A fun piece of speculation so I'm trying not to take it too seriously. But it takes a giant leap of faith to say coal was not the primary driver of the Industri

A fun piece of speculation so I'm trying not to take it too seriously. But it takes a giant leap of faith to say coal was not the primary driver of the Industrial Revolution. First, it introduced a massive energy surplus far greater than annual solar inputs for the first time in human history. You can't just brush off physics and claim this surplus, once discovered, is somehow substitutable on the open market as if human labor could compete in Watt-hours. The presence of ultra-concentrated forms of energy with a high ROI was the driving factor in investing in technology for their extraction. A perfect circle: coal gives us more energy, to build better machines, which let us access more coal, etc. Change the economics and there is no incentive to industrialize unless you've got an army of Orcs to bootstrap the energy budget. Even if a human society could industrialize without fossil carbon, why do we see literally no evidence of such a thing ever happening on earth?