The possibility of the world burning a lot more coal without doing irreparable damage to the climate may be a step closer with the opening in Germany of the first power station to use carbon capture and storage technology.

That we have even got this far without exhausting the Earth's resources would have astonished the Victorians. In the mid-19th century, the outlook seemed bleak. Among the experts arguing that we were squandering our limited energy supply for short-term prosperity was William Stanley Jevons, Professor of Political Economy at University College London.

In his work of 1865, The Coal Question, the distinguished economist cautioned that we had become wholly dependent on the finite resource of coal. Indeed, some calculations - based on the increasing rate of extraction and the geological analysis of how much coal remained underground - suggested that Britain could run out by 1900.

At this point, Jevons maintained, the economy would literally run out of steam, reducing Britons to a medieval standard of living. The cost of shipping coal from elsewhere in the world would be prohibitive and, in any case, the leading geologists calculated that other countries would quickly exhaust their stocks as well.

“I draw the conclusion that I think anyone would draw,” wrote Jevons, “that we cannot long maintain our present rate of increase of consumption.” John Stuart Mill agreed, announcing that his “treatment of the subject was almost exhaustive”. William Ewart Gladstone was so impressed that he devoted a large section of his famous Budget Speech of 1866 to the findings of Jevons.

Jevons foresaw a conservative party arguing for lower growth to conserve the Earth's scarce resources while a liberal party would preach unrestricted expansion in the vague hope that something might turn up.

And, of course, what Jevons did not factor into his calculations was that something did turn up - oil. Nor did he question that received geological opinion about world coal stocks left underground was wrong by a factor of centuries.

We should not feel too superior. Faulty energy predictions are not just a Victorian vice. As recently as 1977, President Jimmy Carter forecast that mankind “could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade”.

The President was talking out of his hat. He must be surprised that oil is still on tap. But not as taken aback as Jevons would be to discover that the world may be on the threshold of a new, cleaner, age of coal.

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