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Bonus: Damon Binder on Economic History and the Future of Physics
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What's the Good News About Coal?
The UK is like pretty well endowed with coal. And people can argue about whether China was similarly endowed or other parts of Europe. But the key thing there being that coal is just like a very dense store of energy. So if you compare it to wood, for instance, you need like vast areas of forest to be cut down and bunched. Whereas coal is basically free in the ground. It takes a lot of energy. The original steam engines were produced to pump water out of coal mines. They were very, very inefficient. There's no way you would like run them for basically any task for pumping water from a coal mine. You really do not have to be very good at pumping
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