Despite solar and wind power generating the cheapest electricity in history, around forty countries are still building new coal-burning power plants – the worst thing anyone can do for climate change. How two years of campaigning led to twenty countries committing to phase-out coal power, and what needs to happen next.

Change in the economy, just as in the climate, can be self-reinforcing, sudden, and irreversible. The world’s fastest transitions to renewable energy and electric vehicles are happening in countries where economic tipping points have been crossed in these sectors. By deliberately targeting these thresholds, we can achieve large-scale change much more quickly than we might expect. To find these opportunities, we need to move away from traditional cost–benefit analysis and adopt a very different approach to decision-making.

In the struggle to sustain the nation’s economy and society accompanying World War One, the concept of ‘applied science’ was widely deployed and further enriched. It gained new traction through wartime and post-war administrative developments and the debates over research amongst the military services, civilian agencies, and private industry. Generic issues of the time were highlighted by the 1917 Sothern Holland enquiry into the organisation of naval research. Subsequently, new establishments, such as the DSIR and the Committee of Civil Research, shaped applied science. The chapter shows the interpretation of applied science by individual institutions and the press by exploring the details of specific research projects in the military, the radio industry and, above all, coal-oil manufacture. Thus it treats research on converting coal to oil at ICI, the Low Temperature Carbonisation Company, and Powell Duffryn. Through their thinking over funding priorities, new bodies often formulated and promoted their own conceptions of applied science. They both responded to public opinion and helped shape widely shared understanding.

After uncovering oil’s role in decolonization, one question immediately emerges: what about other natural resources? Although oil is neither the only fossil fuel on which we depend nor the only resource that produces a substantial amount of wealth, it appears to be the only natural resource that can lead to separate independence. This chapter compares oil and other natural resources to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between natural resources and territorial sovereignty. Through an investigation of coal, precious metals, and natural gas, it argues that natural resources can lead colonial areas to divergent outcomes – namely amalgamation, separate independence, and secessionism – after decolonization depending on (1) their commercial value and (2) the timing of their discovery. While resources with low economic value did not affect the territoriality of states, those with high value resulted in three different outcomes. Resources discovered before or during the process of colonization often resulted in amalgamation into a larger entity. Those discovered between colonization and decolonization often resulted in separate independence. Finally, those discovered after decolonization often led to secessionism.

Called “the rock that burns” by Aristotle, coal was the first major industrial fuel, created about 300 million years ago as heat and pressure compressed pools of decaying plant matter. Burned to generate heat to boil water and make steam to move a piston in a Watt “fire engine” or a giant turbine in a modern power station, the industrialization of manufacturing, transportation, and electric power is examined from beginnings in the United Kingdom to today’s increased use of coal combustion in developing countries despite the limited thermal efficiency and harmful combustion by-products.

A transition simplifies or improves the efficiency of old ways, turning intellect into industry with increased capital – when both transpire, change becomes unstoppable. The transition to a more efficient combustion fuel changed the global economy when coal replaced wood (twice as efficient) and oil replaced coal (roughly twice as efficient again). The history of the Industrial Revolution is explained through the energy content of different fuels (wood, peat, coal) from the 1800s, early steam engines that produced power for manufacturing and propulsion, and the political, economic, and social consequences of industrialization (wealth, health, and globalization), culminating in Thomas Edison’s 1882, coal-fired, electricity-generating, power station in Lower Manhattan.

There is much to do to create a modern energy paradigm, one that is clean, sustainable, and economically viable, but the changes are coming as overall efficiencies improve and manufacturing costs decrease for today’s renewable technologies. In 2000, 0.6% of total global energy production was generated either by wind or solar, a 50% increase in a decade; by 2010, the amount had doubled.1 By 2013, Spain had achieved a global first as wind-generated power became its main source of energy (21% of total demand, enough to run 7 million homes2), while both Portugal and Denmark now regularly produce days powered 100% by wind.

Historically cloudy England scored a first, as solar became the largest source of grid energy during an especially sunny 2018 spring bank-holiday weekend,3 while in the midst of high winds from Storm Bella on Boxing Day in 2020, the UK was more than half powered by wind, a new record.

The 1860s marked a key moment in the history of extraction and the rise of extraction-based life, a social order premised on the removal of subsurface resources and, especially, on the coal economy. This decade saw the explosion of an economic discourse around coal exhaustion in Britain, thanks to the publication of William Stanley Jevons’s The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines[GK21] (1865), and the expansion of overseas imperial extraction projects following, for example, the discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1869) in South Africa. In this chapter, I explore the role of extraction in the 1860s’ most characteristic genre: sensation fiction. After an overview of the chronotope of exhaustion and how it manifests in fiction, I turn to two sensation novels premised on extractive plots: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret [GK22](1862) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone [GK23](1868). Together they suggest the extent to which British national life was, by the 1860s, already imagined to be fully dependent on extraterritorial mineral inputs.

What are the legacy energy sources and what are the impacts as we move to renewables?

This chapter takes the earth to be its archive. It imagines the journey of a piece of coal from the mines of the Karatsu coalfield, in north-western Kyushu, to the Yamashiro-maru’s furnace. It asks how such a history brings into play new timelines, new spatial frameworks and above all new actors in nineteenth-century Japan’s engagement with the outside world. Narrating a range of timescales, from millions of years to the daily diary of a Yamashiro-maru passenger in March 1900, the chapter juxtaposes maps, memoirs, paintings, photographs, geological reports, diplomatic missives and a crew list partly to offer a new reading of the ‘opening’ of Japan in the 1850s. This account emphasizes as much the ‘geo-’ as the ‘-politics’ of Japan’s international relations, thereby reimagining Japanese agency in matters of coal – both in the Tokugawa shogunate’s mid-century encounter with Commodore Perry and in the Meiji state’s late-century relations with East Asia.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

Despite solar and wind power generating the cheapest electricity in history, around forty countries are still building new coal-burning power plants – the worst thing anyone can do for climate change. How two years of campaigning led to twenty countries committing to phase-out coal power, and what needs to happen next.

Change in the economy, just as in the climate, can be self-reinforcing, sudden, and irreversible. The world’s fastest transitions to renewable energy and electric vehicles are happening in countries where economic tipping points have been crossed in these sectors. By deliberately targeting these thresholds, we can achieve large-scale change much more quickly than we might expect. To find these opportunities, we need to move away from traditional cost–benefit analysis and adopt a very different approach to decision-making.