cross-posted from: https://kbin.run/m/[email protected]/t/553659
A decline in fossil fuel power is now ‘inevitable’, the report’s authors say.
cross-posted from: https://kbin.run/m/[email protected]/t/553659
A decline in fossil fuel power is now ‘inevitable’, the report’s authors say.
I wonder how the world would look like without fossil fuel below ground.Would we had less cars?
We would still be at a pre-industrial level of technology. Without having an easily accessible and highly energy dense fuel (coal) to kick us off, none of modern society, including renewables, would be possible.
That’s largely ahistorical.
The invention of the dynamo, combined with early industrial wind and water wheels, would have changed where and how we were able to efficiently industrialize. But we had the capacity even without discovering large coal fields in the American coal belt, Russia, and Australia. Hydroelectric dams and heavy investment in wind turbine engineering would have yielded steady surpluses in domestic electricity across a different distribution of domestic real estate.
What large cheap surplus deposits of coal gave us was an opportunity to put off investing in nuclear energy for the better part of a century. Nuclear power is generally cheaper, cleaner, and more abundant than coal. And we had industrial scale nuclear powered electricity plants by the 1950s, with nuclear shipping made possible through the prototype NS Savannah in 1961.
Coal’s biggest benefit wasn’t its energy density nearly so much as its portability. Unlike with wind and hydro, you weren’t geographically constrained in where you could build. And unlike with nuclear, you didn’t have these huge upfront engineering and R&D costs.
Coal boosted the efficiency of early industrial mass transit and allowed a rapid colonization of the frontier regions. But it required the same continual westward expansion to tap cheap labor markets and access new coal fields. Hydro was far more energy dense. Nuclear was late to the party. Wind was temperamental and needed significantly more engineering prowess to harness efficiently. But all of these were solvable problems within the span of decades.
In my country we have about 40% hydroelectric plant. They are reliable. Water mills and tide might be something that started the industry.
Keep in mind that many big cites are located near the ocean. Many benefits from water.
Today many companies throw as much money as they can at renewables. They are simply cheaper but limited the amount of opportunities. Example Google could not find enough clean energy to cover their own footprint. Google have a lot of many that they don’t know what to do and want to be climate neutral for their data centers. It is much faster to put in new energy hungry graphic cards the getting a new power source running.
We would certainly have valued hydrothermal and other clean sources a lot more. Iceland could have been a superpower.
We would have come up with lots of ways to make Steam. Electricity still would have happened. So I am guessing a lot of steam generating electricity. Hydro power would still be a thing as would thermal.
Wind power seems like the real candidate for early supremacy though. It can be purely mechanical ( eg. Grinding or running pumps ), it could store energy in the form of water pressure, and it could be used to generate electricity.
If we had a reliable electrical grid and no fossil fuels, things like batteries and electric cars would have gotten a lot further ahead sooner.
A smaller Industrial Revolution was totally possible on wind and water power. The next step would be electricity. Once we had electricity, a lot of the road we went down would be possible. Nuclear power would probably have been added to the mix more or less on the same schedule.
Perhaps the biggest deference would not be energy but rather plastics. It is hard to say what the materials side of history would have looked like without oil.
Why? Cars will go away when cities are redesigned to make them unnecessary/inconvenient. Otherwise electric cars don’t care where energy comes from.
I think the point they’re making is electric technology / batteries haven’t been very good until recently, so we’d have a lot fewer cars out there if we didn’t have fossils fuels in the first place since they can store more energy than batteries.
The counter argument, and I’m not saying this is correct, is that we had electric cars over a hundred years ago:
“Over the next few years, electric vehicles from different automakers began popping up across the U.S. New York City even had a fleet of more than 60 electric taxis. By 1900, electric cars were at their heyday, accounting for around a third of all vehicles on the road. During the next 10 years, they continued to show strong sales.”
https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-electric-car
If we had pursued the electric car at the same rate we pursued advances in ICE engines, perhaps they would have been better by now. They made resurgences in the 70s and 80s during the energy crisis in the west.
Clearly burning hyrdo-carbon rich fuels was easier, but it’s hard to say how much the pursuit of fossil fuel driven vehicles and machinery was influenced by both momentum, and the manipulation and interference of the fossil fuel industry. It’s possible that we could have had electric cars and still all the of the traffic, infrastructure and urban societal issues that we do today.
We had the opportunity. Remember the EV1?
Big oil got scared and convinced GM to scrap the entire EV line and set EV innovations back by a fucking decade
Yep, I agree! Just saying I think that’s what the original question was about. Seems like an interesting question to ask.
Fuel would be extremely expensive because we’d drive either on plant oil or alcohol. Possibly at the expense of the food supply
Edit: Probably industrial revolution would be slowed into a crawl, and the high performance economies wouldn’t develop until the discovery of nuclear power
To some degree sure, but not in all cases. If you have a tractor that burns wood gas for power but it helps you harvest more crops quicker, it may outweigh the cost of the land used for the trees.
What you mean from the beginning there were no fossil fuels?
For the case we likely would be quite technologically hamstrung. I can’t see how something like the industrial revolution could have happened without coal, I suppose they would burn wood but I’m not sure the global forests would supply them enough.
I suspect we would be in a far worse position as practically all the forests would have vanished.
It would certainly be rough, but not impossible to do things. The we were pretty close to having an early industrial revolution, we even had the steam engine invented really early on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
If inventions like that had been further developed, things could have gone somewhere.
The Romans didn’t even have basic numeracy they were never going to invent the steam engine.
The link I posted literally is a steam engine. Not a particularly good one, but a steam engine regardless. They just said “oh wow this is neat. Anyways…”
When they could have said “oh wow this is neat, let’s make this better and use this to automate production of things”.
They just didn’t develop this invention further. A bit more tinkering and they would have had it.
At the beginning there were only horses. Then came bicycle and cars. Both with fossil fuels and electric ones. I think even hydrogen was on the table. What won? the cheapest and easiest one.
Industry revolution might have been look differently. Water mills, tie water etc can be helpful. Energy cost nothing.