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Depends on what that means, but fossils have only been in widespread use for a couple of centuries, yet a lot of important discoveries were made before them. Th
by 8bitsrule 6y ago
Depends on what that means, but fossils have only been in widespread use for a couple of centuries, yet a lot of important discoveries were made before them. The energies from wind, water, animals and burning plants were widely in use before coal took off in Europe about 3 centuries ago.
Without (only a century of) oil, even without coal, the discovery of EM fields still would have led to (slower) development of hydro and wind electricity gear. Wherever you've got abundant electric, the rest follows. With technology to tap into it, the sun pours FAR more power onto the surface than needed to get 'modern'.
- Gibbon1 6y ago> the sun pours FAR more power onto the surface than needed to get 'modern'. One of the agruments economists make for not switching away from fossil fuels is that we'd be consigning worlds poor to endless poverty. Invariable followed by the accusation that you don't care about poor people. But if you look at the supply of oil and gas it's obvious there never was would be enough to lift the worlds poor out of poverty. If you want a hard example of that during it's modernization push China burned through most of it's coal reserves. Not sustainable. There is though enough solar and wind.
- demosito666 6y agoAnd another thing that is missed in this discussion: the article assumes that there will be much fewer people left than we have today. It's very hard to support something as huge and as cold as Moscow on renewables. But if there are few people, they live in compact villages in warm climate, there is no existential pressure to burn fossils for heating and heavy industries. You have a breathing room.
- Gibbon1 6y agoThing about places that are far north and cold. If you look at a map usually they are less than 1500 miles from some place sunnier.