# What if there were NEVER fossil fuels? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 29, 2012, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466 "2012-11-29T14:42:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2012, 2:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/41 "2012-12-02T02:37:06Z")
[QUOTE=Measure for Measure] I’m saying that coal was a trivial source of energy in 1800 so that any number of energy sources could have substituted for it. If you look at the chart here you will see that coal fuel use only exceeded wood fuel during the 1880s. Even in 1860, coal was a small part of the total energy budget. [/QUOTE] That is only talking about coal as a fuel source, and even there I don’t read it the way you are. For one thing, that is energy consumption in the US, which was, sadly, pretty much a back woods area until the late 1800’s. You can’t seriously think that same graph works for the UK or mainland Europe, do you? Another thing is that even on your chart, wood at it’s peak never gets to even 5 quadrillion BTU…and, again, this chart is only looking at energy. This is a PDF, but [here](http://people.duke.edu/~jyw2/Coal_in_Human_History.pdf) is a brief history of coal in human history (and, we are only talking coal here…not oil or natural gas, which also have niches of use through human history…niches they wouldn’t have filled if they didn’t exist): > [@](#): > > For millennia, coal has been a vital energy source to the human population. The Chinese > relied on coal around 1000BC to smelt copper that served as the basis for their currency, and the > Greek philosopher Aristotle made reference to it in his writings when he alluded to a dark > charcoal like rock.1 The discovery of coal cinders among Roman ruins in England suggests that > the Romans relied on coal as a source of energy prior to 400 AD.2 The first written record of coal > in the Americas was taken in 1673 by Louis Joliet who noted “carbon de terra” while mapping > out the Illinois River region. In current day Pennsylvania, the Nanticoke Indians, a Native > American tribe, were using local anthracite coal as a source for energy and jewelry during the > 1760s .3 This energy resource that provided fuel for ancient civilizations is all but history. Today, > steam coal, metallurigal coal, and industrial coal all play a vital role in the United State’s > economy. > Over the years, the demand for coal has risen sharply at certain points throughout history. > The Industrial Revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries had a profound effect on coal production > and consumption due to the iron industry and technical advances such as James Watt’s modern > day steam engine. As a result, reliance on coal reached an all time high. According to Dr. > Michael Flinn, a former president of the Economic History Society of Great Britain, England’s > “output of coal grew roughly six-fold between 1750 and 1830”.4 Due to coal’s low transportation > costs, those living during Britain’s Industrial Revolution became increasingly reliant on the > abundant resource as the demand for cheap energy soared. Flinn also notes that Britain’s > economy during the 1830s was primarily coal-based after comparing per capita use to that of the > 1980s.5 As a result, the people of Great Britain relied heavily on energy derived from coal to > power their lives. Coal was also vital to the success of the American Industrial Revolution. > Alfred Chandler, a famous economic historian and Harvard business professor, claimed that coal > served as a primary driving force of industrialization through his study of the north-eastern states > of America during the 1830-1840 time period due to the abundant amounts of cheap anthracite > coal capable of being easily transported.6 Like the citizens of England, American households > relied on the readily available inexpensive anthracite coal as a source for heat. > [@](#): > > The problem is that the early days of the industrial revolution weren’t exactly family-friendly. We’ve had phenomenal growth over the past 120 years or so, which couldn’t exist without cheap energy. I’m arguing that we could have had an industrial revolution, though a mass-consumer one would be delayed at least 100 years. And in this alternative history, most of the world would still be agrarian today. And I’m arguing that without coal, oil and natural gas, we’d have never gotten to the point we were at even in the 18th and early 19th centuries. They did more than simply provide energy for steam engines or fuel for heating houses or gas lights in London or Paris. Without them it would have set back development in myriad other fields, and it would have made it too costly to HAVE an industrial revolution. Things would have been more expensive, thus defeating the whole idea…sort of like asking why the Romans didn’t have an industrial revolution using water power. I mean, they built the water infrastructure, and even built large scale factories to use cascading water. Why didn’t they have an industrial revolution? Because they didn’t have all the other technologies they needed to make it something worth while to have, and what they had was too expensive to make it worth while…so, it didn’t happen. Same goes for our industrial revolution…it just wouldn’t have happened. We’d have had the same flat growth and progress we had in the centuries before the industrial revolution exploded on the scene. > [@](#): > > In the back of my mind, I’m worried about the chemical industry and losing lots of developmental lynchpins. So I frankly don’t think this question can be nailed without detailed study. Still, my underlying view is that once the scientific revolution of the 1600-1700s is in place, much can follow. If you can stop Gutenberg though, all bets are off. I think you are wrong. And I don’t see any reason why Gutenberg and the printing press wouldn’t have happened, but having the ability to mass produce writing is far from the ability to mass produce STEEL. Show me how they could have mass produced glass and steel in industrial quantities and I’ll buy that we COULD have had an industrial revolution without fossil fuels. Thus far I’ve seen no evidence that this could have happened…and basically without mass produced cast iron, steel, glass and all the other materials there would be no industrial revolution, no solar panels (probably no discovery of electricity, or even if there was it would be more like the Greek steam engine…interesting, but what’s the practical application without cheap ways to generate power?) or nuclear reactors. So, we never get beyond the late Medieval period IMHO. YMMV of course, and that’s what makes the discussion fun. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2012, 7:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/42 "2012-12-02T07:02:45Z")
