In an earlier post at MasterResource, W. S. Jevons (1865) on Coal (Memo to Obama, Part III), the hall-of-fame-economist explained how coal was a godsend to Britain, powering the industrial revolution in a way that renewable energies could not.

I am reminded of Jevons with the headline from the June 17th Guardian, “Carbon capture plans threaten shutdown of all UK coal-fired power stations.” It read in part:

All of Britain’s coal-fired power stations, including Drax, the country’s largest emitter of carbon, could be forced to close down under radical plans unveiled by government today. Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, is proposing to extend his plans to force companies to fit carbon capture and storage technology (CCS) onto new coal plants – as revealed by the Guardian – to cover a dozen existing coal plants.

[Editor Note: Transportation expert Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow of the Cato Institute and blogs at Antiplanner. His bio is at the end of this post.]

Amtrak, the American Public Transportation Association, and other passenger-rail advocates want everyone to believe that passenger trains are more energy efficient than driving. This helps them justify the hundreds of billions of tax subsidies they receive. But is this rationale true?

Comparing the Studies

A new study from the University of California (Davis) finds that the answer depends on such things as load factors: your auto carrying four people consumes a lot less energy per passenger mile than a subway (which on average is only one-sixth full) or Amtrak train (which on average is only half full).

The Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book says that, on average, cars consumed…

Each renewable energy, Jevons explained, was either too scarce or too unreliable for the new industrial era. The energy savior was coal, a concentrated, plentiful, storable, and transportable source of energy that was England’s bounty for the world.

There was no going back to renewables. Coal–and that included oil and gas manufactured from coal–was the new master of the master resource of energy in the 18th and 19th centuries. As Jevons stated in the introduction (p. viii) of The Coal Question (1865):…