Last week I wrote a post about how Americans originally hated coal. Back in the early 1800s, when coal stoves first came along for the household, Americans loathed them.

Why? Because they couldn’t see any flames: Coal stoves were closed tight. Historically, Americana had heated their homes with open wooden fires — and they loved seeing those flickering yellow-and-orange flames.

Who can blame them? A wood fire is one of the most hauntingly beautiful things to behold. The way flames flicker and dance makes them — and they shadows they cast — seem alive. The crackle and pop of logs is practically a form of ASMR. I’ve camped a ton (ten years in the Boy Scouts of Canada) and I’ve felt how campfires can mesmerize, and calm the twitchy modern mind.

So these were, interestingly, the big reasons people hated coal: Aesthetic and cultural. Technologically, the new energy source was not inherently worse. On the contrary, coal was far cheaper and more efficient than wood. (And given that early Americans had deforested big chunks of the northeast while heating their homes, coal was — ironically — the more sustainable fuel at the time, at least in the short-term goal of preserving 19th-century trees.)

Still, it was incredibly hard to stop burning wood, and let those beautiful flames go.

In my Smithsonian column about the resistance to household coal, I compared it to the cultural and aesthetic objections we’re often seeing to household renewables. Homeowners’ associations all over the country are banning rooftop solar in their neighborhoods because members of the association don’t like the way it looks. Windmills face opposition from locals who hate how it changes the view; the same goes for big solar arrays in fields.

When I was researching that Smithsonian piece, one of my interview subjects raised another possibility — an intriguing and subtle one — about why some people might dislike renewables:

Solar and wind don’t burn anything.

It was Barbara Freese who made this point to me. She’s the author of the superb book Coal: A Human History. When we spoke, she talked for a long while about the ways early Americans hated coal (“people were blaming coal-fired stoves for impaired vision, impaired nerves, baldness and tooth decay”). She talked about the primal beauty of fire (“it really has hypnotic qualities”). And we discussed the aesthetic objections to solar panels today — how they change the facades of historic homes, or fill up a previously green field with rows of glass and steel.

Then Freese made an incredibly interesting point that tied this all together: If solar and wind truly become omnipresent, it would mean the end of humans burning things to create energy.

That’s a very, very long tradition. Humans first used fire as an energy source for cooking probably two million years ago. Then as agriculture took over “we had fire at the heart of our of our domestic life,” Freese noted. The same was true of the industrial revolution: With all those steam-powered factories, locomotives, and then cars and trucks and planes and electrical power-plants, fire was generally at the heart of it. Sure, we used nuclear and hydropower, but in the minority. Most of the time, when we moved big things around and generated electricity, we were using fire.

Granted, most American homes aren’t heated with fire any more, so we don’t have a directly personal a relationship with flame — so “we don’t look at the fires” the way we did in a home hearth, as Freese notes.

But as she talked, I realized that Americans still do have a lot of romance about combustion. Car-owners coo over the roar of a powerful engine; I find the thrum of a motorcyle kind of badass. Fire, burning, and combustion are tied up inextricably with many western ideas about power itself — and I mean “power” not in newtons and joules and kilowatt hours, but power as in “the agency to do things, and to go places”.

With renewables — solar and wind power, particularly— all that age-old romance of fire, millennia in the making, goes away.

“We are — when we’re thinking about dealing with the climate crisis — we’re talking about not burning stuff,” Freese noted. “Almost entirely. Almost entirely! To me that is a huge thing.”

As she added ..

The notion that we are going to move from a species that evolved around burning stuff to one that is going to leap past burning altogether — to me, that is just so huge, and something that I think is exciting. And yet I think it’s underappreciated, what a big step this is going to be.

If we’re really lucky and smart and do things right, we’re talking about doing that in the next 30 years.

I, too, am excited about the transition to renewables! Hell, I’ve been low-key freaking out about global warming ever since Jim Hansen’s 1988 testimony, so I’m worried we’re not going to make the transition fast enough. I wish we could stop burning stuff for electricity today.

I wish there weren’t so much resistance to solar and wind. Obviously, a big chunk of that resistance is about money. Fossil fuel interests — and the enormous industries built around fossil fuels, most notable automobiles and utilities — have been resisting renewables for decades, spending tons of money lobbying against them and seeding fear-uncertainty-and-doubt.

But there are logistic issues too, such that many people (including me) have reasonable concerns about the challenge of shifting to renewables. That shift can’t be effected solely by individuals buying electric cars or solar arrays; it’ll also require the type of serious civic planning and resources that America deployed in previous wars or in building interstate highways. It’s entirely doable! (Here’s a great book on how.) But being nervous about it is natural.

Still, I now wonder if some of the distaste for wind and solar goes really deep — and taps into this movement away from fire.

I’m speculating, of course. But this is incredibly old and primal culture, so it makes sense it’d stir deep, gut-instinct emotions. Those flickering flames are powerful, as is the rumble of the engine.

Of course, if you take the big view, solar and wind are in fact still getting their power from fire. But it’s starfire: Not the flames from a human burning coal and gas, but our incandescent sun, 93 million miles away.

That’s all the fire I need.