It’s my impression that the global figures for energy shares aren’t too much different, though I might dig further. (Here’s one supporting chart going back to 1850: biomass was bigger than coal, while hydro was roughly equal to coal in 1850 [The Quaker Economist #155 - History & Future of World Energy](http://www.quaker.org/clq/2007/TQE155-EN-WorldEnergy-2.html) . I really need a European chart though.) IF we concede the quantity argument, then the question turns on the substitutability of coal for wood, something that I’ve basically assumed. That said, there’s a possible fallacy in XT’s argument. XT has shown that coal was used a lot prior to the 1800. But so what? Railroads were used a lot during the 1800s and for years historians would claim that they were indispensable for US 19th century economic growth. But Robert Fogal blew that argument out of the water. [1] It’s true that a lowest-cost technology will tend to dominate and railroads certainly spanned the US by the end of the century. But to evaluate the significance of something, you have to consider its substitutes. And canals, though inferior to railroads, had a lot of growth potential: the Erie Canal was profitable after all. In fact, I’m riffing off of [that work](http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/19) a lot in this thread. The difference though is that fossil fuel usage is a heck of a lot more comprehensive than railroads. > [@](#): > > Romans didn’t have an industrial revolution using water power. I mean, they built the water infrastructure, and even built large scale factories to use cascading water. Why didn’t they have an industrial revolution? Because they didn’t have all the other technologies they needed to make it something worth while to have, and what they had was too expensive to make it worth while…so, it didn’t happen. I’m saying here that they lacked the technologies because they lacked empirical science. (Therefore, if we can’t make it to 1600, then we are screwed.) Furthermore, ancient social structure was messed up: slave societies aren’t especially adept at creating labor saving devices. > [@](#): > > Show me how they could have mass produced glass and steel in industrial quantities and I’ll buy that we COULD have had an industrial revolution without fossil fuels. My energy chart shows that US coal usage was small during the 1830s. So we had sufficient energy to start an industrial revolution, though the rise of the modern corporation in the post-bellum era was dependent upon plentiful energy. My guess is that extensive coal mining came after the steam engine, which was applied early on to the problem of pumping water out of coal mines, IIRC. Incidentally, there’s another vulnerable spot in my argument. Much of modern physics was developed in Copenhagen and Vienna in the early 20th century. Could that sort of bourgeois society have existed in the 1830s? Russia in the 1850s produced Dostoevsky, London produced Dickens and there were men of letters during the 1700s. So I’m guessing the answer is “Yes”, though Einstein would have been commuting by trolley at most, not rail. [1] Not really, discussion of the matter continued for a while. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2012, 7:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/43 "2012-12-02T07:52:21Z")
How about hydrogen as a replacement for petrol in most combustion applications (power stations, cars, home heating…) ? You can readily synthesize it from water (including seawater, which we’re not about to run out of any time soon) using little more than photoelectric cells and a steady supply of metal. Of course, it does have the ever so slight drawback of, um, exploding at the earliest convenience. So there is that. Still, I mean, if it’s all we’ve got it behoves us to make do. Maybe use a wholly decentralized power station system with small substations dotting the landscape instead of large superplants ready to make big booms. It’s more energy efficient to do it that way, anyway. It’s also possible we would have seen more development of wind energy - windmills were a thing, dynamos are a thing, tack a dynamo on a windmill and you’ve got yourself a wind turbine. We wouldn’t be getting the kind of energy output we’re milking out of fossil fuels/nuclear power, but then we wouldn’t be needing so much either because our cities wouldn’t have developed in ways that require so much raw power to function. Candlelight, trolley cars and land telephone is still kind of allright. Not the Dark Ages or anything. Would it have been possible to hammer out an internal combustion engine using gunpowder ? I know a few were tinkered with as early as the 17th century and some were even built in the modern age, but they never quite got the timing right and the engines all failed or blew up eventually. Is that an inevitability of the combustible used ; or a simple technical hurdle that could/would have been overcome, had gasoline engines not proven a whole lot easier ? If you can make that, I fail to see a reason one couldn’t build power stations, trains, mass produce cast iron etc… using gunpowder power. Sulphur is plentiful, Potassium nitrate a little less so but we could always build industrial bat guano farms, and charcoal is only limited by wood growth. Easy peasy. I’ll echo **Measure for Measure** on the chemistry front angst though. We use petroleum derivatives for or in so much stuff, and said stuff was so central in the development of…well, _everything_… It’s hard to imagine a modern world without plastics. ---
**Author:** ![Scholar\_Beardpig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de053/32.png) [@Scholar\_Beardpig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scholar_Beardpig)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2012, 9:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/44 "2012-12-02T09:59:25Z")
I am learning so much, and I am just content to listen to all this. Please, by all means, continue! ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2012, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/45 "2012-12-02T15:56:20Z")
> [@XT](#): > > And I’m arguing that without coal, oil and natural gas, we’d have never gotten to the point we were at even in the 18th and early 19th centuries. They did more than simply provide energy for steam engines or fuel for heating houses or gas lights in London or Paris. Without them it would have set back development in myriad other fields, and it would have made it too costly to HAVE an industrial revolution. Several points to elaborate on this. I found [a source (pdf)](http://geography.fullerton.edu/taylor/enst595t/darkages.pdf) for looking at the deforestation of Europe. The maps on pages 13 and 14 are a comparison of central Europe between the forestland in c. 900 and c. 1900. Without fossil fuels, the deforestation would have happened that much quicker, and without forests for heating, Europe would not have been able to spend its resources on development. The first commercial steam engines were developed to pump water out of coal mines. Obviously, without coal there, this would not have been a driving force for the development. Also, the initial steam engines were terrible inefficient, [only about 1%](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine) > [@](#): > > Savery’s engine solved a problem that had only recently become a serious one; raising water out of the mines in southern England as they reached greater depths. Savery’s engine was somewhat less efficient than Newcomen’s, but this was compensated for by the fact that the separate pump used by the Newcomen engine was inefficient, giving the two engines roughly the same efficiency of 6 million foot pounds per bushel of coal (less than 1%). Have abundant supplies of inexpensive fossil fuels was a requirement for the development of the steam engine. Once Watt’s more efficient engine was developed, it may have been possible to consider burning wood, but this is an example of a key invention which could very well have not been invented without the existence of coal. