[tordrt]

How would we do the whole industrial revolution thing on whale oil and lumber? Whales would most certainly be extinct by now, thats for sure.

100 years later is an immense amount of extra human suffering, not to say that reaching current level would most certainly take much much longer than 100 extra years.

Im sorry but this whole tirade is just delusional. Its cheaper and better to replace all use of fossil fuels with renewables? Why are we not doing it? Waiting to here your grand conspiracy as of why people are not "doing it".

Why did china build over 50(78GW) new large scale coal plants last year when they could get so much cheaper renewable?

[AngryData]

Would you say the same thing about human suffering if the bronze age was 100 years later? And what about all the suffering and deaths from the pollution? Or the massive global wars fossil fuels enabled? Because without massive oil and gas reserves both WWI and WWII would have been far harder to sustain or commit to in the first place.

With such a massive shift in politics and technology with a lack of fossil fuels I think it is near impossible to compare the modern world to a world without those.

[Gomotono]

Because people didn't care that oil and gas is breaking our planet 100 years ago. Or didn't knew and capitalism made the people in power very very rich very fast.

At that time we still lived and heated normally. For sure the brits destroyed a lot of their trees but you know? They could.

What do you think would have happened if we had a small population collaps at that time and HAD to consume sustainable? We would be less people for sure, but we wouldn't have killed the missing people, they would have not been created in the first place.

We created the first solar panel 1883. The first EV in 1884.

China is still using coal because they are in the same dilemma as we all are: we ignored the impact and keep the status quo. But China build a lot of coal plants for renewing aging ones and they are massivle building out solar.

So why are my neighbours not doing it? Man i talked to sooooo many people about this, are you ready? Because people don't care. Or they don't like new things. Or they don't understand why it would be better.

Yes thats the conspiricy. People can't do the math, don't care about climate change or just don't want something to change.

Everyone i know who has solar panels on the roof, a small battery and heat pump literlay saving money and would never switch back. Every single one of them.

[tordrt]

The Industrial Revolution started in 1760-1800 and was driven by coal, completely replacing wood as the primary industrial fuel. We almost exterminated whales and deforested the entirety of Europe before discovering fossil fuels, which both bounced back after.

The first EV an the first solar panel are second order effects and only possible because of the industrial revolution driving massive human innovation and growth. Good luck reaching the levels of industrialization and tech required to mass produce solar panels by using wood. Producing 1 ton of charcoal from wood, requires 4-7 tons of wood. To smelt a single ton of iron you then again need multiple tons of coal. Good luck industrializing without turning the whole planet into woodchopping and wood planting farm. It was all made possible by fossil coal, oil and gas.

Everything is essentially downstream of industrialization enabled by coal and subsequently the superior oil and gas.

And saying that oil and gas was breaking our planet doesn't make sense, if anything these are great replacements of coal.

You are also diminishing the brutal life of pre-industrialization times. Staggering high child-mortality rates, low life expectancy, and an high amounts of deaths caused by starvation and extreme weather events, like droughts and floods.

Solar plus battery takes many years to be paid back. If this setup is actually cheaper, industrial scale solar+battery would be huge. Solar on its own is a great cheap pairing with stable energy sources like hydro, gas and coal, which is partly why china is doing this.

People do actually adopt green tech when it makes financially sense, just look at the huge boom of adoption of AC and heatpumps around the world. Because it massively reduces electricity cost of heating and cooling.

Its not because people cant do math.

[Gomotono]

The revolution could still have happened differently and slower.

I didn't say it would have been possible without ANY coal but you do understand that the amount of co2 we put into our atmosphere is not from 1760? All of that big huge co2 output happend in the last 100 year...

Solar plus batterie is currently winning. In germany the problem again is NOT the economy, its literaly the energy provider companies being slow as hell. This critisim is circling the media now for the last few years.

China is doing hydro, gas and coal because China is gigantic and they don't mind that coal still exists and we do not know yet at all how their end energy mix will look like but they are pushing very hard for renewable.

No as i told you, a lot of people around me literlaly don't want to do reneable for the reasons i told you. A L'ot of people DO NOT CARE about climate change.

Germany is trying to push for heatpumps in the old government, the new/current one is paddling back, AGAIN. This is happening under our noses. The discussion of the new heating law (from the prev government) created A LOT of controversy.

The main reason why the renewable energy transformation is happening at the current speed and not in the possible speed, is people not math. not economy.

We have protests against wind mills because they 'look ugly'. My neighbours hate my solar panel on the balcony but can't say something against it because the old government created a law for this.

Work collegues of mine hate EVs and don't want to switch over but my company only allows EVs since this year. Multily of them complained that an EV is not usable as a daily car while i own an EV for 4.5 years now and it is usable as a daily driver.

The transition in China is significanlty faster than in Europe.

[jemmyw]

The first coal powered steam machines were very inefficient. They only made sense at all being sited in an actual coal mine where coal was being extracted for thermal heating, so the fuel was abundant and cheap. Yet they were still barely worth it. From that they were iterated on, but it still took time for them to be made efficiently enough to work economically outside of the mine the fuel came from.

This points to the industrial revolution not being clear progress but requiring specific starting conditions. Steam machines had been around as a curiosity for a long time. And there's no guarantee there would have been slower progress to similar electrical technology without coal/steam because those things also accelerated the development of metallurgy and precision manufacturing specifically. Coal powered machines got efficiency with better precision made iron and steel, coincidentally things that required coal to make.

So I doubt we'd be where we are without coal, it might go further as without coal and the specific circumstances of coal access and necessity on the home island of a nation that has become an economic powerhouse by conquest.

But we can't run the world again. Hopefully we can bounce up to the next level and drop the majority of fossil fuel dependence. We've been pretty dumb about it imo in that we know there are potentially massive downsides too continuing to use it like we are, and we know there are areas like air transport that might have no alternative, so smart would be to transition everything as fast as possible to preserve the niche uses.