Modern humans have walked the Earth for about 300,000 years, and for most of that time, our species’ activities have had minor impact on the planet’s climate. While things like deforestation and irrigation changed landscapes and ecosystems, for the most part, global temperatures went up and down over the millennia based on natural cycles, and human populations had to adapt to survive. Then, about 250 years ago, something changed. New technologies and innovations, powered by fossil fuels, allowed us to make goods and materials faster—and in greater amounts—than ever before. This period, known as the Industrial Revolution, marked the start of an era of unprecedented economic growth, but also of human-caused environmental destruction. The Industrial Revolution was a catalyst for the climate crisis, and the impacts of industrialization continue to shape society today.

The preindustrial world

Before the Industrial Revolution, most people lived in rural areas and worked on family farms, growing their own food and extracting raw materials in line with the seasons. Skilled artisans made goods by hand, so production was slow. People burned wood to heat their homes and cook their food. Any “machines”—such as mills or looms—were powered by wind, water, humans, or animals.

Modern forms of transportation like cars and trains didn’t exist yet, so if you wanted to get somewhere, you walked or perhaps rode in a horse-drawn cart. This meant that most people were limited in how far and how fast they could travel. Without the constant background noise of large vehicles and other machinery, preindustrial life was quieter than it is today. But things weren’t easy. Most people spent a lot of time doing hard physical labor and their life expectancy—which was around 40 years—reflected these challenges.¹

Rapid change

Things began to change in the 1700s with the advent of new technologies that made the manufacturing process easier and speedier. Chief among these technologies was the steam engine. This innovation, which was invented in Britain in 1712, transformed the heat from burning coal into high-pressure steam that could power machines and entire factories. This enabled rapid production of goods and moved manufacturing out of individual homes and into large factories. People moved from the countryside into cities to earn wages working in factories and mines, as cheaper factory-made goods replaced many home-produced products and left rural workers seeking new jobs. Railways were constructed to transport goods and supplies via steam-powered locomotives. Britain began producing huge amounts of iron and steel to build new industrial infrastructure. The British Empire began demanding higher production from its farms around the world to produce cotton that could feed clothing factories and meat and grains to feed all the factory workers. And coal, a fossil fuel, powered it all.

Coal was a sensible fuel choice because it was abundant, cheap, and burned very, very hot. As environmental historian Paul Warde explains, “coal was cheaper to obtain and cheaper to transport than wood. A wagonload of coal contained much more heat energy than a wagonload of wood, where the combustible woody fibers shared space with a lot of air and water. This made coal cheaper to both extract and to move to markets.” ²

But coal is also one of the dirtiest fossil fuels. When burned for energy, it releases huge amounts of CO₂ (carbon dioxide), a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, trapping heat and contributing to global warming. As the Industrial Revolution unfolded, tens of millions of tons of coal were mined in Britain and the United States every year to power machines, factories, transportation, and to heat homes.³ By the year 1900, coal supplied roughly half of the world’s energy. Data taken from ice cores (samples drilled from ice sheets or glaciers that provide a record of the Earth’s past conditions) show a corresponding spike in atmospheric CO₂ levels. And it was around this time that we began to see global temperatures start to rise.

This is why we use the preindustrial era as a benchmark for global temperature trends. To measure human-made climate change, researchers compare modern temperatures to those that existed on Earth before humans began burning huge amounts of fossil fuels for energy on a large industrial scale. We know that today, there is 50% more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than in preindustrial years,⁴ and the world is at least 1.3 degrees Celsius (or about 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it was in 1900.

Going global

The steam engine was just one of many groundbreaking new technologies that entered the market around the turn of the twentieth century. Others included the electric generator (which paved the way for the generators still used in most modern power plants) and the internal combustion engine (which is what’s under the hood of all nonelectric vehicles today). In 1913, Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line at his automobile plants. This conveyor-belt system dramatically reduced the time it took to manufacture a car from 12 hours to just 90 minutes. Automobiles grew in popularity, and oil—another fossil fuel—was suddenly in high demand. Today, oil is the world’s top energy source, and some countries have shaped their entire economies around extracting and selling oil to other nations so they, in turn, can keep petrol pumps full and buildings warm, and can manufacture new products like plastic.

