What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? | Hacker News Reader

What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came?

rootsofprogress.org

13 pointsfeross5 comments

I think this is where we are with a lot of clean tech. It's really obvious to everyone that something must be done. It's even fairly simple to derive from first principles what that something should be - lots of renewables, mainly solar, energy storage, electrification of everything that can be electrified and synthetic fuel for the rest.

But it's not happening? Why? Because the market isn't there. There's simply no way for the changes required to compete with an almost unlimited supply of free energy pouring from the ground. And until clean tech is profitable, it will not be built.

I'd love a few politicians to realise this and start taxing carbon at the moment it leaves the ground. That would truly create a market for clean tech. But of course, that would be political suicide. So they don't.

Agreed that we need to do more to encourage renewables, but thankfully, the market has already brought the cost of solar down to be competitive with coal, even without adding subsidies to solar and tarrifs on coal. Solar is around $0.02 to $0.08 per kWh, vs $0.03 to $0.05 per kW for coal. The only thing coal has going for it in the face of that is solar's inability to produce when there is no sun.

> magine you could go back in time to the ancient world to jump-start the Industrial Revolution. You carry with you plans for a steam engine, and you present them to the emperor, explaining how the machine could be used to drain water out of mines, pump bellows for blast furnaces, turn grindstones and lumber saws, etc.

> But to your dismay, the emperor responds: “Your mechanism is no gift to us. It is tremendously complicated; it would take my best master craftsmen years to assemble. It is made of iron, which could be better used for weapons and armor. And even if we built these engines, they would consume enormous amounts of fuel, which we need for smelting, cooking, and heating. All for what? Merely to save labor. Our empire has plenty of labor; I personally own many slaves. Why waste precious iron and fuel in order to lighten the load of a slave? You are a fool!”

That's not the correct sales pitch to use with an emperor. The correct sales pitch is to show him how he can win battles.

Throughout history, until the 19th century, a lot of military confrontations ended up with a side hunkering down in a castle, and the other one sieging that castle. Most sieges were unsuccessful and the successful ones were costly. One of the methods used during sieges was the undermining: you mine a tunnel from a safe distance until you get under the fortification's walls, and there you enlarge the hole until a part of the wall collapses.

Of course, this only works if the tunnel you dig does not get flooded. If it gets flooded, you're out of luck. But put a Newcomen engine there, and your attackers can keep digging inside dry tunnels. Who can stop you now?

Go back to the ancient world and they don't care about your magic steam engine because it uses too much resources? Make one gun and they'll want to get better at extracting resources quickly.

James C Scott chronicles in his various books about how most people do what they can to avoid top-down control. Before such weapons of coercion, it would have been much more difficult to enforce the hierarchies suggested by industrialization.

Weapons have been one of the primary drivers of progress. If we all lived happily together then we would just spend more resources on luxuries and consumption

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