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(same poster as above, alt account, sorry) You're just handwaving history without any real knowledge of how resources developed. The ability to not chop down trees is predicated on having substitute goods available. One of the biggest and most important innovations the world has ever seen was the invention of iron produced from coke (coal). Before coke, you needed charcoal (trees) to produce iron. It was expensive, and the supply of wood was running out. You mention England. Well England lost 66% of its wood supply between 1000AD and 1900AD at a fairly consistent rate, before widespread use of fossil fuels. This INCLUDED needing to IMPORT large quantities of wood from other areas. Its great that they've managed to reforest their local area, but the net consumption of wood on a global scale is undoubtedly still net consuming. And if we never used coal to make iron, then the economic cost of literally everything just got much higher, and more expensive, and more wood intensive. Learning to make iron from coal allowed us to stop using wood as a substitute. To be clear, the industrial revolution is just not economically viable to happen without coal. Society just does not advance. It's not a matter of putting up windmills. Without fossil fuels you don't get iron, steel, plastic, etc. You know what wind turbines are made of? Steel. Iron. Plastic. Mostly steel. You can't make steel without fossil fuels. Aside from the massive energy requirements, you're going to need coal in there to get carbon into the steel. Unless, yet again, you want to burn trees into charcoal. Even with today's tech and substitutes, deforestation continues at an alarming rate. Dropping us back to pre industrial revolution tech isn't a good idea to solve that. |