In other words, Britain discovered coal, to some extent, then started using it earnest and neglected the forest-as-fuel-source infrastructure that was needed to keep repopulating the forests.
So you're arguing that deforestation was a consequence of using more coal, not a driver of using more coal.
So the question still remains, why was coal only discovered then? What prevented people from using coal earlier?
Coal was known and used in antiquity. It has the same problem as oil: extraction was difficult and expensive except where it was on the surface or just below it.
People used more coal where good quality coal was easily accessible. They turned to more extensive mining and extraction as population growth and deforestation made wood more expensive - prior to that it was cheaper and easier to cut down trees that would regrow themselves if managed even half-heartedly. Once a steady supply of cheap coal was established it accelerated deforestation in a feedback loop.
* The sophistication of forest management varied a lot across civilizations and time within the same civilization, but very few took a "clear-cut everything" attitude. Clear-cutting was usually done to make farmland to grow more food, not for the lumber itself per-se.
It was known and used, just that there wasn't enough incentive for massive extraction so it wasn't searched. It's population growth and in conjonction with it urbanisation, electrification and railroads that lead to the search of more efficient energy source.
Nothing really prevented people from using coal earlier and they did but keep in mind that town where smaller and people scattered about in lots of smal villages. It was easier to collect wood.
Remember that by the end of 18h century, only a handful of cities barely reach a million inhabitant.
1712: Newcomen's steam engine.
1765: Watt's first engine.
1800: First battery.
1804: First steam locomotive.
1832: First DC generator.
The book (https://archive.org/details/ahistorycoalmin00gallgoog/page/n...) referenced by wikipedia claims that the change from wood to coal for domestic use occurred during the reign of the first Elizabeth.
(The Cornish steam engines also come up a lot due to them doing a lot of improvements that Watt held back with patent shenanigans, and a collaborative approach to their improvements)
Before electricity was a thing the steam engines were also used to pump water which then ran machinery hydraulicly, like cranes. Which piggybacked on improvements in civic water supplies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Armstrong,_1st_Baron...
(Same guy had the first house lit by hydroelectric power later)
My point is that this sort of transition isn't immediate and universal. Some people had the motivation and opportunity to use coal, there were lots of advantages and it spread... slowly... at the same time the infrastructure to extract and distribute it developed.
Wikipedia has an interesting history that includes Roman usage. Note the final cite, which has the traditional "we ran out of wood" story is cited to a 19th century source.
> After the Romans left Britain, in AD 410, there are few records of coal being used in the country until the end of the 12th century. One that does occur is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 852 when a rent including 12 loads of coal is mentioned.[8] In 1183 a smith was given land for his work, and was required to "raise his own coal"[9]: 171–2 Shortly after the granting of the Magna Carta, in 1215, coal began to be traded in areas of Scotland and the north-east England, where the carboniferous strata were exposed on the sea shore, and thus became known as "sea coal". This commodity, however, was not suitable for use in the type of domestic hearths then in use, and was mainly used by artisans for lime burning, metal working and smelting. As early as 1228, sea coal from the north-east was being taken to London.[10]: 5 During the 13th century, the trading of coal increased across Britain and by the end of the century most of the coalfields in England, Scotland and Wales were being worked on a small scale.[10]: 8 As the use of coal amongst the artisans became more widespread, it became clear that coal smoke was detrimental to health and the increasing pollution in London led to much unrest and agitation. As a result of this, a Royal proclamation was issued in 1306 prohibiting artificers of London from using sea coal in their furnaces and commanding them to return to the traditional fuels of wood and charcoal.[10]: 10 During the first half of the 14th century coal began to be used for domestic heating in coal producing areas of Britain, as improvements were made in the design of domestic hearths.[10]: 13 Edward III was the first king to take an interest in the coal trade of the north east, issuing a number of writs to regulate the trade and allowing the export of coal to Calais.[10]: 15 The demand for coal steadily increased in Britain during the 15th century, but it was still mainly being used in the mining districts, in coastal towns or being exported to continental Europe.[10]: 19 However, by the middle of the 16th century supplies of wood were beginning to fail in Britain and the use of coal as a domestic fuel rapidly expanded.[10]: 22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining
Seems relevant that the coal mining areas worked out the way to use coal more cleanly in home furnaces a couple of centuries before the 'running out of wood' shift was supposed to have happened.
