AHC: Alternative Industrializations?

Albrecht

Banned
In my opinion, getting to the Age of Enlightenment is the biggest step here. From there to the Industrial revolution is very easy.
 

Deleted member 123260

I don't know? I'm a physicist, not a botanist or agronomist, so I'm really not the best person to ask. But based on what I know some permaculture practices could be beneficial in climate change scenarios by sinking carbon into the soil at enhanced rates or by producing food ecosystems with somewhat more resilience to climate change effects than conventional agriculture. These are not likely to be especially large, though.

How large would it specifically be though. I think we need a hybrid approach to climate change.
 

Albrecht

Banned
How large would it specifically be though. I think we need a hybrid approach to climate change.
These methods are not suited to fight climate change. You cant simply push down bio matter and hope for it to be fossilized soon. Its also the Geothermal power at play beneath the surface. Such fossilizations take millions or even at best thousands of years. Why not just use the Geothermal power directly, instead?
 
In my opinion, getting to the Age of Enlightenment is the biggest step here. From there to the Industrial revolution is very easy.

Is Enlightenment needed in some of the slow burn scenarios suggested or if the dominant faith doesn't claim to have a monopoly on truth?

Example: Njord's daughters play in the stream while we drop in Thor's hammer to turn the turbine in the hydro electric "Thor Powered" electric plant. After is all, electricity is a manifestation of Thor. And if our visitors from India see Shiva's power being unleashed, that's true too I guess.
 

Deleted member 123260

These methods are not suited to fight climate change. You cant simply push down bio matter and hope for it to be fossilized soon. Its also the Geothermal power at play beneath the surface. Such fossilizations take millions or even at best thousands of years. Why not just use the Geothermal power directly, instead?

I'm not talking about fossilization but reducing carbon emissions which permaculture seems like it can do.
 

Albrecht

Banned
Is Enlightenment needed in some of the slow burn scenarios suggested or if the dominant faith doesn't claim to have a monopoly on truth
Enlightenment doesn't necessarily mean religion getting weaker among the masses. This cannot happen as Science cannot by itself, claim a monopoly over Truth. Its a false equation. Science can be worked on irrespective of the religiousity of the masses. Enlightenment needs a good flow of information which can be availed through contact and expansion.
 

Windows95

Banned
Maybe if Mu'tazilis are not as brutal and dictatorial as OTL... Then we can have industrialization. If al-Ghazali's influenced is reduced (Mu'tazilism is more popular), unrestricted progress in the scientific method is possible. Shifting patronage from the arts to science for military purposes might help too. Contact with China with their gunpowder might help, with charcoal to burn for energy.
 
Well I have always been under the impression that an industrial revolution requires both an Agricultural Revolution and a commercial/capitalist revolution.

A scenario where both of these take place makes industrialization more plausible.
 
@Workable Goblin

This may not be the right thread for this but would permaculture mitigate climate change.
I don't know? I'm a physicist, not a botanist or agronomist, so I'm really not the best person to ask. But based on what I know some permaculture practices could be beneficial in climate change scenarios by sinking carbon into the soil at enhanced rates or by producing food ecosystems with somewhat more resilience to climate change effects than conventional agriculture. These are not likely to be especially large, though.

Permaculture, if applied to all farm land currently under the plough, would pull a few gigatonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere. I hesitate to make any claims with solid numbers, since we're talking about a dynamic equilibrium in a very complex system indeed, but no matter how you cut it, we're talking a huge amount more biomass in the soil and a huge amount less carbon in the atmosphere. It's not just beneficial, it's the single biggest positive measure we could take (as opposed to negative measures where we stop doing something in the hopes to make things better). It takes a while for the soil ecology to go from "devastated" to "thriving and fertile" however, so all farmland switching at once isn't something I'd recommend and the time required means we'd need to take aggressive measures elsewhere to get a full solution.

fasquardon
 
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Permaculture, if applied to all farm land currently under the plough, would pull a few gigatonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
The problem is that there’s a lot of gigatonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere already, so pulling “a few” out won’t actually do that much (especially if it’s not combined with emissions reductions, of course). Additionally, there are other techniques such as enhanced weathering, non-permaculture related afforestation, and biochar creation which offer similar potentials to remove some amount of CO2 from the atmosphere, with some seeming to be capable of removing a practically unlimited amount of CO2 with sufficient investment (specifically enhanced weathering and direct air capture and sequestration). Those seem more promising than widespread adoption of permaculture to me.

As I said, though, I’m not an expert in this area.
 
The problem is that there’s a lot of gigatonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere already, so pulling “a few” out won’t actually do that much

Back of the envelope calculations would suggest that we'd need to dig up more gigatonnes of coal/gas/oil to feed all the soil formation we're talking about.

