This seems like a vast amount which even wasteful production could hardly exhaust in thousands of years. But much of the supply is of such low grade as to be inefficient as a steam producer, much of it occurs at such deep levels or so remote from the centers of population as to be commercially unprofitable to mine. Mr. Floyd W. Parsons, formerly editor of the _Coal Age_, has warned us that "each year now witnesses the exhaustion of a number of high-grade coal areas. Far more mines producing better grades of coal are being worked out than there are new mines commencing to produce.... Operating companies are now going over their acreage, taking out pillars and working low-grade thin seams." And Mr. D. B. Rushmore, chief engineer in the power and mining department of the General Electric Company, calculates that if our coal consumption were to continue to increase at the apparently normal rate of seven per cent each year, the life of our known reserves would be as follows: Eastern District, which includes the most accessible and best quality of our fuel 59 years Eastern, Central, and Southern Districts 65 years Entire U. S. and Alaska, two-thirds of this being low-grade coals and lignites 84 years These figures are based upon the appraisals of the U. S. Geological Survey. They include coal in veins as shallow as fourteen inches, all coal whose ash content does not exceed thirty per cent, and all known deposits within six thousand feet of the surface. They are based on the optimistic assumption that two-thirds of the coal in the mines will be brought to the surface, a considerably higher recovery than has hitherto been achieved. Mr. Rushmore concludes that the evidence points unmistakably to an approaching scarcity of high-grade coal and increasingly higher prices. One of the greatest single causes of waste and increased prices is our antiquated system of distributing the energy contained in coal. It is estimated that every hundred tons of coal shipped involves the burning of ten tons in railroad locomotives. There is no longer any technical justification for transporting power in the enormously bulky form of coal when it could be much more efficiently distributed by pipe and wire in the form of gas and electricity. Even were it not enormously inefficient, there are definite physical limits beyond which the steam haulage of coal in bulk cannot be increased--certain bottle necks like that through which the Lehigh River flows, narrow edges like that along the Susquehanna, where no more slow puffing trains can go toiling up and down the slippery grades, because there is no more room for them on the tracks. Already the load upon the antiquated steam railroads is too heavy for them to bear, so that the system of transportation breaks down under every peak load and in every crisis such as that induced by the war.