You might be able to trace whether the trees disappeared first in the areas where they had coal mines.
edit: interesting take on this here:
https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/wood-scarcity/
> In 1611, the agricultural writer Arthur Standish warned, ‘No wood, no kingdom.’ Deforestation, he claimed, threatened to undermine English agriculture, impoverish the poor, and provoke rebellions. In contrast, his contemporary Dudley Digges – a politician and investor in commercial and colonial ventures – took the opposite position. He argued that fears of wood scarcity were unfounded; a ploy by ‘beggars’ dwelling in forests and the greedy, feckless landlords who profited from these desperate tenants, both of whom wished to protect forests from conversion to more profitable uses. A third perspective was offered by the London merchant and deputy treasurer of the Virginia Company, Robert Johnson. Wood scarcity was real and incurable, and the only solution was to exploit abundant woods in the new English colony of Virginia.
Mines get deeper and start flooding more, pumping is more difficult and you have an "energy crisis" as coal mines struggle to keep up production and land has already been deforested.
Choose a place that has slowly ramping up energy consumption so that they start supplanting it with coal until there's a threshold of it being profitable to mine coal in deeper wells.
What I still don't understand is why it took so long. Is it the critical mass of population and urban vs. rural population? Could it have happend in Asia, the Middle East or other parts of Europe? How long would we have had to wait if it hadn't happened in Great Britain?
Then there's the next step Bret discusses: the Newcomen engine apparently worked well enough for mining purposes that the next big improvement took 50 years and then it was James Watt that got involved.
"It is particularly remarkable here how much of these conditions are unique to Britain: it has to be coal, coal has to have massive economic demand (to create the demand for pumping water out of coal mines) and then there needs to be massive demand for spinning (so you need a huge textile export industry fueled both by domestic wool production and the cotton spoils of empire) and a device to manage the conversion of rotational energy into spun thread. I’ve left this bit out for space, but you also need a major incentive for the design of pressure-cylinders (which, in the event, was the demand for better siege cannon) because of how that dovetails with developing better cylinders for steam engines."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining#:~:text...
Similar comments here about the lack of wood driving the use of coal.
https://industrialrevolution.org.uk/coal-mines-industrial-re...
And:
It's not a simple story. There were distinctly regional transitions and pressures from things like the expansion of urban centers that created demand for food which could not be mined unlike fuel that could be both mined and grown. Other factors like the spread of horses for ploughing (displacing oxen) and improvements in agricultural machinery were also important. The growth of distribution networks (canals) was also very important. Still copicing was practiced commercially right into the 20th century, and some copices were not cut back - they were just abandoned. You can see these weird old trees out in the English countryside today.
So it's accurate to say "wood as a heat fuel was scare for some people in some places". Conversely it is fair to say that coal displaced some other fuels including wood gradually, and that the use of land for crops other than wood became gradually more attractive.
https://www.bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLES/62_1_WardeWilliamson.p...
https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
Tl;dr: 7:1 raw wood to charcoal conversion. And a lot of charcoal needed for each iron batch. Or "To put that in some perspective, a Roman legion (roughly 5,000 men) in the Late Republic might have carried into battle around 44,000kg (c. 48.5 tons) of iron – not counting pots, fittings, picks, shovels and other tools we know they used. That iron equipment in turn might represent the mining of around 541,200kg (c. 600 tons) of ore, smelted with 642,400kg (c. 710 tons) of charcoal, made from 4,620,000kg (c. 5,100 tons) of wood."
I believe this is a common misconception. The author seems vaguely aware of it because just before this he says that the forests were cleared in antiquity, which is the usual response to point out this as being a wrong theory that doesn't add up.
They cleared most of the forests for agriculture and kept and 'farmed' the ones they coppiced for fuel for a long time after clearing the rest. When they no longer felt they needed wood as fuel, they cut down more rather than managing them as they had for hundreds of years.
This is like saying people started eating beyond burgers because they ran out of cows. No, we'll stop having herds of cows because we have a replacement that makes them less necessary.