3 ms·

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

by 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.

by dleslie 7mo ago

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.