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I think fossil fuels moved us too far up on the energy usage scale before we were ready for it.

• wallace_f 7y ago
  Perhaps virtue is the biggest problem in the world today.
• ThrustVectoring 7y ago
  All else equal, a species would rather have a smaller global population when starting to use fossil fuels. There's only so much capacity for use of fossil fuels, and more people means less per-capita. Before we used fossil fuels, 100% of economic growth was funneled into population growth. That trend was only bucked with the industrial revolution with its associated fossil fuel use.
• dTal 7y ago
  You may be on to something, but what would "ready for it" have looked like? Are we talking technical, or social progress? Because social progress would appear to depend at least in part on technical progress (for example, automation making slavery obsolete), and technical progress depends on... abundant energy.
  • ianai 7y ago
    Would we have had the energy for WW1/2 without fossil fuels? I don’t think so. They were at least in part due to pressures for countries to grow into other countries territories. Without oil, population growth wouldn’t have brought the world to that point so quickly. We also wouldn’t have had airplanes nor jets. That probably would mean the atomic bomb would be developed after nuclear power plants-avoiding a century of associating nuclear power with nuclear bombs. Kind of a neat thought experiment.