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Comment by triceratops | Hacker News Reader

It would've been impossible to bootstrap renewable energy without fossil fuels.

I'm strongly in favor of zero emissions. We also have to give fossil fuels their due for getting us here. I don't think the comparison to asbestos holds.

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We've been milling wheat with wind power for more than a thousand years; run-of-river hydro-mechanical solutions have been used for milling, mining, and forging for just as long.

Electric wind and hydro solutions are hundreds of years old, at this point.

And of course, there's steam.

I think we'd have had a green revolution with wind and water. Petroleum wasn't necessary.

I imagine it would not have been so dramatic, though. Might have ultimately found our way to the same spot, but a few hundred years longer. It is hard to argue that the incredible energy density of fossil fuels (oil in particular) is not a big driver of our industrialization.

There's certainly a quality to it that has lent itself to the suburbanization of the USA. In the absence of viable electric battery technology, the suburbanization would have relied on street cars and pedestrians.

Which existed. And were ripped up around the time the automobile took over; which has all sorts of theories around it as to why...

I think without oil we'd have higher density cities, better public transit, and healthier populations.

> And of course, there's steam.

How do you make steam without burning something? If you say nuclear fission then you're proposing that humans would somehow have invented electric mining vehicles and mined enough ore to invent fusion without burning a single hydrocarbon molecule?

I suppose in an alternate reality where we simply had no fossil fuels this may have been the tech tree. It would have taken centuries longer though.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It wasn't necessary for it to happen eventually, but if eventually is several generations further down the line because it would have been painfully slow that's an important factor to consider.

Slower industrial and economic development would include huge human costs in terms of slower medical, social, economic and possibly also political development. It might have some beneficial effects as well though. I don't think it's an easy calculation to make.

We had rapid social progress _despite_ suburbanization. It never came to pass that we could assume that every household had a car, there was always a statistically significant urban populations that preferred transit, and delivery of public services is less efficient with lower density populations.

I happen to believe that we would be a healthier, happier society if suburbanization had never occurred. If we walked more, and had better access to the services we need, then we'd be healthier and happier. And it would be cheaper to deliver services.

I think that may be insufficiently factoring in energy costs. If energy costs a n order of magnitude or two more for an extended period, you just get a whole lot less economy generally, and therefore a whole lot less of everything an economy can provide.

Walking more sounds great, but I'm not sure it compensates for what could be an order of magnitude less health care generally.

Health care is more efficiently delivered to higher density populations. Low density populations increase the time to access health care, which increases the risk of delivering emergency care but it also encumbers access to primary care with the associated access time. Suburban areas are a great deal more expensive in terms of health care delivery.

Consider that in the absence of suburbanization there is decreased demand for energy. Higher density housing is cheaper to service overall, but also provides greater efficiency in accessing services. The reduced efficiency of suburban residences _requires_ the existence of high density forms of readily accessible and consumable energy; it simply isn't viable to build an American suburb without cheap energy, because it is a hideously inefficient model.

But other models _do_ exist, and _are_ successful. The suburb can die and society will be better off for it.

Absolutely true, my point is more about extraction per se now that alternatives for some uses exist, and definitely the bootstrap problem is real and fossil fuels were the only way to get past it.

What I'm saying is more of an "externalities may exceed the value for any future time" than "we should go back in time and ban them from the beginning". I also suspect that as chemical feedstock and niche uses they'll effectively never be replaced, just probably be synthetic instead of extracted.

Thermal solar can be built 200 years ago. Although coal is very useful for production of steel, it is not essential as wood can be used instead.

> Although coal is very useful for production of steel, it is not essential as wood can be used instead.

Wasn't the production of charcoal in Europe during the middle ages the cause of rather massive deforestation?

I don't know about Europe, but mining deforested most of Nevada's pinyon-juniper woodlands to produce charcoal during the 1800s.

> Thermal solar can be built 200 years ago

That's good for heating water, but I'm not aware of it generating a significant amount of electricity even today.

Soviet Union built one in Crimea. It worked. And nothing special was used that could not be built 200 years ago. But it was rather inefficient and in presence of cheap coal there were no point to continue with it after the collapse of Soviet Union.

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