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2012, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/46 "2012-12-02T17:04:52Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > How about hydrogen as a replacement for petrol in most combustion applications (power stations, cars, home heating…) ? You can readily synthesize it from water (including seawater, which we’re not about to run out of any time soon) using little more than photoelectric cells and a steady supply of metal. People have always used solar energy, they just did it in the more efficient method of growing plants and then burning the plants. You could grow trees and burn wood, or sugar cane and make alcohol, or whatever, but what you’re not getting is how MUCH energy we get, and got throughout history, from fossil fuels. Hydrogen and gunpowder and so on aren’t the answer, because they don’t create energy, they merely transform it into a convenient package. Gunpowder is merely charcoal that already contains an oxidizer so that it doesn’t need oxygen from the air to burn. So if you’ve already got the charcoal and want to burn it to create power, it’s a lot more efficient to mix it with easily obtained oxygen from the air rather than expensive sulfur and saltpeter. You can convert any source of carbon into a fuel suitable for an internal combustion engine rather than a steam engine, as long as you’re willing to pay the price in setting up the factories to convert the fuel stock from one to another, and accept the loss of efficiency. Converting coal into liquid fuel is well known, you can convert wood or other crops into liquid or gaseous fuels as well. Brazil’s use of ethanol from sugar cane is well known. Again, we can replace coal with charcoal in 99% of cases. This is not the problem. The problem is the supply of charcoal and wood and other biofuels. Europe was almost totally deforested due to the demand for wood. Even in the Middle Ages forests weren’t wildernesses, they were carefully managed to supply wood. You couldn’t go out and chop down wood from the forests, because those forests were the property of somebody who already owned every stick of wood in that forest, and had a market for it already. You can substitute charcoal for coal, and alcohol for petroleum, that’s easy. The problem is producing even a fraction of the amount of coal and petroleum we use and used in real life. Also the notion that we could radically scale up hydro power is misguided. Yes, you could stick a paddlewheel into every creek and stream. But those paddlewheels provide trivial amounts of power compared to modern needs. To produce electricity on an industrial scale you need dams and turbines. And there just aren’t that many places in the world where these things can be constructed. Of course without coal the early industrial revolution could depend on wind and water power. But that only provides a small fraction of the energy we needed in real life. ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2012, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/47 "2012-12-02T21:18:05Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > To produce electricity on an industrial scale you need dams and turbines. And there just aren’t that many places in the world where these things can be constructed. Of course without coal the early industrial revolution could depend on wind and water power. But that only provides a small fraction of the energy we needed in real life. Look at some of the energy charts I’ve cited. In 1830 we consumed “A small fraction of the energy we needed in real life”. But there was mechanized clothing manufacture and newspapers. Now I doubt the steel necessary to create railroads or skyscrapers would be cost-effective: but that age came later (sooner for RRs, later for skyscrapers). Then again, Edison, who invented systematic corporate research and development, came much later as well. I vote that something like this thread would make an interesting piece of sci fi/alternative history. But I would permit 1%, 5% or maybe 10% fossil fuel reserves: 0% seems a little grim. (Related question: is a world like [Aria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aria_%28manga%29) plausible, even given high tech? I mean ignoring sky castles and the like, can you run a bourgeois urban society on canals and wind? How much coal did Venice use: probably a lot for their glassworks et al. Similarly for Amsterdam.) We also need dinosaurs: you can’t go wrong with dinosaurs. **TokyoBayer** : Although pumping water was the first application for the steam engine, it’s hard to believe that some other application would not have arose. That’s the insight of Fogel et al: you need to take the [counterfactual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_history) seriously. Though I confess that on occasion I will snark at that Nobel Laurette, depending on my mood. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2012, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/48 "2012-12-02T21:21:26Z")
> [@Agent\_Foxtrot](#): > > (Edit: I reported this thinking we were in GQ, not GD. Mods, please disregard the report.) > > Where would we be without petroleum? I imagine we’d still be utilizing coal-based fuels for energy. No coal, either, read the OP. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2012, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/49 "2012-12-02T21:24:37Z")
> [@pancakes3](#): > > There’s a huge span of time between the iron age and the industrial revolution. That’s what I was questioning. As far as tech past steam engine goes, it depends on how optimistic about mankind you are. We could have developed fantastic ways to harness electricity like lightning farms, or waterpower, etc. Or we could just be stuck in a 18th century way of life. Europe would be marginalized because of the halt of progress that the Industrial Revolution would have brought and the concentration of power would be a lot more evenly distributed. Or it could be a world of [Clockpunk!](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ClockPunk) 🆒 ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2012, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/50 "2012-12-02T22:26:49Z")
