[ninalanyon]

> Air quality would have been a disaster.

What do you mean would have been? It was a disaster. Perhaps you are too young or insufficiently well travelled to have experienced the effects of burning coal in, say the UK in the 1950s and 1960s or in China even in the last few decades.

Without oil the push to solar and wind would also have been accelerated, probably.

What is it about oil and as that you think made it accelerate semiconductor R&D?

[tordrt]

Yeah, my point was that it would have been even worse without oil and gas.

solar, wind and semiconductors all require a very advanced petrochemical supply chain. You simply couldn't produce any of this without products derived from oil and gas.

[ninalanyon]

> You simply couldn't produce any of this without products derived from oil and gas.

That is simply untrue. Everything that is made from oil or gas can also be made from organic feedstock. I don't mean to say that it would be easy and it would certainly be slower to start with but it is certainly not impossible. Remember that the first plastics were made before the age of oil.

One currently used plastic that does not use oil or gas as a feedstock is cellophane [1], another is rayon [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane#Today [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayon