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Coal was certainly a problem; we have the word "smog" for a reason. But we were already on our way to electrified transport, via street cars and similar, when t

by dleslie 7mo ago

Coal was certainly a problem; we have the word "smog" for a reason. But we were already on our way to electrified transport, via street cars and similar, when the automobile surged to popularity.

LegionMammal978 7mo ago
And where does all that electricity come from? Until the 40s or so, hydroelectric plants and wind turbines could provide hardly any power output compared to coal plants, later supplemented by gas plants; even the electric streetcars relied on fossil fuels further down the line. Renewable energy development would've had to scale an order of magnitude further than in reality to be a basis for industry and transportation, alongside advances in electricity distribution and storage to pull it from where it's generated.
- dleslie 7mo ago
  The solution, in the absence of oil, would be to simply build more hydro and wind. Neither are particularly difficult technologies. Where they would have lagged in efficiency they make up for in simplicity. Distributing electricity isn't easy, but it also isn't particularly insurmountable. We had to solve it even with oil as a source of electrical generation.
  - LegionMammal978 7mo ago
    Your scenario seems baselessly optimistic. If it were just as simple to run society off of those, we would've been doing it to some extent already: it's not like Big Coal or Big Oil was blocking everyone else from having ideas about how to generate power (see: the initial spread of gas power, followed by the spread of nuclear power), and surely many people would've had the incentive to produce power without dealing with coal miners or oilmen. It's that it would've been dramatically more expensive without all the design iterations they have since gone through. And if you greatly restrict supply at a given price point, without changing the underlying demand, you'll end up with much higher prices and lower total volume, so we wouldn't enjoyed all the compounding benefits from access to energy.
    - dleslie 7mo ago
      There are places that do. Here in Canada there are at least two provinces that subsist almost entirely off of hydro, and have for the better part of a century. Both export huge amounts of electricity to the USA. And we have active political conflict between big oil and everyone else, where there seems to be an insatiable demand for socializing the externalities of oil and gas while receiving public funding to make oil production competitive and market viable. In that manner, it places itself in front of efforts to use literally anything else. If oil and gas had never received a single dollar of public funding, including by way of public funding for externalities that support or recover from oil and gas, then it never would have been market viable as an energy source in places where it doesn't seep out of the soil. Roads would not have been paved, power plants would not have been built, suburbs would only exist for the very wealthy.
triceratops 7mo ago
Respectfully, from reading all your other comments all over this thread, I don't think you understand everything that modern technology stands on top of. You're handwaving away enormously difficult, complicated things and processes with "just use hydro". It doesn't work like that. Your heart is in the right place and I sympathize with you about car-oriented development in North America. But I think you have a massive blind spot. Fossil fuels were good and necessary for the modern world. Their owners have perpetrated heinous lies to keep us tied to them for far longer than was good or necessary.
- dleslie 7mo ago
  We might argue whether they were good (I disagree) but I cannot agree that they were ever _necessary_ as an energy source. Viable alternatives exist and have existed for the entire duration of their use as a form of energy; and the story of oil-as-energy is the story of human suffering in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; without oil there would not be wars over oil, there would be healthier populations, and (likely) climate change would be less of a concern.

by dleslie 7mo ago

Coal was certainly a problem; we have the word "smog" for a reason. But we were already on our way to electrified transport, via street cars and similar, when the automobile surged to popularity.

LegionMammal978 7mo ago

And where does all that electricity come from? Until the 40s or so, hydroelectric plants and wind turbines could provide hardly any power output compared to coal plants, later supplemented by gas plants; even the electric streetcars relied on fossil fuels further down the line. Renewable energy development would've had to scale an order of magnitude further than in reality to be a basis for industry and transportation, alongside advances in electricity distribution and storage to pull it from where it's generated.

dleslie 7mo ago
The solution, in the absence of oil, would be to simply build more hydro and wind. Neither are particularly difficult technologies. Where they would have lagged in efficiency they make up for in simplicity. Distributing electricity isn't easy, but it also isn't particularly insurmountable. We had to solve it even with oil as a source of electrical generation.
- LegionMammal978 7mo ago
  Your scenario seems baselessly optimistic. If it were just as simple to run society off of those, we would've been doing it to some extent already: it's not like Big Coal or Big Oil was blocking everyone else from having ideas about how to generate power (see: the initial spread of gas power, followed by the spread of nuclear power), and surely many people would've had the incentive to produce power without dealing with coal miners or oilmen. It's that it would've been dramatically more expensive without all the design iterations they have since gone through. And if you greatly restrict supply at a given price point, without changing the underlying demand, you'll end up with much higher prices and lower total volume, so we wouldn't enjoyed all the compounding benefits from access to energy.
  - dleslie 7mo ago
    There are places that do. Here in Canada there are at least two provinces that subsist almost entirely off of hydro, and have for the better part of a century. Both export huge amounts of electricity to the USA. And we have active political conflict between big oil and everyone else, where there seems to be an insatiable demand for socializing the externalities of oil and gas while receiving public funding to make oil production competitive and market viable. In that manner, it places itself in front of efforts to use literally anything else. If oil and gas had never received a single dollar of public funding, including by way of public funding for externalities that support or recover from oil and gas, then it never would have been market viable as an energy source in places where it doesn't seep out of the soil. Roads would not have been paved, power plants would not have been built, suburbs would only exist for the very wealthy.

triceratops 7mo ago

Respectfully, from reading all your other comments all over this thread, I don't think you understand everything that modern technology stands on top of. You're handwaving away enormously difficult, complicated things and processes with "just use hydro". It doesn't work like that. Your heart is in the right place and I sympathize with you about car-oriented development in North America. But I think you have a massive blind spot. Fossil fuels were good and necessary for the modern world. Their owners have perpetrated heinous lies to keep us tied to them for far longer than was good or necessary.

dleslie 7mo ago
We might argue whether they were good (I disagree) but I cannot agree that they were ever _necessary_ as an energy source. Viable alternatives exist and have existed for the entire duration of their use as a form of energy; and the story of oil-as-energy is the story of human suffering in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; without oil there would not be wars over oil, there would be healthier populations, and (likely) climate change would be less of a concern.