I am dubious of such calculations however, so until we've tried scaling up the techniques further, I will be conservative and say only "a few".

fasquardon
 

Deleted member 123260

@Workable Goblin @fasquardon

I feel like we need actual studies on permaculture to get the exact numbers of it's impact. I'm not sure exactly why we can't do all of them at once.

Of course it doesn't matter since humanity isn't coordinated enough to stop climate change anyways.
 
Just a thought, but Therese ist one Basic facto that Limits the number of regions that could become industrial centre early. The avalability of fiel.while water Power is nice, you would need rich coal deposits nearby
 
Question: is there any viable alternative to coal? I am totally ignorant on this side of things so it would be nice to hear an informed opinion.

Edit: whoops. Just read through the entire discussion on that the page before.
 

Lusitania

Donor
The issue with alternative places for industrialization is that majority if not all of them lacked both political, society structure, available resources and education structure to support it.

there is reason it not happen in India or China even though both were more advanced that Europe for long periods of time prior to Europe own industrialization.
 
Wealth inequality seems to be a hindrance to industrialisation. The mercantilist policy of deliberately keeping the masses in poverty was justified by claiming that they won't work as hard if they didn't need to do back breaking work from dawn to dusk just to get the bare essentials. Of course, if they did have the wealth to bargain for a higher return on their labour, then the wealthy would have to invest to make their labour more efficient, and having some wealth left over after they've covered living expenses would mean they could generate demand for products suitable for industrialisation. If you're a capitalist with a brickworks or a textile mill, who has the greater capacity for further demand for your products - one aristocrat with a full wardrobe and a manor house, or a hundred to a thousand peasants wearing stitched-up rags and living in wooden hovels?

Might a democracy which doesn't have the crutch of slave labour, or a powerful monarch with the policy of "a chicken in every pot" like Henry IV of France, enrich the peasantry enough to get the virtuous cycle of higher productivity and increased aggregate demand going?
 
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Wealth inequality seems to be a hindrance to industrialisation. The mercantilist policy of deliberately keeping the masses in poverty was justified by claiming that they won't work as hard if they didn't need to do back breaking work from dawn to dusk just to get the bare essentials. Of course, if they did have the wealth to bargain for a higher return on their labour, then the wealthy would have to invest to make their labour more efficient, and having some wealth left over after they've covered living expenses would mean they could generate demand for products suitable for industrialisation. If you're a capitalist with a brickworks or a textile mill, who has the greater capacity for further demand for your products - one aristocrat with a full wardrobe and a manor house, or a hundred to a thousand peasants wearing stitched-up rags and living in wooden hovels?

Might a democracy which doesn't have the crutch of slave labour, or a powerful monarch with the policy of "a chicken in every pot" like Henry IV of France, enrich the peasantry enough to get the virtuous cycle of higher productivity and increased aggregate demand going?

You're right about inequality being a hindrance to industrialization. Due to high influx of capital and goods from the colonial empires and strong competition between European nations, wages got higher and higher and capitalists had a real incentive to invest more innovation instead of simply employing the more expensive labor. Economically speaking, industrialization was a matter of stability and easy access to capital first and foremost. China and India didn't create great commercial empires because they had everything they wanted exactly where they were, they reached a poitn of equilibrium between supply and demand that innovation simply didn't pay, see more here.
 
The High Level Equilibrium stuff that tends to stress that market integration was high and efficient in China relative to Western Europe of the time doesn't tend to be seen as correct, or at least note clearly correct, I don't think, by economic historians today (see - https://voxeu.org/article/why-china-was-wrong-side-great-divergence - on the previous conventional wisdom that China presented a rather less integrated market than Western Europe and its territories, the revisionist California school that claimed the reverse, then the return to either previous view or more of a parity.)

In general, the HLE idea seems like it either present the idea that market integration and efficient markets as make industrialization less likely (against the grain of what almost all economic historians would expect, usually stressing that market size tends to improve returns to innovation!) or is just describing a "no surplus" Malthusian economy in somewhat more favourable terms (but doesn't really add anything analytically?) or it's really just a "high wage" theory of industrialization per Allen (high wages = more investment in productivity per worker = industrialization) but again phrased in a more favourable way for low wage economies ("Places with low wages are so because they have more efficient markets!", which is, in general, not a truism - market integration doesn't causally immiserate workers). It's the kind of thing that sounds plausible at first, but when thought about in detail more like a combination of simpler, more testable theories with extra steps and slightly different presentation and which is less testable because it combines lots of ideas in a less clear way (and some odd ideas - "Railways wouldn't have been profitable in China due to the water transport network, explaining so no one innovated the steam engine before that... yet railways were profitable as soon as they could be introduced, and lack of the necessary engineering principles explains lack of steam engine, so.....?").
 
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