The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh.

  • Correa Moylan Walsh
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    optimism prevails. Even the total exhaustion of the British mines has been contemplated with serenity. “In three hun- dred years we may bring our coal from China,” said Mr. R. T. Moore in the Presidential Address before the Institute of Mining Engineers in 1909,° notwithstanding that Jevons had shown that British trade needs the export of coal as the only heavy freight the British isles produce, to counterbalance the heavy freights of their raw imports; and if the heavy freight of coal were added to the import side, nearly half of the British shipping would sail in ballast. Factories are much. more likely to go to the coal than coal come to the factories. . To-day Great Britain produces every year over two hundred and fifty million tons of coal, Germany nearly as much, the United States twice as much. The total annual production is well over a billion tons, and it is increasing rap- idly. The question is of world-wide import, and to it the In- ternational Geological Congress, sitting at Toronto in the summer of 1913, devoted attention. Their investigations es- timated the uttermost supply to be about seven hundred billion tons in Europe, twelve hundred billion in Asia, five thousand billion in America, mostly in the northern hemisphere, about sixty billions in Africa, and a hundred and seventy in Oceania, totaling a little over seven thousand billion tons.? This lib- eral allowance will last seven thousand years if the future production and consumption never exceed the present figure of about a billion tons annually. But if the production and consumption be doubled in the next twenty years and there- after continue without further increase, it will last three thousand five hundred years. If they be once more doubled, it will last about seventeen hundred and fifty years. But if they go on doubling and remaining stationary, its duration will be reduced nearly to nine hundred, to five hundred, to three hundred, and so on, until the end is reached. The solution of the problem when this will be, would be easy if the increases were to be uniform, the mathematics of the problem being simple. Even then, however, we should have to be careful to find whether the increase is in geometrical pro- gression, as just supposed, or in arithmetical; for these yield 8 Transactions, vol. xxxvii, Pp. 455 ® The Coal Resources of the World, Toronto, 1913, vol. i. p. xviii.