Power to the people Kander, Astrid; Malanima, Paolo; Warde, Paul
2014., 20140105, 2014, 2014-01-05, 20130101, 2013, Letnik:
46
eBook, Book
Power to the Peopleexamines the varied but interconnected relationships between energy consumption and economic development in Europe over the last five centuries. It describes how the traditional ...energy economy of medieval and early modern Europe was marked by stable or falling per capita energy consumption, and how the First Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century--fueled by coal and steam engines--redrew the economic, social, and geopolitical map of Europe and the world. The Second Industrial Revolution continued this energy expansion and social transformation through the use of oil and electricity, but after 1970 Europe entered a new stage in which energy consumption has stabilized. This book challenges the view that the outsourcing of heavy industry overseas is the cause, arguing that a Third Industrial Revolution driven by new information and communication technologies has played a major stabilizing role.
Power to the Peopleoffers new perspectives on the challenges posed today by climate change and peak oil, demonstrating that although the path of modern economic development has vastly increased our energy use, it has not been a story of ever-rising and continuous consumption. The book sheds light on the often lengthy and complex changes needed for new energy systems to emerge, the role of energy resources in economic growth, and the importance of energy efficiency in promoting growth and reducing future energy demand.
Abstract
This article charts the development of the trade in a key input into early modern British industry: potash, used as a source of alkali, predominantly in the making of soap for washing ...woollens, and the bleaching the linen. Although an essential intermediary input into the manufacturing processes through precursors to the modern chemical industry, this trade and its ecological impact have gone almost entirely unnoticed by historians. The article sets out the scale of the trade and its organization reaching to regions of supply in the Baltic and Russia, before a rapid switch towards North American suppliers after 1760. Knowledge of the potash trade expands the scope and understanding of the ‘organic economy’ to a product that accounted for the largest share of ‘ghost acres’ abroad used to underpin British industrial development and whose wood requirements came to far exceed the production of wood within Britain. Data on the ash trade provides an indicator for the scale of industrial output, and relative size of the textile-finishing sector in England and the Netherlands that may modify our understanding of the relative fortunes of industries in both countries.
On the European aggregate level there is an inverted-U curve for long-term energy intensity. In the 19th century aggregate European energy intensity rose, followed by a declining trend during the ...20th century. This article discusses the possible explanations for the declining trend during the 20th century and explores the role of energy quality as expressed in energy prices. For the first time a complete set of national energy retail prices covering two centuries has been constructed and used for Britain, while the energy price data previously available for Sweden until 2000 has been updated to 2009. This allows us to explore the role of energy quality in shaping long-term energy intensity. We find no relation between energy quality and energy intensity in the 19th century, while energy quality may have stimulated the declining energy intensity in Europe over the 20th century, but is not the sole or even main reason for the decline. Rather, increased economic efficiency in the use of energy services seems to have been the main driver for the decline after 1970, presumably driven by the information and communication technology.
This article charts the development of the trade in a key input into early modern British industry: potash, used as a source of alkali, predominantly in the making of soap for washing woollens, and ...the bleaching the linen. Although an essential intermediary input into the manufacturing processes through precursors to the modern chemical industry, this trade and its ecological impact have gone almost entirely unnoticed by historians. The article sets out the scale of the trade and its organization reaching to regions of supply in the Baltic and Russia, before a rapid switch towards North American suppliers after 1760. Knowledge of the potash trade expands the scope and understanding of the 'organic economy' to a product that accounted for the largest share of 'ghost acres' abroad used to underpin British industrial development and whose wood requirements came to far exceed the production of wood within Britain. Data on the ash trade provides an indicator for the scale of industrial output, and relative size of the textile-finishing sector in England and the Netherlands that may modify our understanding of the relative fortunes of industries in both countries.
Historians researching the character of fuel supplies in early modern England have largely focused on the relative contributions made by coal and the produce of managed woodland, especially with an ...eye to quantification. This has been to the neglect of the diversity of regional and
local fuel economies, and their relationship with landscape, social structure, and infrastructural changes. This article highlights the wide range of other fuels employed, both domestically and industrially, in this period; examines the factors which shaped the character of local fuel economies,
and the chronology with which these were altered and eroded by the spread of coal use; and looks briefly at the implications of this development for farming and land management.
The British Agricultural History Society's Winter Conference that took place at the Institute for Historical Research with the theme "The Politics of Countryside" is featured. The event highlighted ...an opening paper by Maika de Keyser of the University of Antwerp, followed by Elly Robson of the Institute for Historical Research and the University of Cambridge. The conference was also rounded off by an innovation, a panel reflecting on issues of rural politics across papers and periods, staffed by Chris Briggs, Briony MacDonagh and Clare Griffiths.
This paper presents a stylized graph of the energy intensities in two typical European sets of countries: the East and the West, in parallel to the existing research on the European North – South. ...The coal-rich West and East differ from the coal-poor South and North, in that their pattern is an inverted U-curve, while both North and South have consistently declining energy intensities. Energy intensity peaks about 50 years earlier in the West than in the East. For the first time we have been able to demonstrate that the gap between the West and East actually started in the 1950s, and to single out the main drivers behind the East European inefficiency. It was not general systematic wastefulness or lack of innovations, but surprisingly for a planned economy, it was the inefficiency in the expanding electricity system that accounted for most of the effect, together with the structural change towards heavy industrial production. As much of the industrial production became electrified and powered by less efficient electricity, this had a snowball effect through the whole value chain of the production. The negative impact of the planned economy on energy intensity was largest between 1948 and 1970.
•Energy intensity in coal-rich West and East resembles an inverted U-curve.•Energy intensity in the East diverges from the West after WII and peaks later.•Planned economy had an impact on structural changes of the economy.•No simple story of inefficient resource use and systematic waste.•Inefficiencies were mainly concentrated in the electricity transformation sector.
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