dohboi wrote:As I said elsewhere, there are of course rich ironies in the Norway decision.
Still, I'd rather see such major funds publicly saying they will not help further fund coal development than have them go on funding it.
Slavery was 'nothing personal, just business' until people decided it wasn't a morally acceptable way of doing business.
I see this last statement or variations upon it made with great frequency. Unfortunately it is incorrect, the people of the 1850's did not suddenly become more moral in the modern view than those of the 1492-1840 period. What happened was messy economics. Until the 1840's your choices for getting mechanical work done were a) Human labor, B) Animal power, C) Wind power and D) Water power. If you were lucky enough to be the first person to get to a new stream or river that flowed fast enough to turn a Mill Wheel you could become quite wealthy. By the same token if your local had a moderate but relatively steady breeze but no competing water you could build a Windmill and you could do very well for yourself. That is why you can open any phone book in America and look at the last names, you will find many Miller and Smith families because in the early modern era peoples surnames were based on their profession as often as not. Every village needed a Mill and a Smithy to succeed. If you didn't have rapidly flowing water of a steady breeze you would attach 1 or 2 oxen to a turnstile and make them walk in circles for a few hours each day turning the milling wheel, and if there were no Oxen available you would put slaves, criminals, or less coerced humans on the turnstile and make them march in circles all day to drive the milling wheel.
Starting around 1840 by 1850 low pressure steam engines replaced many if not all of the human and animal power because fire wood and coal were cheap and the steam engine did not need to be fed, sheltered or doctored when you were not in need of running the Mill. In the 1850's some steam engines were just sitting there unused during the off season and creative people started putting them to work in 'Manufactories' which we modern folks have shortened to Factory. This happened first in New England where every suitable stream had a Mill that powered textile factories. When the steam engines came in the need for human and animal labor changed, you needed more skilled workmen to tend the steam engines and Mechanics did quite well, and you needed uneducated labor to thread machines and so on. The Manufactory owners quickly discovered that day laborers could be trained at these tasks with minimal effort, and you did not have to feed, shelter or doctor them because they would seek out those things with the low wages you paid them on their own. Slaves had to have all of those things and were economically not competitive, the Factory owner who used slave labor was at a financial disadvantage compared to his 'free' labor neighbors.
Thus in New England, where farms were small and Factories used free labor Slavery became uneconomic and seemingly overnight 'immoral'. To make matters even more lopsided Pennsylvania had the best known supplies of Coal. The hard Anthracite coal of Pennsylvania was perfect for steel and iron works because it can be used directly in blast furnaces as fuel. To use wood you have to make it into charcoal first and to use softer grades of coal you have to 'coke' it which is essentially the same process. You cook either wood or soft coal and the remnant left behind is hard enough and burns hot enough to power a blast furnace or forge. With cheaper iron and hundreds of small factories Pennsylvania and New England developed the first railroad networks. With railroads on land and the Great Lakes from Buffalo, New York westward providing low cost transport the industrialization waves moved rapidly west in the north. Buffalo, Erie PA, Cleveland, OH, Toledo, OH, Detroit, MI, Chicago, IL, Green Bay, WI all were opened up by sail boats, but by the 1850's steam power had revolutionized river and lake transportation.
So in area's where big farms were more economic than they were in New England there were still small farms because the kind of crops grown went to feed the factory labor across the entire north of the country. Wheat and Corn and Oats are not cash crops like Indigo, Tobacco and Cotton. You can make a living, but it is hard to get fabulously wealthy farming food.
In the south on the other hand cash crops were the way the motivated got wealthy and stayed wealthy, not manufacturing. Farm implements to make better use of labor had already appeared in the north with the McCormick type reaper and the John Deere plow making it possible for small farmers to grow more food on less land by increasing labor efficiency. There were motivated people working on producing mechanical equipment designed for Indigo and Cotton farming in the 1850's, but before those technologies could mature to the point of effecting the markets for labor the Civil War broke out. If the war had been delayed 10 or 15 years mechanical replacements would have made cotton and indigo slavery uneconomic. Without the great need for form labor slavery would have become rare and died out on its own just like it did in New England.
If you want Coal to become 'immoral' you have to accept some alternative way of producing power that will replace it economically. Do that and it will fall out of favor very quickly.
