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Unfortunately we only get the one free gift of fossil fuel energy accumulated over millions of years.

• jandrese 9y ago
  Insuring that we don't make the same mistake again? Development would be slower if you have to start with renewables, but it's not blocked entirely.
  • PeterisP 9y ago
    There's some historical arguments that without fossil fuels, the industrial revolution doesn't happen and we'd never get beyond that block. I.e. if man/animal labor is more effective than crude machines, then societies never make mass investment into crude machines and don't prepare large numbers of people working with said machines, so there's no stimulus that might ever reach fancy machines that might be actually useful. We'd have the same fate as the medieval Chinese society, which invented lots of nifty tech centuries before Europe, but didn't go beyond that to the industrial revolution for social reasons until the progress elsewhere forced the social reasons to change.
  • echlebek 9y ago
    I think the consensus is that the industrial revolution would have been impossible without fossil fuels.
    • jandrese 9y ago
      It would have been impossible to power steam engines with wood instead of coal? I get that it is less efficient, but wood burners certainly existed back in that era. Every train would have needed a balloon funnel and there would have been far more significant logging operations and probably deforestation problems, but it doesn't seem completely impossible.
      • deleted 9y ago
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