Fossil Fuels in Economic Theory - Back to the 19th century British Debates

Antoine Missemer

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Abstract: The interest of economists in fossil fuel exhaustion dates back to the mid-19th century, when, in Great Britain, W. Stanley Jevons published his 1865 essay on coal. In the subsequent decades, fossil fuels were considered with ambivalence: sometimes as a new theoretical and practical priority, sometimes as a secondary issue to be studied in standard frameworks. This paper explores, through the example of the mining rent, how fossil fuels were (partially) incorporated into economic theory at the time. It also explains why the original British view was finally relegated to the background in the early 20th century, when American economists took part in the discussions.

Keywords: marginalism; Jevons; mining rent; history of economic thought; fossil fuels (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-his, nep-hpe and nep-pke
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01793364v1
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Revue française de civilisation britannique, 2018, XXIII (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01793364

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