CLEANING UP ON COAL

 

I know the recipe by heart. Coal, “…a readily combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock”, is simply captured carbon, concentrated out of the air by plants. 

Take a few hundred million tons of plant material and leave it buried under piles of other dead vegetation for 8 or 9 thousand years, and you get peat (above). 

Leave that buried for thirty to sixty million years and you get lignite coal (above). 

Leave it buried for 200 million years and you get Bituminous coal (above). 

Cook and squeeze it for 300 millions years and you get Anthracite (above) or "hard" coal, the cleanest burning coal there is ("My gown stays white / From morn till night / Upon the road of Anthracite") - “cleanest” being a very relative term, of course. But once you have coal, it takes just a couple of centuries more to produce greed and monopolies. It was a preview of the turn of the 20th Century when oil made a few millionaires and kept the rest of the population grasping for clean air and financial security.

Humans adapted the best word they already had to describe the burning stone; char-coal. And since it was first recognized washed up on beaches near Durham along the Scottish boarder (above), they called it sea-coal. It was so rare that it was a prized New Years' gift long before there was a Christmas among the Saxon savages. 

Its fire was so smoky that thieves carried chunks of it with them to conceal their crimes. Other than as a smoke screen, it had little practical use. But as the forests of England were chopped down to build palaces and forts and fleets, and wood became expensive, the peasants turned to heating their miserable huts with sea-coal. And that is when things started to heat up.

Journalist Edwin Black described the early economics of coal in an article at "The Cutting The News.com" (for 18 May, 2009);  “In the last four decades of the thirteenth century, the cost of wood increased about 70 %, while (the price of ) sea coal increased only 23 %… Londoners had no choice but to resort to sea coal, which was rapidly becoming known simply as "coal." 

By 1300, London's total annual demand for wood was 70,000 acres.  By 1400, it was only 44,000 (acres), despite prodigious industrial, commercial and population growth.” The street in London where merchants sold their cargos still bears the name of “Seacoal Lane”. 

And the math was always in favor of coal. One ton of wood contains about 16 million British Thermal Units, while anthracite coal has almost 29 million BTUs.   But the price stabilization  of coal was caused by two rules of economics; the first that a price increase produces an increase in supply - in this case when miners went looking for sea-coal on the and bellow the land . 

The second economic rule which favored coal is that an increase in profits produces an alteration in the tax codes - as merchants share their new wealth with government bureaucrats, who are hired to protect that wealth.

In this case the merchants were a forgotten class of lobbyists called the “Hostmen”. Originally these were the medieval equivalent of modern day Marriot, Hilton and Motel 6 operators. On 24 July, 1567 Queen Elizabeth I granted a patent to a Mr. William Tipper, making him the sole provider of lodging and meals to “merchant strangers” or “merchant adventurers” (what we would call traveling salesmen) visiting London. 

For that privilege Mr. Tipper paid her Majesty 40 shillings for each traveling salesman who paid him, and that is the origin for the term “a big tipper”, as in an extra payment for service. But the Hostmen of Newcastle-on-Tyne (above) had even bigger plans.

Even earlier, in 1529, to make the tax collector’s job easier, the crown decreed that every commodity harvested or produced within the watershed of the small River Tyne and its tributaries (in the vernacular, the Tyneside), had to be trans-shipped through the port city of Newcastle-on-Tyne. That also made it easier for the hostmen of Newcastle to gain control of the coal market, since “…once the coal was on a boat, it was in the hands of merchants and shippers.” (Ibid)

“By the 1550's , the Hostmen (so) commanded the coal--from ground excavation to river distribution (so) that…in 1590, the Lord Mayor of London complained about “…the monopoly and extortion of the owners of Newcastle coals." (ibid) The tip left on the table for Elizabeth was one shilling paid to the crown for every 36 bushels of coal shipped out of Newcastle and the Tyneside. And it was said that just 10 men - and the Queen - controlled the sale of coal throughout all of England and much of coastal Europe.

After the Virgin Queen’s death in 1603, Parliament moved to cancel the royal monopolies. But by then the Hostmen of Newcastle were too rich to be interfered with, i.e. they were too big to fail. Their profit margins remained as high as 65%.  The price of coal was not coming down until somebody or something broke up the Hostman's monopoly.

Not even the bloody English Civil War could break their control of coal. “The Hostmen always produced smart defenses, polished cost justifications and retained the best spokesmen to make their case.” (ibid). By 1661 Thomas Fuller could define the popular phrase ‘to carry coals to Newscastle’ as meaning “…to busy one's self in a needless employment.”  No point in shipping coals to Newscastle, no matter how much you could under cut the Hostmen's prices.  Because you couldn't. It was illegal to even try.

The next step was described in “Extracts from the Company of Hostmen, Newcastle-Upon- Tyne (1901): “…(coal) miners soon drove shafts down to underground water levels, and mines had to be drained before production could be raised…In 1712 Thomas Newcomen's first coal-fired, steam-operated pump was installed in a coal mine in the West Midlands. It pumped 600 liters of water (150 gallons) a minute from the bottom of a shaft 50 m (160 feet) deep…”  But unseen, in this technology, was the death of the Hostman's power.

In less than a hundred years that steam engine, used to drain the coal mines, would be placed on wheels and fed coal from the same mines to produce a loco-motive. And it was that invention, intended to further strengthen the wealth and power of the Hostmen, which finally proved the death of their 400 year old monopoly. 

As Edwin Black observed, “With trains, coal mines far beyond Newcastle were finally able to free themselves from river transport….(and) That was how the Hostmen cartel was finally broken up.”  By new technology.

But the final cost of the Hostmen's and coal company monopolies came due two hundred years later, on Saturday, 6 December 1952.   Still carrying the enormous debt from World War Two, England taxed imported oil  much higher than local mined coal.  

They called it the Great Smog of London. A low pressure zone settled in over the Thames valley and stayed for a week. The exhaust from thousands of steam locomotives, coal fired power plants and internal combustion engines hung on day after day while air quality plummeted.  

The terrible situation was acerbated by thousands of coal fires heating homes and businesses and powering factories,  

Visibility in London fell to one foot, and “smoke ran like water.”  That Sunday the smoky fog was so thick ambulances could not safely navigate city streets, and 6,500 people who were having trouble breathing died when they were forced to walk to London hospitals.   On Monday, with most people locked in their homes and avoiding all physical effort, only 900 died. 

On Tuesday, 9 December,  the wind finally swept the fog away, leaving a final death toll of 12,000 killed in just four days from simply breathing the coal fouled air.

The rock that burns is a killer. And the sooner we stop burning it, the sooner we can breath easier.

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