[QUOTE=Kobal2] How about hydrogen as a replacement for petrol in most combustion applications (power stations, cars, home heating…) ? You can readily synthesize it from water (including seawater, which we’re not about to run out of any time soon) using little more than photoelectric cells and a steady supply of metal. [/QUOTE] Hydrogen is fuel carrier, not a fuel source…you basically have to put energy in to get energy out. The thing is, even leaving that aside, what is a plausible scenario how someone in the 17th or 18th century would develop the necessary technologies to use hydrogen to do any of the things you are proposing. That’s the thing…using hindsight and a knowledge of technology, you could see the possibilities of alternatives (though I think that even with modern knowledge of what’s possible that hydrogen without any fossil fuels is completely impracticable)…but folks living under the energy crunch and budget of a world that was always completely devoid of all fossil fuels wouldn’t have that knowledge to fall back on. > [@](#): > > It’s also possible we would have seen more development of wind energy - windmills were a thing, dynamos are a thing, tack a dynamo on a windmill and you’ve got yourself a wind turbine. We wouldn’t be getting the kind of energy output we’re milking out of fossil fuels/nuclear power, but then we wouldn’t be needing so much either because our cities wouldn’t have developed in ways that require so much raw power to function. Candlelight, trolley cars and land telephone is still kind of allright. Not the Dark Ages or anything. They DID develop windmill technologies, and I’m sure would have continued to use it and even make refinements and breakthroughs. Water as well…look at what the Romans accomplished. But you are leaping from wind/water power for mechanical uses to electricity because you know all about that. I see no plausible reason they would have made those leaps…and no plausible way they COULD have done it even if you sent them a text back in time. Again, where would they get the materials and energy TOO make wind and water do all that stuff you think they would have come up with to have it do to replace cheap and abundant fossil fuels? You need steel, and copper wire and loads more wood or building material as well as a host of other things…and you need them in industrial quantities. Where are you getting them from? Trees are only going to take you so far. It’s a catch-22…and as I said earlier, I think you are going to be behind the curve of our actual history much earlier. I don’t think you are going to get to the the late Medieval period or early Renascence in the same way we did, because you’d have to have been having to rely completely on wood for much more, much earlier. Not only would that have shaped the path of invention, but it would have limited your energy budget much more, much earlier. > [@](#): > > I’ll echo Measure for Measure on the chemistry front angst though. We use petroleum derivatives for or in so much stuff, and said stuff was so central in the development of…well, _everything_… It’s hard to imagine a modern world without plastics. Well, we would never have developed plastics…it just isn’t something that would have been invented. We’d have used the same things we used before plastics…wood being one of the primary things, but also bone and shell and other things like that. A lot of things we take for granted today though rely on the ability to have a larger energy budget, and access to industrial levels of resources. That enabled the development of new technologies…technologies that would never have been developed because we wouldn’t have had the large margins to broaden research and go wild in so many different directions. Why didn’t the Romans develop the steam engine, or the Greeks or Persians develop electricity, or the early Europeans or Islamic empires mass produced steel and wrought/cast iron? Why didn’t the Chinese do any of these things? They all COULD have done those things…but they didn’t. All of those things exploded on the scene in the last 200 years…around the time our energy budget skyrocketed while the costs plummeted. It was fossil fuels that enabled all of that…all of what we have today. Everything from modern agriculture to modern technology…everything depended on that cheap and abundant energy from fossil fuels. Without that you’d be back to the mind set and capabilities of the iron age…and even there, they’d be scrambling and having to manage or ration their resources very carefully because of the tree shortage…Peak Lumber would be on all the broadsheets (possibly made of some wood substitute) in Europe. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2012, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/51 "2012-12-02T22:42:00Z")
[QUOTE=Measure for Measure] It’s my impression that the global figures for energy shares aren’t too much different, though I might dig further. (Here’s one supporting chart going back to 1850: biomass was bigger than coal, while hydro was roughly equal to coal in 1850 [http://www.quaker.org/clq/2007/TQE15...dEnergy-2.html](http://www.quaker.org/clq/2007/TQE15...dEnergy-2.html) . I really need a European chart though.) IF we concede the quantity argument, then the question turns on the substitutability of coal for wood, something that I’ve basically assumed. [/QUOTE] The UK began serious use of coal in the mid 18th century, and it ramped up from there. Gas lighting was being used in major European cities by the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Chinese were using coal as to produce metals as far back as 1000 BC, and it was widely used in Europe and England for the same things by the mid-18th century. The US was a mostly agrarian nation that had a small population and was mainly centered around the East Cost and mid-South until the mid 19th century. We didn’t start really catching up to our European cousins as far as energy budget or manufacturing until the late 19th and early 20th century. Your graph pretty much shows when that happened…when we started to seriously use fossil fuels and develop our own production and manufacturing instead of relying on Europe for manufactured goods while we shipped back raw materials, like most early colonies do wrt the mother country. > [@](#): > > That said, there’s a possible fallacy in XT’s argument. XT has shown that coal was used a lot prior to the 1800. But so what? Railroads were used a lot during the 1800s and for years historians would claim that they were indispensable for US 19th century economic growth. But Robert Fogal blew that argument out of the water. [1] It’s true that a lowest-cost technology will tend to dominate and railroads certainly spanned the US by the end of the century. But to evaluate the significance of something, you have to consider its substitutes. And canals, though inferior to railroads, had a lot of growth potential: the Erie Canal was profitable after all. In fact, I’m riffing off of that work a lot in this thread. The difference though is that fossil fuel usage is a heck of a lot more comprehensive than railroads. I don’t think any of this makes what I’m saying a fallacy. You keep pointing to single technologies and saying there are work-arounds, but so what? It’s the breadth of technologies, and more importantly the lower energy budget that’s the key to why we wouldn’t/couldn’t have had an industrial revolution like the one we had even in it’s earliest manifestation. > [@](#): > > I’m saying here that they lacked the technologies because they lacked empirical