We would have eventually figured out hydro and wind power. Shortly after that, there would have been an einstein type, and i bet 50-100 years later worldwide nuclear power, with some large off limits areas where the crappy first generation death traps were operated(nuke is easy… safe nuke is hard).
Biomass is not energy dense enough to make transportation worthwhile. So if an industry required biomass it would need to relocate to those undeveloped areas to exploit it. As such the whole pattern of global development has changed before deforestation becomes a problem. At this point our alternative history is too divergent from real history to even make guesses. You’ve got a totally different dynamic WRT colonisation and the world is suddenly on a different trajectory.
I could come up with plausible hypotheses where that leads to almost any conceivable outcome.
Some are, many aren’t. In India for example the commercial plantations retain > 80% of the original biodiversity despite a total deforestation of 80%.
They aren’t easier even today. Its still far easier to produce celluloid than nylon. Price I really couldn’t address.
But the real issue is that things are as they are today because that’s the way we’ve directed our research. Had we directed 100 years of research in another direction things would be very different.
I think this is the point that really needs to be stressed. If we posit a world where nobody could find any alternatives then the outcomes are pretty damn obvious. But in the real world every time we run out of one resource we find another, even better one. There’s no reason to assume that this would be any different.
It demonstrably was possible without fossil fuels. I would guess that less than 5kg of iron was smelted during the iron age using fossil fuels. And that is being optimistic
The Iron Age started and finished with virtually no fossil fuels burned.
Isn’t the fact that we have found alternatives to every limiting resource in out history a reason to believe so?
Tell that to the Romans, the Indians, the Song Chinese, the Celts, the Zulus…
…it’s not wood alone that does the job, it’s charcoal.
This need not always be the case. In fact, for some civilizations, this wasn’t the case. It comes down to the fallacy of special pleading to assume that the non-FF civ (which, I would argue, is not “our” familiar civ and can not necessarily be expected to develop the same responses*) will develop the same coping strategies rather than going the way of many other civs, from Easter Island to Greenland.
*e.g if power generation is localised as you say, and the path of colonialism is altered, then, as you say, we cannot speculate on the path to be taken. Well, no, we can speculate, but have no way of being “right”. For example, . I could speculate that without the centralized nature of the various Empires, British, French & German universities might not be as well-funded, and that takes us down all kinds of speculations about the path of science research.
Of course when I said we I meant humanity. Not culturally and physically isolated island communities.
You are repeating Jared Diamond’s flaw of trying to compare isolated, resource deficient islands to an entire globe spanning economy. That is not in any way a valid comparison. Nobody discovered an alternative to lumber on Easter Island because none existed there. But we know for a fact that numerous alternatives exist to fossil fuels in this world, they only needed to be discovered, as we have now done.
IOW we aren’t arguing about whether alternatives existed. We know as a fact that they existed. The only dispute is whether they would have been discovered. And given that in the real world every time we run out of one resource we find another, even better one. There’s no reason to assume that this would be any different.
That’s was precisely my point. Declaring that deforestation would be worse is invalid because it is based upon a long chain of speculation. It might be worse, it might just as easily be better.
This is exactly the type of thing I’m talking about. So many possibilities, and even a small change at that time could have had far reaching consequences that could have led anywhere. Maybe technology would have been retarded, maybe it would have advanced much faster. It’s impossible to say unless we stipulate that no alternatives could have been found.
Well, in that case, sure, no quibble, I guess humanity as a whole always finds some alternative - but the ones doing the finding may not be members of the civilization that started looking i.e. Western European civ, which was the one doing the growing and advancing as per the OP.
Hindsight’s always 20-20. It is entirely possible to use up all the fossil fuel and have a civilization collapse (through reversal of the Green Revolution) before viable alternatives are developed in time. Then later biomass energy may be perfected, but the civ doingthe perfecting won’t be the same one that started looking.
I agree.
I’m not convinced. It seems some variation of predestination is afoot in your argument, which I don’t quite grock.
In my opinion, given the demonstrated destructive and greedy nature of the powers at the time, it would be worse.
I agree, we’re just speculating here. It comes down to how much historical inevitability you think there is to the “March of Progress”, I guess.
That’s certainly conceivable, though personally I’d consider it less likely for the same reasons that those civilisations didn’t start colonisation and industrial expansion in our own history.
