Occasionally, when I’m walking the dog on the beach, I find a lump of coal, black against the yellow sand. The Firth of Forth, the fjord that washes the north of Edinburgh, cuts deep into the seam that Scotland’s central belt is built on. Sometimes, the waves dislodge a chunk of the bed, and wash up a 350-million-year-old piece of driftwood from the mighty forests of the Carboniferous Period.
In many ways, the story of man-made climate change was first written with these stones. Across the water from Portobello beach where I walk the dog is Fife, where a young Adam Smith observed the birth of industrial capitalism, powered by that same bed of rock. On the Firth of Clyde to the west is Greenock, the home town of James Watt, whose improvements to the steam engine drove the Industrial Revolution and powered the expansion of the British Empire.
With the engineers and philosophers produced by the Enlightenment, it’s often claimed – somewhat arrogantly – that Scotland invented the modern world.