science. (Therefore, if we can’t make it to 1600, then we are screwed.) Furthermore, ancient social structure was messed up: slave societies aren’t especially adept at creating labor saving devices. And I’m saying that they would lack the energy budget and resources to get beyond that…to have enough slack in their system TOO develop all these other nice things. We didn’t get beyond thos ‘ancient social structures’ that were ‘messed up’ and were ‘slave societies’ because we became enlightened and better human beings…we got beyond them because we found a cheap, abundant energy source that allowed us to mass produce things like steel and made labor saving device and a whole host of other technologies feasible and economically viable. And THAT is what created the path to getting rid of slavery and all that other ancient nastiness. And also allowed for the development of the scientific method and all the other things we take for granted today. > [@](#): > > My energy chart shows that US coal usage was small during the 1830s. So we had sufficient energy to start an industrial revolution, though the rise of the modern corporation in the post-bellum era was dependent upon plentiful energy. My guess is that extensive coal mining came after the steam engine, which was applied early on to the problem of pumping water out of coal mines, IIRC. And I disagree, as I’ve already said and for the reasons I’ve stated. I don’t believe we would have ever gotten there, certainly not on the time line we have today until the early industrial revolution where it would peter out. We would have been resource starved and having to ration energy resources much earlier and it would have even more stunted our development and constrained it to much narrower lines of inquiry. > [@](#): > > Incidentally, there’s another vulnerable spot in my argument. Much of modern physics was developed in Copenhagen and Vienna in the early 20th century. Could that sort of bourgeois society have existed in the 1830s? Russia in the 1850s produced Dostoevsky, London produced Dickens and there were men of letters during the 1700s. So I’m guessing the answer is “Yes”, though Einstein would have been commuting by trolley at most, not rail. I’d say no, of course. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2012, 12:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/52 "2012-12-03T00:27:52Z")
XT - I think your timing is off but I’d need a European energy graph to test this. The US and the global energy charts support my contentions. One factor that makes me dubious about your story is that the US 19th century developmental path was labor saving/resource intensive relative to the European one. [1] So we _might_ expect extensive coal use - and we did. But it wasn’t close to wood usage even in 1850. Talking about the early uses of these various sources doesn’t really address the issue. [1] But I see from "Economic Development and the Demand for Energy: A Historical Perspective on the Next 20 Years " that US energy usage per unit of GDP only surpassed that of the UK around 1900. So the high use of wood could reflect mere agrarianism. In fact US use of energy per unit of GDP tracked that of the world up to the 1840s. [2] Energy Primer by Grübler et al suggest that [1] may be incorrect: US energy intensity was high and declining from 1860-1890… way above that of France. UK data starts in 1880, where its tied with US, before falling behind it. [3] Ack! I’ve downloaded a dozen papers without obtaining the European data. An interesting one is ENERGY CRISIS AND GROWTH 1650–1850, which tends to prop XT’s view, without providing the critical energy share data over time. It does note that wood usage was about 4x higher in Britain than in Italy and 10x higher in Scandinavia. So we have some play there. More generally the article notes that population grew faster than agricultural productivity in 1600-1800, resulting in among other things shorter people. The price of firewood grew faster than the price of food - might this explain the interest in coal? Ah here we go: I’ll add emphasis: "On a world scale—although it was actually almost completely concentrated in Europe—coal mining rose from 4 million tons in 1700 to 16 in 1800, 129 in 1860, and 790 in 1900… in 1800 British coal output was providing as much energy as would otherwise have required the devotion of perhaps 15 million acres to the production of wood for fuel on a sustained basis…**Without the recourse to coal, England’s agricultural advancements would have ‘never sufficed on their own to engender an Industrial Revolution’." [4]** But wait! “Certainly the transition to fossil fuels was not everywhere so thorough as in Great Britain. Italy, which almost completely lacked coal, continued to rely heavily on firewood and charcoal. Russia, which was well endowed with coal, but also rich in forests, continued to utilize large quantities of wood throughout the nineteenth century.” Finally: After 1800, Europe and China trod on diverging paths. China continued to intensify labour, while its economic performance kept declining. Even in a rice-producing economy, the possibilities for intensification are not endless. The Chinese economy ‘was finally hit by both the ‘‘absolute shortage of land’’ due to the exhaustion of new land and the relative short-age of land due to the lack of any new land-saving technology’. 80 ‘In the second half of the nineteenth century, China was poor compared to the West, and much less industrialized’. 81 In Europe, on the contrary, the phase of resource shortage came to an end, thanks to the use of coal as a land-saving resource. First in England, and then elsewhere on the continent, per capita energy consumption rose rapidly. From 1800 to 1900 it grew from about 63–84 to 155–159 MJ per day, and this while the continent’s population was growing by 100 per cent. In the same period, the Chinese population only grew by 25 per cent. Fossil fuels allowed new machinery to be developed for use in industry and transportation. [4] E. A. Wrigley, ‘Energy constraints and pre-industrial economies’ So wood shortages prompted an interest in coal, which eventually turned around Europe’s demographic crisis. But the cotton gin was invented in the US, which relied heavily on wood until the mid 1800s. Arguably, coal was necessary for a British Industrial Revolution. But also arguably the cognitive and organizational prerequisites were in place in other areas not suffering from a wood/hydro/wind shortage. I can’t locate the killer citation. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2012, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/53 "2012-12-03T00:44:13Z")
[QUOTE=Measure for Measure] sorry for the incoherence [/QUOTE] I don’t see any…certainly it’s more coherent than most of my iPad on the run posts. 🙂 I disagree with your conclusions, but I’m enjoying reading your thoughts on this. Just briefly, as I’m on the run atm…you are assuming European colonization of the US following the same historical trajectory as in our universe. Again, I’m not seeing that as a given. Coal, oil and natural gas, while not major contributors in Europe prior to the mid-17th century, were still factors (China went through periods of heavy use of coal, and the Egyptians and other regional powers used petroleum and coal)…and one who’s lack would have caused even more dependence on trees for everything, putting even more stress on the resource than was the case in our history. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2012, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/54 "2012-12-03T01:36:34Z")
