as the tendency of the marketplace to exacerbate those divisions, Wyss slights many of the benefits associated with strip mining. Like Aldrich, he is unable to assign a specific economic cost to the injuries and deaths associated with mining. He instead personalizes the issue, using individuals from his cast of characters: “Joe Bryant, coal miner who writes a farewell note before dying while trapped in the mine,” and “Samuel R. Perdue, West Virginia coal miner for thirty-one years who suffers and dies from black lung” (pp. ix, xvi). Unlike Aldrich, however, at no point does Wyss connect those tragedies to the practice of strip mining, an innovation that would have saved the lives of both men.
Wyss, Aldrich, and Energy Policy
The vigorous debate regarding climate change has influenced both authors, and their books will likely contribute to further discussion of that issue. Wyss and Aldrich disagree on almost everything associated with coal, so it should come as no surprise that they have divergent views on the relationship between humans and their environment. Aldrich’s analysis reflects social constructivism, and he provides example after example of American inventors and entrepreneurs who shaped technology to suit the needs of society.Footnote 26
Perhaps unintentionally, Wyss’s narrative reflects recent scholarship that questions whether we control energy and the destiny of the planet or whether the planet controls the destiny of us. In a provocative 2015 article, Timothy LeCain suggested that “[c]oal shaped the humans who used it far more than humans shaped coal.”Footnote 27 His neo-materialist critique of more traditional views (such as the social construction of technology) suggests that it is impossible—or at least unwise—to separate humanity from the influence of the natural environment.Footnote 28 Wyss (but certainly not Aldrich) might agree with LeCain’s admonition that “perhaps the most important lesson any big-brained creatures would need to learn is that partnering with coal and oil to increase their own power is the easy part. The hard part is to figure out how to keep these powerful partners from enslaving and destroying them.”Footnote 29
Wyss clearly feels that coal is well on its way to enslaving and destroying us. He suggests that the market economy is at the root of the problem, and he bolsters his assertion with quotes from University of Chicago behavioral scientist John Paul Rollert (“greed has always been the hobgoblin of capitalism … a canker on the faith of capitalism”) and United Nations Secretary General António Guterres (“the naked greed of entrenched interests raking in billions from fossil fuels”) (p. 216).
Wyss does not acknowledge the factors—including better technology and new sources of energy—that over the past seventy years have accounted for a precipitous decline in domestic coal usage and the pollution associated with it. Nor does he concede that meaningful reductions in humanity’s carbon footprint will likely slow GDP growth in developed countries and forestall economic development in the Global South.
Wyss is not the only one to omit some inconvenient truths regarding the relationship between their scholarship and the climate-change debate. Aldrich ends his analysis on the eve of American entry into World War II, as “by 1940, the broad outlines of America’s energy transitions were clear” (p. xx). That may well be so, but it is worth noting that the postwar period also complicates his thesis, given that “[a]fter the war, political forces increasingly shape energy outcomes” (p. xx). Ending his analysis in 1940 also enables Aldrich to avoid difficult and uncomfortable questions regarding the effects of fossil fuels on the global environment.
Surprisingly, given his training as an economist, Aldrich has a narrowly focused view of the trade-offs associated with market capitalism. In particular, he makes scant mention of social benefits and social costs (a.k.a., positive and negative externalities). Aldrich’s reluctance to discuss social costs is striking when compared to his assertion that coal (and later, oil) provided an increase in personal comfort that cannot be reflected in GDP data. Nor could that positive externality be fully captured by companies embedded in a system of market capitalism. If that is the case, then it is equally likely that those companies can shirk a full accounting of the negative externalities that they generate, passing them on to individuals in the form of pollution and climate change. Wyss, the journalist, is more willing to address the issue, and he suggests that the penchant for “[i]gnoring health and environmental concerns is embedded in the history of coal” (p. 212).
