Coal: A Human History (review)

Barbara Freese's Coal: A Human History is an engaging book intended for the general reader, and it is a book that historians of technology will find satisfying as well, except for the absence of citations. Although there are some endnotes, the text provides no clues as to whether sources for a particular fact or argument will be cited in those notes. That said, it should also be said that Freese has done an admirable job of researching the uses of coal and presenting her findings about the kind of world that coal has helped us build and the prospects of sustaining such a world into the future. Her conclusions center on China, on the tremendous acceleration in coal-burning accompanying China's rapid development, and on its global environmental consequences.

Freese worked for twelve years as an assistant attorney general for the State of Minnesota, where she helped enforce air-pollution regulations. After leaving that post, she turned her attention to coal in an effort to understand one of the leading causes of air pollution, and by the time she embarked on her study she was especially concerned with coal's contribution to global warming. Her book is a richly nuanced history of the human use of coal in all its glory and ugliness. She traces such uses back to the Stone Age in China and the Bronze Age in Wales. Over the centuries, even as people came to appreciate the way coal burns, they also found it annoying for its dirtiness and for the foul smell of its smoke. The human history of coal, then, is one of balancing its benefits with its liabilities. Comparing coal to a genie, Freese writes, "Failing to recognize both sides of coal—the vast power and the exorbitant cost—misses the essential heartbreaking drama of the story" (p. 13).

Freese tells a story familiar to many historians of technology: of the growing use of coal for heating; of the need to pump water from ever-deeper mines, thereby encouraging the development of the steam engine; of the application of steam power to the textile industry and the use of coke for smelting iron; of the manufacture of gas from coal for municipal lighting; and of the revolution in transportation wrought by the railroad. Along the way, she keeps the reader apprised of worsening air pollution and declining public health in large industrial cities, while at the same time reminding us that the advent of the coal age took tremendous pressure off previously prominent sources of fuel for heat and light—woodlands and whales. Following the history of industrialization from England to the United States, she brings her story to a temporary pause by describing what the burning of coal and other fossil fuels has done to levels of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere.

Then Freese turns her attention to China, offering a brief history of the uses of coal there from ancient times to the present and showing that China reached many milestones, such as the smelting of iron, centuries before they came about in England. Focusing on the history of coal in China during the second half of the twentieth century, she covers the turmoil of the Mao Zedong era before providing an overview of recent developments, including the rapid construction of coal-fired power plants, the air pollution that coal has created in much of China, and the implications of China's rapid industrialization for global warming.

After soberly delineating these findings, Freese concludes her book by briefly highlighting the promises and pitfalls of alternative scenarios—for sequestering carbon while continuing to burn fossil fuels, and for energy futures not based on carbon. This book leaves the reader with a good understanding of how humanity came to live in such an energy-demanding condition and with a realization that the outlook for the future is not at all certain.