Briefly, to go along with my earlier blurb on the history of coal, [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_petroleum) is a short Wiki on the history of oil, quoting mostly the parts about use in the ancient world: > [@](#): > > Early history > > More than four thousand years ago, according to Herodotus and confirmed by Diodorus Siculus, asphalt was employed in the construction of the walls and towers of Babylon; there were oil pits near Ardericca (near Babylon), and a pitch spring on Zacynthus ( Ionian islands, Greece ).[1] Great quantities of it were found on the banks of the river Issus[citation needed], one of the tributaries of the Euphrates. Ancient Persian tablets indicate the medicinal and lighting uses of petroleum in the upper levels of their society. > > Oil was exploited in the Roman province of Dacia, now in Romania, where it was called picula. > > The earliest known oil wells were drilled in China in 347 AD or earlier. They had depths of up to about 800 feet (240 m) and were drilled using bits attached to bamboo poles.[2][unreliable source?] The oil was burned to evaporate brine and produce salt. By the 10th century, extensive bamboo pipelines connected oil wells with salt springs. The ancient records of China and Japan are said to contain many allusions to the use of natural gas for lighting and heating. Petroleum was known as burning water in Japan in the 7th century.[1] In his book Dream Pool Essays written in 1088, the polymathic scientist and statesman Shen Kuo of the Song Dynasty coined the word 石油 (Shíyóu, literally “rock oil”) for petroleum, which remains the term used in contemporary Chinese. > > The first streets of Baghdad were paved with tar, derived from petroleum that became accessible from natural fields in the region. In the 9th century, oil fields were exploited in the area around modern Baku, Azerbaijan. These fields were described by the Arab geographer Abu al-Hasan 'Alī al-Mas’ūdī in the 10th century, and by Marco Polo in the 13th century, who described the output of those wells as hundreds of shiploads. Petroleum was distilled by the Persian alchemist, Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi (Rhazes), in the 9th century,[3] producing chemicals such as kerosene in the alembic (al-ambiq),[4] and which was mainly used for kerosene lamps.[5] Arab and Persian chemists also distilled crude oil in order to produce flammable products for military purposes. Through Islamic Spain, distillation became available in Western Europe by the 12th century.[6] It has also been present in Romania since the 13th century, being recorded as păcură.[7] > > The earliest mention of petroleum in the Americas occurs in Sir Walter Raleigh’s account of the Trinidad Pitch Lake in 1595; while thirty-seven years later, the account of a visit of a Franciscan, Joseph de la Roche d’Allion, to the oil springs of New York was published in Sagard’s Histoire du Canada. A Finnish born Swede, scientist and student of Carl Linnaeus, Peter Kalm, in his work Travels into North America published first in 1753 showed on a map the oil springs of Pennsylvania.[1] > > In 1710 or 1711 (sources vary) the Russian-born Swiss physician and Greek teacher Eyrini d’Eyrinis (also spelled as Eirini d’Eirinis) discovered asphaltum at Val-de-Travers, (Neuchâtel). He established a bitumen mine de la Presta there in 1719 that operated until 1986.[8][9][10][11] > > In 1745 under the Empress Elisabeth of Russia the first oil well and refinery were built in Ukhta by Fiodor Priadunov. Through the process of distillation of the “rock oil” (petroleum) he received a kerosene-like substance, which was used in oil lamps by Russian churches and monasteries (though households still relied on candles).[12] > > Oil sands were mined from 1745 in Merkwiller-Pechelbronn, Alsace under the direction of Louis Pierre Ancillon de la Sablonnière, by special appointment of Louis XV.[13] The Pechelbronn oil field was active until 1970, and was the birth place of companies like Antar and Schlumberger. The first modern refinery was built there in 1857.[13] And another, also brief look at oil [here](http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/119235/science/oil_from_ancient_times.html): > [@](#): > > Oil From Ancient Times > By: Bob Jent > > Many people are surprised to hear that we’ve been using oil for almost seven thousand years. At first, we used oil that seeped to the surface in the form of thick black tar. In the Middle East, there is a huge oil reserve underground. In this area, there have been enormous oil seeps of bitumen, oil springs and oil-bearing rock. Oil has been readily available for use in this area since ancient times. > > Oil was even effectively used in the time of the caveman. During the Stone Age, man used the bitumen tar to repair pottery and to seal water containers so that they would not leak. Oil and tar was also used in the Stone Age to make bricks and mortar. Not all ancient men were cave dwellers. Some, in the Middle East, were actually marsh dwellers. They are the ones that created bricks and mortar from the thick, black, sticky tar that they had readily available in their bitumen seeps. The area where they lived often flooded. Their oil and tar homes kept them safe and waterproofed from these floods. Entire cities were built of these bricks and mortars in Babylonian times. The oil trade was the catalyst for industrialization in the Middle East. > > The next use of oil in ancient times, which we know about, was when ancient man started coating their boats with oil. They knew about the waterproof properties of oil and tar, which led to this very effective practice. Boats were made of reed. Bitumen kept them from leaking. The practice quickly spread around the world. Sailors would always be stained black from working in these bitumen sealed boats. They eventually became known as tars from all of the black stains that they had. The practice of caulking boats with bitumen remained unchanged for thousands of years. It only ended when people started switching to metal and fiberglass for boat production in modern times. > > Currently, we use oil in all of its forms. In the past, oil and gas were considered flammable, dangerous and too thin to use for any practical purposes. Bitumen was mainly used as a glue and a waterproofing agent. The Persians were the first to use the thinner forms of oil. They realized that the flammable properties could be very useful in battle. This was the beginning of modern warfare. Flaming arrows quickly turned into fiery bombs made with bitumen. > > The Chinese were the first people to drill for oil and spark a revolution. Purely by accident, they discovered that when drilling for salty brine water that they could get to oil. We don’t know if they used the actual oil, but we do know that they used the natural gas that they discovered to boil the brine and get the salt out. Companies like Triple Diamond Energy use the same drilling principles today. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2012, 1:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/55 "2012-12-03T01:42:34Z")
