Christopher Jones is an Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University. He is a historian of Energy, Environment and Economics. This blog entry summarizes his discussion with Srijana Mitra Das of Times Evoke on hidden chapters in America’s energy transition. It appeared in Times of India newspaper on Saturday, 10th of February 2024.
Professor Jones area of interest is in the relations between the human societies and how modern energy systems have fueled types of economics growth that were never seen earlier on Earth. He also focuses on how these systems can be made more sustainable for a long term thriving future. With respect to what drove America’s unprecedented turn to fossil fuels in the early 20th Century, he emphasized on the Role of Transport Systems as the distance between the places where people derived this energy from the the places where the people were using it. He also comments on the struggle to build ways of moving energy in reliable and scalable steps to where consumers lived, coming down to canals and pipelines which shipped oil and wires which transmitted electricity. Understanding the energy systems looks different from the perspective of considering the transport networks necessary to connect the places that derived this energy with the users in distant locations.
On his writings which make the case of energy’s benefits in the US being very unequal, he has commented that such inequalities are endemic to the fossil fuel regime and goes back to where power is extracted and where it gets used. The regions which produce energy benefit far less than the places consuming it. The people in the rural areas bore the costs of mining from industrial accidents to health impacts. Extraction from underground of both oil and coal leached toxic material into their water supplies and damaged their lands. New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore boomed but the people in the generating locations had to face much more of the costs of these energy systems.
On his chronicling that America’s first energy transition was being marked by Fraud, Failure and frustration he points out two aspects. Firstly, people were very uncertain on using coal and oil when they emerged. They were also very unsure of having constantly running electricity through the walls of their houses. There was an economic aspect as well, as switching from woodfire to coal also meant getting costly stoves, and; abandoning the pleasant smell offered by wood. Accidents happened as the poor refinement of oils used in lanterns caused them to explode. Lastly, the first coal transition that happened with anthracite required a very hot flame and the air to go through this in a particular manner. As consumers did not know how to do this, some of the first coal merchants were accused of being fraudsters selling useless black stone.
With respect to the materiality of energy as normally we think of energy as being abstract, Prof Jones articulates about the enormous networks that are behind the scenes when a switch is pressed or a car is refueled. Our modern world has been designed around making energy easy to access, but energy seems invisible when huge systems of pipes, wires, cables and terminals have been built across landscapes. In essence people lighting their homes in New York are not seeing the West Virginia mountains being cleared for coal.
On his term, “Petromyopia” he has said that most analysts equate energy only with oil. For much of the 20th century, oil has been the most attractive energy source. He has found that oil has never been more than 35% of global energy consumption. Human society uses many other energy sources like coal, natural gas, biomass, animal power and human labor as parts of the energy systems. However, ‘petromyopia’ hides the other energy systems.
References –
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/times-evoke
https://newsroom.asu.edu/expert/christopher-jones#expert-tags
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