Coal, Oil and the Difficulty of Grasping Long Duration Problems

In the mid 19th Century, William Stanley Jevons patiently tried to explain to his fellow countrymen that the rich energy content in coal was not a marginal but a pervasive influence on nearly every aspect of the British economy. He warned that coal production would inevitably migrate away from the easy, near-surface deposits to the deeper deposits that would take more capital, more labor

Does any of this sound familiar? Jevons was repeatedly misunderstood as saying that Britain was running out of coal. He took great pains to explain the scale of the problem, but Jevons was talking about a cycle whose duration would extend beyond people