Eventually, other industries adopted Ford’s assembly line, and suddenly products were plentiful, affordable, and easily replaceable. And so began an age of mass production and unprecedented consumerism. “The cardinal features of this culture were acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratization of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society,” historian William Leach wrote in his 1993 book Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. Consumer culture continues to accelerate today, and companies use up a lot of fossil fuel energy and natural resources producing new products to turn a profit.⁵

Thanks to steam-powered ships and trains and oil-powered cars and trucks, companies were no longer constrained by geography; they could sell their products all over the world. International trade expanded and countries’ economies became intertwined and interdependent. This globalization was a boon for many countries, with exports becoming a key source of economic growth. Cities grew, populations boomed, and living standards improved for many. But all this growth came at the expense of the natural world: Carbon emissions skyrocketed, landscapes were destroyed to make way for industrial activities, and factories poisoned the air and the water.

In recent decades, so-called natural gas, a fossil fuel, has become a prominent fuel source for industrial activities and electricity generation. While it has been pitched as a “cleaner” alternative to coal and oil, natural gas is primarily methane, a greenhouse gas that is even more potent than carbon dioxide. It’s estimated that methane alone is to blame for about 30% of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.⁶

Looking ahead

As we think about solutions to the climate crisis, one key question is whether we can continue to grow our economy without hurting the planet. Many countries have already started to “decouple” economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions by switching to renewable energy sources like wind and solar. In other words, their emissions are plateauing or falling while their economies are still growing. But the broader trend is not good: Global emissions are rising. Major industries like steel and iron continue to rely heavily on coal, and this dirty fossil fuel still accounts for over one-third of global electricity generation. In 2024, global coal use hit a record high. ⁷

Weaning the global economy off fossil fuels is hard. It requires that entire industries change how they operate, where they get their power from, and how their infrastructure is set up, all without disrupting output or threatening the bottom line. New technologies—like solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries—can replace the old energy sources, but this takes time, money, and complicated logistics. At the same time, fossil fuels themselves have become a major commodity, and some wealthy and powerful nations that export a lot of oil and gas are happy for demand to remain high so their economies can keep growing.

In the meantime, some people believe we need to rethink our consumer behavior. For example, in recent years, movements that advocate supporting local supply chains, reducing consumption by reusing and repairing products, and eating foods that are in season and grown nearby have arisen. Nobody wants to go back to a time before modern conveniences like electricity, but perhaps we could take inspiration from our preindustrial habits that had a lesser impact on the planet.

1 Life expectancy is measured based on “the average of all the different lengths of lives in the population. When mortality is high in infancy and childhood, then many of these lives are very short, and these many short lives really bring down the average age of death.” (From Romola Davenport and Jim Oeppen, “Three Score and Ten?: Top of the Campops: 60 Things You Didn’t Know About Family, Marriage, Work, and Death Since the Middle Ages,” The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, August 15, 2024.)

2 Paul Warde, “The Rise of Coal: Top of the Campops: 60 Things You Didn’t Know About Family, Marriage, Work, and Death Since the Middle Ages,” The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, May 1, 2025.

3 “Why Was Coal So Important to the Industrial Revolution?” BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zpfy3j6#zvrc96f, and Jianfeng Yang, Yun Yu, Teng Ma, Cuiguang Zhang, and Quan Wang, “Evolution of Energy and Metal Demand Driven by Industrial Revolutions and Its Trend Analysis,” Chinese Journal of Population, Resources and Environment 19, no. 3 (September 2021), 256–264, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cjpre.2021.12.028.

4 “Carbon Dioxide—Earth Indicator,” NASA, https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/carbon-dioxide/.

5 Kerryn Higgs, “How the World Embraced Consumerism,” BBC, from The MIT Press Reader, January 20, 2021, and Christina Adams and Kari Alldredge, “How Today’s Consumers Are Spending Their Time and Money,” McKinsey & Company, October 16, 2025.

6 “Methane and Climate Change,” the International Energy Agency’s Global Methane Tracker, 2022, and “Natural Gas,” The International Energy Agency Global Energy Review, 2025.

7 “Coal,” The International Energy Agency and “State of Climate Action 2025,” Systems Change Lab.