Apologize for the drive by links (and double post…it timed out before I could re-edit my semi-coherent last post, unfortunately), but just wanted to toss them into the discussion. Obviously, you can really dig into this, and there at tons of examples people using fossil fuels in the ancient world…generally, not as an energy source but for myriad other purposes. You can do similar searches on the use of natural gas in the ancient world as well. The point is that all of these things have been used for hundreds, even thousands of years…and none of them would have been there in the scenario proposed by the OP. That would have a cascading effect on human development, technology and history. ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2012, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/56 "2012-12-03T02:29:18Z")
> [@Measure\_for\_Measure](#): > > Look at some of the energy charts I’ve cited. In 1830 we consumed “A small fraction of the energy we needed in real life”. The problem I see with a global comparison is that a majority of use for biofuels would be for heating and cooking for the general population, plus industrial use. However, the macro charts tell us nothing about the specific use. Could certain industries develop without fossil fuels? > [@](#): > > I vote that something like this thread would make an interesting piece of sci fi/alternative history. But I would permit 1%, 5% or maybe 10% fossil fuel reserves: 0% seems a little grim. (Related question: is a world like [Aria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aria_%28manga%29) plausible, even given high tech? I mean ignoring sky castles and the like, can you run a bourgeois urban society on canals and wind? How much coal did Venice use: probably a lot for their glassworks et al. Similarly for Amsterdam.) The explosive growth and development in Amsterdam in the late 17th century was dependent on the ready availability of inexpensive peat. This is why the 0% is grim. > [@](#): > > **TokyoBayer** : Although pumping water was the first application for the steam engine, it’s hard to believe that some other application would not have arose. That’s the insight of Fogel et al: you need to take the [counterfactual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_history) seriously. Though I confess that on occasion I will snark at that Nobel Laurette, depending on my mood. No, I understand Fogel’s point, and actually agree with it in many cases. However, Fogal’s point that canals would be a substitute ignores that steel would not be readily available to mass produce cars and machinery. I haven’t read Fogel’s book, but looking at wiki, it seems to say that all else be equal, what would happen if only the railroads weren’t there. Canals may work for certain parts of the the Northeast in the US, but systems of canals would not be feasible in Japan, for example, or for the industrial development of the West. You also need to look at why things weren’t developed. Why wasn’t the wheel developed as a tool in the New World? Let’s get Jared Diamond and Fogel in a room and let them fight it out. ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2012, 3:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/57 "2012-12-03T03:08:53Z")
> [@XT](#): > > That would have a cascading effect on human development, technology and history. I actually buy this story, though it would need more fleshing out. I might call it, “Stagnation via a thousand cuts.” It’s a different argument than the insufficient energy story. We might not make it to the enlightenment, for example. > [@TokyoBayer](#): > > However, Fogal’s point that canals would be a substitute ignores that steel would not be readily available to mass produce cars and machinery. I assumed we wouldn’t get railroads or cars (or asphalt highways) in a serious way until we invented nuclear power. And even then… I was trying to sketch a story where we would have horses, buggies, bicycles, mass produced clothing, whale oil, newspapers, pharmaceuticals, agricultural colleges, hybrid trees and eventually nuclear power. Internal plumbing before nukes? Not sure. ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2012, 4:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/58 "2012-12-03T04:18:48Z")
> [@Measure\_for\_Measure](#): > > I actually buy this story, though it would need more fleshing out. I might call it, “Stagnation via a thousand cuts.” It’s a different argument than the insufficient energy story. We might not make it to the enlightenment, for example. They may very well have been enough total energy, but impossible to have enough fuel at key locations to power the industrial revolution. The Netherlands, for example, which has run out of forests and woods and required peat. While all the Chinese were happily burning fires from wood, this did not help the Dutch because of the limitation of distribution. > [@](#): > > I assumed we wouldn’t get railroads or cars (or asphalt highways) in a serious way until we invented nuclear power. And even then… I was trying to sketch a story where we would have horses, buggies, bicycles, mass produced clothing, whale oil, newspapers, pharmaceuticals, agricultural colleges, hybrid trees and eventually nuclear power. Internal plumbing before nukes? Not sure. Then you run into a zillion other problems such as how to transport manufacturing material cheaply enough to be able to mass product products cheaply enough for people to purchase them, which is required in order to drive innovation. If you are relying on canals and horses, then you’ll never get a steel industry off the ground, and without that, the rest of the industrial revolution. ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2012, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/59 "2012-12-03T05:45:29Z")
> [@TokyoBayer](#): > > If you are relying on canals and horses, then you’ll never get a steel industry off the ground, and without that, the rest of the industrial revolution. The steel industry faces severe limits due to high energy prices. I’m thinking that pots, pans, rifles, needles and nails could be produced, but not heavy stuff. And remember that we had an industrial revolution before energy use took off in the mid 1800s. It mostly didn’t involve steel though. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2012, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466/60 "2012-12-03T06:12:25Z")