Nor is it certain that a market-driven quest for greater efficiency will produce the most socially beneficial outcomes. Happily, coal preserved the forests, kerosene saved the whales, oil and natural gas reduced smoke, and companies found new uses for waste steam—just as, on the railroads, air brakes and automatic couplers increased output and reduced workplace accidents. But what if safety appliances had merely saved the lives of railroaders, without producing gains in efficiency? Would corporations have invested in those innovative technologies? For that matter, how many deaths and injuries occurred during the transitional period when managers were contemplating whether that capital investment would generate an adequate rate of return? What if strip mining increased profits and made working conditions more dangerous? How would the market respond to that situation? While those are hypothetical questions, residents of Love Canal were intimately familiar with the consequences of a corporation’s inability to find a profitable use for its waste products. Business opposition to the adoption of catalytic converters and to the elimination of substances such as asbestos and tetraethyl lead suggests that market-driven innovation does not always unleash gales of creative destruction in a manner that symbiotically improves corporate profitability and social welfare.Footnote 30
Both books would benefit from reliance on the contributions of scholars such as Vaclav Smil. In numerous works, Smil has detailed the potential and the limitations associated with alternative energy sources that might, in a gale of creative destruction, unseat coal and oil as the cornerstones of the hydrocarbon economy.Footnote 31 Of greater significance, he acknowledges the high social costs that Wyss does not quantify, and Aldrich does not discuss. That assessment suggests that renewable energy is at a disadvantage against hydrocarbon fuels whose price to the consumer does not reflect their true cost to society and that markets do not allocate resources as efficiently as Aldrich suggests.Footnote 32
As we consider what steps should be taken to address climate change, there is little consensus regarding the optimal balance between market forces and the constraints of the regulatory state. Wyss notes that “for years the coal industry has promoted a range of solutions, from scrubbing away the impurities to capturing and burying the carbon in the earth before it gets into the upper atmosphere. So far, all have been spectacular failures” (p. 214). Aldrich suggests that “[c]ombating global warming worldwide will need cheaper, better sources of energy and power” (p. xix) without predicting what those developments might entail. The market-driven replacement of wood by coal, and in turn the ascendancy of petroleum, suggests the wisdom of that approach. Yet it also presumes that the economic patterns that worked in the past will continue to operate successfully in the future and that technology can resolve the problems that have been created by technology. As LeCain has observed, such hubris further empowers the entrenched economic elites who have created the harmful conditions in the first place.Footnote 33
The two authors hold out little hope for effective political intervention, although for different reasons. “Climate change is a long-term and complex problem,” Wyss observes, “the antithesis of the kind of challenge that politics and democracy address best” (p. 214). That is, perhaps, another way of saying that politicians are reluctant to interfere with what the electorate believes to be the appropriate operation of economic markets, or to tell voters that they may have to curtail their expectations for additional comfort and a higher standard of living. Aldrich contends that future reliance on government interventionism, rather than markets, will deprive future generations of continued economic growth. “While the transitions described in this book have made us richer, the current one—driven by policy, not individual choices—is likely to leave us poorer” (p. xix).Footnote 34
There is some ambiguity in the use of the word “us,” one that reflects a significant limitation associated with both books. Understandably, Wyss and Aldrich focus on American coal, avoiding the extraordinary complexity associated with a transnational analysis. Coal, and everything associated with it, is nonetheless a global commodity. Coal is mined in West Virginia, shipped to China, and used in the manufacture of consumer products that are in turn exported to the United States. Greenhouse gases that result from that global supply chain are indifferent to national boundaries. The more immediate consequences associated with coal use—visible air pollution and industrial accidents—have declined significantly in the United States. Perhaps, as Wyss suggests, that was the result of activist public policy, or perhaps, as Aldrich asserts, we can credit market forces for that beneficial outcome. Neither author mentions that we have outsourced those disagreeable side effects to the Global South, where the desire for economic growth and a more comfortable life often supersedes environmental and safety regulations.Footnote 35 Nor is it clear that the planet possesses either the resources or the tolerance for pollution that will enable developing nations to mimic energy consumption patterns in the United States. A transnational comparison, perhaps building on the work of scholars such as Kenneth Pomeranz, could also explain why the market forces that Aldrich describes—present in pre-industrial China and the West—produced radically different outcomes.Footnote 36
The perspectives offered by Wyss and by Aldrich have considerable merit and will likely have strong support from individuals who identify with different shades of the political spectrum. The danger, perhaps, is that those with preconceived views will oversimplify the conclusions of each book. Readers who sympathize with Wyss may find support for their belief that capitalism is inherently evil and only a massive intervention by governments around the globe will save us from planetary destruction. A superficial glance at Aldrich’s narrative may suggest that free-market capitalism will fix everything and that we have nothing to worry about. That dichotomy is perhaps reflective of the current state of history in the United States. Was George Washington a great American hero, father of our country, and a role model for us all, or was he a hegemonic elitist who hypocritically demanded liberty for himself while denying freedom to those whom he enslaved? Is coal the miracle fuel that made the United States the richest country in the world, while giving Americans a far more comfortable life than their ancestors could have imagined, or is it the embodiment of corporate greed and the sacrifice of human lives and the environment?
Despite their professed reluctance to engage in policy debates, Wyss and Aldrich have contributed to the scholarly and political polarization associated with climate change. They offer important insights into the relationship between business and politics, the free market and the regulatory state, and corporate profitability and the public good. Wyss channels his journalistic expertise to offer a seductively persuasive narrative, while Aldrich provides a compelling thesis supported by meticulous research. Both books are worthy of careful attention.
Author biography
Albert Churella is a professor of History at Kennesaw State University. He has recently completed a three-volume study of the Pennsylvania Railroad, at one time the world’s largest private corporation, and is now working on a history of Conrail. He is president of the Lexington Group, a transportation history and policy organization.
Open access
