Since Christopher Columbus’s arrival to the New World, the Indigenous population had been declining because of colonial and disease violence (genocide). Due to the reduction of the Indigenous population and no one to cut/burn them down, the forests had fully recovered and the New World had become a “planetary carbon sink.” Too much carbon dioxide would cause the Little Ice Age’s severity, cooling the Earth down and resulting in agricultural production problems. This event describes how cheap work and food need to function to have cheap energy.

Chapter 6: Cheap Energy
(Room 2: pages 161-165)

By: Stephanie Monroy

“Soggy soils didn’t make for fertile land. We know this because taxes on grain cultivation plummeted by 1400 as an agroecological crisis deepened” (Patel and Moore, Page. 167). 

 In this paragraph on Page. 167, we are introduced to peat. A source of “Cheap Energy”, according to Patel and Moore. In the 15^th century, the Royal Dutch company was making a large profit from their exploits of peat, which could be turned into coal, a source of fuel. After ravaging the peat from the land, they found themselves in an agricultural crisis as they could no longer use the land and instead created an environment that was unstable and brought natural disasters such as flooding to its people in northern and central Europe.