We’ve done this to death in the peak oil threads, and no, it’s not really possible. It’s like Batman trying to crucify himself. It would require a prolonged, deliberate action to use the last of the coal to power the very draglines that we use to mine the coal in the first place.
There’s no predestination, it’s just an observation. You can not name a single resource that has become prohibitively scarce that we have not found an alternative for. For example when whale oil became expensive we didn’t just stop using those applications, we switched to mineral oil. When wood ran out we didn’t just stop making iron, we switched to coke.
That’s not because of predestination, it’s because we can be damn clever when we are pushed to (and damn stupid when we aren’t).
You may well be right, but it’s not quote the foregone conclusion that you originally presented it as. There are logical arguments that suggest it would be better.
I suppose you could put it that way. I tend to look at it as logically predicated upon a proven human ability to overcome any resource scarcity if that is at all possible.
I think you are taking a minutia or people and referring tho us ALL as those people.
Hint: There were very few plantation owners, railroaders, HUGE ranchers…
Everyone else worked their asses off.
Yes, but in ceramic packages. In fact, until very recently (20ish years) military specifications excluded plastic packaging for integrated circuits.
Well, I stand corrected, since I thought it was the accessibility of coal that made large-scale smelting possible. Instead, it’s charcoal, similar but unrelated, and while humanity would indeed have entered the iron age, I don’t think it would ever have moved past it, and it would inevitably feel the effects of deforestation.
Coal was indeed used both in ancient Europe and China, with the latter using it to smelt copper, though it wasn’t fully exploited until (and was arguably necessary for) the industrial revolution.
Coal was essential for the massive increase in steel production during the industrial revolution, but not during the Iron Age. Without the coal you don’t see the flood of cheap steel, but you still have steel. Without coal, once you gobble up the standing forests your steel production is limited by forest productivity–how much charcoal can you produce every year is limited by how many acres you have in forestry, and how productive those acres are. And while you can produce more my farming more intensively, it’s not like coal where you can increase production just by digging faster.
Note that early steam railroads and riverboats burned wood, not coal. So no coal doesn’t lock you into a medieval tech level, even into the mid 1800s coal wasn’t being intensively exploited. And oil wasn’t until 1900 or so. So it’s really the 100 years between, say 1850 and 1950 that you have a really big change in the intensity of fuel use. Or to put it another way, without those coal beds history until the 1850s would be pretty much the same. Then things become much different. But the scientific and industrial revolution was already going ahead full steam–so to speak.
We would have nothing to power our dinosaurs with!
There wouldn’t have been an Industrial Revolution.
Why did you bother to post an irrelevant Wikipedia link without even reading the thread?
As Lemur866, there demonstrably would have been an industrial revolution.
I would figure that the high Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) of early fossil fuel production allowed for much faster rates of growth than a non-fossil fuel based society. As early oil wells had an EROEI of 100+ and early coal mines an EROEI of 80+, huge quantities of energy were available without having to do much work (relative to the energy you were getting out of it). I would figure wood and other biomass (if ignoring the energy input from the sun) has a very high EROEI, but as a non-renewable resource it is much more limited than fossil fuels and as a renewable resource takes a long time to grow, thus also limiting the production rate.
Do you have to be rude to the guy? It is my OP and I’m happy he added something.
Besides, he might have meant the second industrial revolution, which didn’t occur until the middle of the 19th century. The first revolution still likely would’ve happened, but the second may have taken far longer to occur.
I think it’s not so much the plain use of coal as the conversion of coal to coke that fueled the first IR. Which basically is doing a similar thing to coal that you do to wood to make charcoal. So we could have had a first IR fired by charcoal easily enough, but it’s that second IR Wesley Clark mentions that I’m having a harder time seeing happen, since it’s largely driven by coke and petroleum to drive the Bessemer furnaces and internal combustion engines, where I don’t see charcoal and alcohol being exact substitutes. Aand unless you have the example of petroleum, why would you develop biogasoline for IC engines in the first place?
Because it’s so much more efficient than steam in so many applications.
Secondly you probably wouldn’t transition from steam to biogasoline. You’d more liekly transition from steam to wood gasification. Producer gas would have been available as a fuel from charcoal production regardless of fossil fuels, and the production of wood gasification would have been discovered as a result.
But more importantly, you’re assuming that the IC engine would be important, which it probably wouldn’t have been. I imagine that electric would have replaced steam, rather than IC.