Fossil fuels were latecomers to human history. Coal wasn’t widely adopted until the mid-1600s when England faced a wood shortage. Petroleum had been used for millennia as a tonic, medicine and cure-all, but was not burned for energy until it was developed as a lantern fuel in the mid-1800s to replace whale oil, which had become shockingly expensive. Natural gas was produced and used locally as a substitute for manufactured gas but did not see widespread use until interstate pipeline systems became available to transport it nationwide after World War II. The growing reliance on fossil fuel to power the manufacturing, electricity, and transportation sectors was largely a late nineteenth and twentieth century phenomenon. By the start of the twenty-first century, the economy of the United States and indeed the world had become dependent on fossil fuel.