> [@XT](#): > > They DID develop windmill technologies, and I’m sure would have continued to use it and even make refinements and breakthroughs. Water as well…look at what the Romans accomplished. But you are leaping from wind/water power for mechanical uses to electricity because you know all about that. I see no plausible reason they would have made those leaps…and no plausible way they COULD have done it even if you sent them a text back in time. Again, where would they get the materials and energy TOO make wind and water do all that stuff you think they would have come up with to have it do to replace cheap and abundant fossil fuels? You need steel, and copper wire and loads more wood or building material as well as a host of other things…and you need them in industrial quantities. Where are you getting them from? Trees are only going to take you so far. The Colonies, of course ! Europe raped the entire world for a couple hundred years for a bunch of tea, tobacco and calico ; I don’t think it out of the realm of the imaginable that it could rape it for precious, precious charcoal. Though your (and **Lemur** ’s) point about Peak Lumber is well taken - it’s amusing to think of the geopolitics of an Earth where “the Middle East” is become “the Amazon” or “Yosemite”. > [@](#): > > It’s a catch-22…and as I said earlier, I think you are going to be behind the curve of our actual history much earlier. I don’t think you are going to get to the the late Medieval period or early Renascence in the same way we did, because you’d have to have been having to rely completely on wood for much more, much earlier. I’m not aware that the early Renaissance tech levels relied much on fossile fuels - that was still the paddlewheel, oxen teams et al. era. > [@](#): > > Well, we would never have developed plastics…it just isn’t something that would have been invented. We’d have used the same things we used before plastics…wood being one of the primary things, but also bone and shell and other things like that. A lot of things we take for granted today though rely on the ability to have a larger energy budget, and access to industrial levels of resources. That enabled the development of new technologies…technologies that would never have been developed because we wouldn’t have had the large margins to broaden research and go wild in so many different directions. > Why didn’t the Romans develop the steam engine, or the Greeks or Persians develop electricity, or the early Europeans or Islamic empires mass produced steel and wrought/cast iron? Why didn’t the Chinese do any of these things? They all COULD have done those things…but they didn’t. All of those things exploded on the scene in the last 200 years…around the time our energy budget skyrocketed while the costs plummeted. I would disagree there. I would posit that the drive of invention and innovation stems mostly from simple idleness. Which is why the Romans and Greeks pioneered so much stuff - their slave-driven societies left a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands. Of course, they spent much of that copious free time rambling on about philosophy, the arts, history or religion instead of really coming up with new practical concepts (for the most part - Roman war & architectural engineering was still something else), but I’d say that has also to do with a) lack of an accumulated body of knowledge, they \*were \*starting from scratch after all and b) lack of familiarity with the more tecknical stuff among the idle elites. The same is true of the Middle Ages - what little innovation happened is mostly constrained to monastic monks, and there again mostly involved trifles (new dyes, new ways to make books, proto-cladistics…) Flash forward to the late 16th, early 17th century and the advances in agriculture and early manufacture have pulled most of Europe from hard scrabble subsistence farming, the aristocrats have distanced themselves from their erstwhile role as warriors (in no small part due to the increasingly professional nature of warfare… and its deadliness. It’s no fun any more when you get killed all the time) and you’ve got a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands once more. The great minds of the Enlightenment were all thus - bored noblemen trying their hands at something new and clever or trying to improve the productivity on their lands ; clergymen ; fat merchants & artisans having made their fortunes selling doohickeys or on the Ftock Exchange and ready to give themselves some respectability with a science salon or patronage… but this time around, many of these minds were harnessed to the technical plow, either because of the simple background of these people and how they’d stricken rich in the first place, or in the service of warfare (which had become increasingly technical) & shipping (that’s a big one), or simply because it was the “in” thing, so to speak. Leibnitz, when he wasn’t busy measuring his dick and forwarding the historical data to Newton, applied scientific methods & machines to the Harz silver mines for example. It was the great schtick of those times: applying science (even rubbish science) to the practical world, if only to prove it wasn’t all just an idle waste of time and verily aristocrats still had something to contribute to society, pinky swear. So, bearing this in mind, and provided we could have reached the same societal model that would leave many business-oriented people with time on their hands to think of ways they could make even more money without fossil fuels or towering energy budgets (which I don’t think is all that out of the realm of the feasible - see below), I do think Science! would have marched on, which is why I posit that electricity could indeed have become an item - Volta came up with batteries in the 18th and had already managed to link electricity with “life” or “living motion”. That’s intriguing enough a notion to set some other minds on fire about it and its possibilities. > [@](#): > > It was fossil fuels that enabled all of that…all of what we have today. Everything from modern agriculture to modern technology…everything depended on that cheap and abundant energy from fossil fuels. Without that you’d be back to the mind set and capabilities of the iron age… Oh, come now. The agrarian revolution had little to do with abundant energy, fossil fuels or even mechanization which arrived quite late to the party. What did it was an increasing transfer and collation of information, basically taking the singular new ideas developed in this or that backwoods and disseminating them throughout all the \*other \*backwoods (… sorry, having a flash of all those “sharing best industry practices” management docs I’ve had to translate lately). Which is also the great change in direction that brought about the Enlightenment. The printing press, and later the telegraph, changed everything. That would/could have happened regardless of fossil fuels. After that, admittedly, the industrial revolution is quite harder to get off the ground without fossil fuels - but then again, that doesn’t mean minds would have become stagnant in turn. Think of it more as an industrial slow and steady curve trending ever-so-slightly upwards :D. Certainly the early efforts in mechanization of labour didn’t hinge on fossil fuels, from textile cottage industries to the early water-powered textile mills… the \*idea \*was there. If the idea is there, and the minds are there, Science! can’t but find a way. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-there-were-never-fossil-fuels/642466.md?page=4)