Making engines more efficient made Britain burn more coal, not less

In 1865, William Stanley Jevons noticed something backwards: as steam engines got better at converting coal into useful work, Britain's total coal consumption went up, not down. Cheaper, more efficient power made coal-fired machinery profitable across far more industries, and the resulting boom in usage outran the efficiency gains. The same pattern now worries efficiency advocates in energy and computing.

— William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question — 1865
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