5/28/2023 0 Comments Planet horse![]() In the 1870s, biomass gave way to the first fossil fuels: coal and, to a lesser extent, petroleum. The half century from 1800 to 1850 saw the country devour biomass, most of it in the form of firewood and animal feed. In a broader sense, I’m featuring this project because it has a lot to teach us about how the energy system got to be the way it is today-and how it might change, and be made to change, in the future.įirst, you can glean the big eras in American energy use from this chart. The thicker the line or box in this chart, the more energy is flowing. It will help you think more keenly about climate change. Look at what the energy system was like 100 years before you were born. So click around! Look at what’s happening in the year you were born versus what’s happening now. “You could write a book from that Sankey alone,” Apratim Sahay, an energy consultant based in Boston, told me. As far as I’m aware, this is the first attempt to put so much information about U.S. Honestly, I’ve featured this chart here in the hopes that you’ll go to their website and play around with it. You can find a full interactive version of their chart online. The left side of the chart shows where energy is coming from (coal, natural gas, or petroleum) and the right side shows what it’s being used for (transportation, agriculture, or home lighting and heating). energy system, measured in watts per capita. This particular Sankey diagram shows the inputs and outputs for the U.S. This type of chart is called a Sankey diagram, which shows the relative size of flows in and out of a system. It’s a history of the American energy system in chart form, from 1800 to 2019. That tidbit is one of many things I learned from an astonishing new research project from Suits and his colleagues. That translates to far more hay and oats. In the 1810s, the average American horse ate 25,000 to 30,000 calories a day, Suits said. (As Jason Torchinsky has written, horses were the world’s first semiautonomous vehicle.) It matters because of how the change happened at all-a massive program of selective breeding that was not possible, Suits said, until railroads existed to ferry promising horses over long distances.Īnd it matters, finally, because you must understand how yoked horses are to figure out how much energy the U.S. This matters to the history of energy because, back then, horses were a primary form of transportation. They become 50 percent more powerful,” Robert Suits, a historian at the University of Chicago, told me. ![]() “In the mid-19th century, you have a massive expansion of the horse body. The first thing you should know about the history of energy in the United States is that, about 150 years ago, the horses got absolutely ripped. Sign up to get T he Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox. Every Tuesday morning, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. ![]()
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