The fossilized sunlight that powered the Industrial Revolution — by providing the concentrated energy that broke the organic economy's land constraint, created the working class, built the railway network, and began accumulating the atmospheric carbon that is now reshaping the planet's climate
Every calorie of food, every timber beam, every draught animal, every candle — for all of human history before roughly 1750, the economy ran on sunlight captured by living things and stored for at most a few years. Then industrial civilization learned to burn sunlight stored underground for 300 million years. The consequences — factory production, railways, cities of millions, industrial warfare, a global economy — and the atmospheric carbon now reshaping the climate are all downstream of that single transition.