When in 1939 war did break out between Germany on the one hand, and Britain and France on the other, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dutifully invoked the Neutrality Acts. However, he believed that this was a fundamentally different war from World War I.
Another advanced coal technology is coal gasification, a process in which coal is converted to a gas (called syngas) before it is burned, making it easier to separate CO2 as a relatively pure gas before power is generated.
Coal was first used as a fuel around 1000 BCE in China. With the development of the steam engine in the United Kingdom in 1769, coal came into more common use as a power source. Coal was later used to drive ships and locomotives. By the 19th century, gas extracted from coal was beiyg used for street lighting in London.