Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957

Biophysical economic interpretation of the Great Depression: A critical period of an energy transition

“…Most studies of the energy transition from coal to hydrocarbons focus on the period from the 1940s to the 1970s (Melsted & Pallua, 2018). These were the decades during which much of the transition took place, especially in Western Europe (Hassan & Duncan, 1989;Jensen & Jensen, 1967;Kander et al, 2014; also see 2 ). There are some exceptions: Pratt (1981) studied the emergence of oil, initially as a fuel for lighting, in the early twentieth century United States; and Rubio and Folchi (2012) showed that in many Latin America countries oil surpassed coal as the dominant energy source in the 1920s.…”