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by cmehdy
2081 days ago
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European powers were fairly dominant in the world when the industrial revolution started there. The causation link isn't clear to me (if one caused the other or vice-versa - I'd love to hear from people who know better), but the fact of the matter is that local energy sources could be used (coal, as early as the 1700s) so the benefits were clear and local first, and a huge jump in progress ensued across those economies over the last few centuries. Transitioning to less "dangerous" fossil fuels happened once the economies were already pretty robust and machines were doing the work of hundreds of men at once, because countries got richer and as their quality of life improved they increasingly walked away from dangerous stuff (the deaths per TWh of coal and brown coal are horrifying[0] and unions and education of the population surely had their role to play in driving change in the way those countries dealt with fossil fuels).
Europe then increasingly moved away from coal (not quite done with it though: Germany is still so anti-nuclear that they are the second biggest users behind Russia and iirc the first next importer of coal-based energy - from Russia), but that's the kind of luxury one can afford when the economy is already in decent shape. That's also in part why, while currently China is the single largest producer of coal in the world (to sustain its growth year-on-year), they're also pretty aware that they've got to switch pretty fast to something better (i.e. nuclear) because the honeymoon won't last forever (and I have no doubt that a few generations there will pay a high price in the future for that - cue social unrest down the road). So at the very least, the idea that we can "throw people at the problem" isn't entirely devoid of sense when you consider how many people in Europe dedicated their lives to this brand-new energy-dense coal for a couple generations, and in doing so definitely sacrificed their health and lives in exchange for rapid social progress (that they might or might not have benefited from..). [0] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy |
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