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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

The jump to either is fairly trivial because hydropower is so abundant. 18% of the worlds current electricity is supplied by hydroelectric power. Considering we developed nuclear energy using 1940’s industrial capacity hydro could easily bridge the gap.

Similarly while trains needed fossil fuels ships didn’t and allowed for very efficient transportation of goods on the ocean and inland through areas with sufficient rainfall. The major historic use of coal was for heating, but much of the earth never gets that cold.

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> hydropower is so abundant

Almost all of our current hydropower is based on damns made of concrete. Creating the cement for that is very energy intensive. Also turbines and generators are made of metals which require a lot of energy to melt.

Probably you can bootstrap a waterpower based industry somehow without fossil fuels but it is not trivial.

The other thing is that each incremental step in such a process has to provide some benefit to the participants. For example you are not going to have generators without readily available good quality copper wire, but bootstrapping a copper refining and wire making industry without fossil fuels is very hard. Those people need to see a reason for doing it in a world where there is no electricity yet therefore there is very little need for said copper wires.

Historically the Industrial Revolution was mostly bootstrapped by hydro / biofuel power. Useful combustion engines were only invented fairly late in the process. You don’t need to start with massive dams, you need to bootstrap industry to get to that point. Even 0.1% of the worlds current electricity generation is a massive amount of energy.

There’s this idea that the Industrial Revolution ran on coal but Coal was an inferior fuel for steel production until ~1827 or so.

Eventually steam locomotives beat horse / manpower drawn canal boats, but it a close contest until surprisingly recently. Hell the last commercial cargo sailing ship was in use until the 1960’s long after nuclear power became a thing.

Bootstrapping a hydropower based industry with fossil fuels is not trivial either.

> Almost all of our current hydropower is based on damns made of concrete. Creating the cement for that is very energy intensive.

Is that really harder than building hundreds of kilometers of aqueducts? Humans have known how to engineer water flows for thousands of years, if we valued power we would build those dams. That power would be more expensive so it would slow down the industrial revolution but it would still happen.

Also you don't need continuous power for an industrial revolution, that is convenient but factories are still revolutionary even if they just run half the year.

The issue isn't electricity, it's energy. How do you run your first ironworks without coal? You can't really exploit hydro for electricity without industrialization, and you can't really have an industrial revolution without coal.

Good point, even to this day coal/coke is required to create steel (electric-arc is only used for recycling steel).

That’s not true. We use syngas (about 50% H, 50% CO) in all the iron ore reduction plants built in the Us in the last few decades, and they can run almost entirely on hydrogen.

Additionally, coal wasn’t even used for making steel in the US basically at all until 1827 (charcoal has fewer impurities like the sulfur found in a lot of early coke). The US primarily used charcoal from wood even for iron production until well into the mid 1800s (and by 1884, charcoal was still used for 10% of iron and steel production in the US, and charcoal was still used in some niche areas even into the 1940s). And steam locomotives in the US were also often powered by wood in the 1800s.

The same way the first ironworks were run - with charcoal, which you make from organics.

But without coal you quickly run out of forest. I mean, England did, and they were coal rich!

England ran out of Land not forests. They set aside large tracts of land for growing wood starting in the Middle Ages because having wood was useful both as a construction material and for burning.

Critically, you can move wood long distances so running out locally isn’t an major issue as long as you don’t run out globally.

Before coal, England used coppicing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing#United_Kingdom ) to quickly regrow the forests used for charcoal for steel smelting.

Your industrial output will be limited, but there's plenty of land and forests grow by themselves.

You can always use peat.

Early Ironworks couldn’t use coal due to suffer issues, the US didn’t swap until 1827 long after the Industrial Revolution kicked off. Also, we’ve used a relatively small fraction of the worlds coal supply, so there’s little reason to assume a prior civilization would have used it up either.

A large fraction of the early/mid Industrial Revolution was powered by hydro/wood. Abundant rainfall is why so much industry ended up in the north eastern US and England. Efficient motors was more a result of a scientific and industrial innovation rather than the cause of such.

So suggesting Ironworks as a major obstacle doesn’t really stand up.

auto corrupt: “suffer issues” > sulfur issues

Most industry is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for vehicles. That includes nearly all construction. How would we get around that bottleneck?

0 fossil fuels doesn’t mean zero fuels. Further starting from scratch with different constraints means different optimizations.

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