alternatehistory.com

Hello:)

While today we are most familiar with oil as car fuel, it's rise as a serious commercial enterprise started with the use of kerosene for artificial lighting. This was the early oil industry's bread and butter- whereas gasoline(petrol) was at the time a worthless substance. Unfortunately for the oil industry kerosene lamps proved inferior to the lightbulb, and were displaced- but luckily for the oil industry the car industry was emerging around the same time, and the previously ugly gasoline bloomed into a beautiful swan(or not).

The key point here is that gasoline was only around as an irritating byproduct of kerosene, and all it would have taken is an earlier development of the lightbulb for their to be little or no oil extraction when the car industry emerged. Early car developers were open to three possible power sources: gasoline, biofuel and electric. They went with Ggsoline because it was objectively superior, but if it's supply was ~zero and the infrastructure for extracting it wasn't ready and rearing to go it seems likely that they would have gone with biofuel instead.

My first reaction to this idea was to feel sad that it didn't happen that way- we'd have lower carbon emissions, no massive oil subsidies for the horrid regimes that seem to won the jackpot oil-wise, no oil-driven military activity.

Of course reality is never that simple. Wouldn't biofuel mean vastly higher food prices, much more poverty and starvation? Wouldn't that mean even more intensive and extensive agriculture(goodbye Amazon rainforest?).

Then theirs the possibility that petrol's superiority is great enough that it would eventually be able to "come from behind" and knockout biofuels. I could even see this being driven by environmentalist/humanitarian motives of some government or billionare, wanting to reduce deforestation/starvation. Now wouldn't that be ironic:p
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