Britain’s last deep coal mine closed on Friday, bringing the curtain down on an industry that once employed more than 1 million miners at over 3,000 collieries. Coal helped Britain become the first modern industrial power, fuelling her factories, steel works, ships and railways in the 19th century, when the country became famous as the workshop of the world (“Energy transitions”, Smil, 2010). Contemporary observers believed Britain’s imperial might was bound up with the future of her mines, and their inevitable depletion worried them as much for its political as its business implications. “Coal is almost the sole necessary basis of our material power (and) gives efficiency to our moral and intellectual capabilities,” British economist William Stanley Jevons warned (“The Coal Question: An Inquiry […]