An enviromentally concerned world...how early?

I was listeing to NPR the other day, about such wonders as geothermal power, and other alternative energy sources, and got to thinking:
How early could we plausibly see a drive towards renewable energy sources? I'm not just refering to a few small projects, but a serious drive to reduce dependence on irreplacable fuels?
Doesn't matter if it's wind, water, alcohol...anything.
I know that a lot of hydro facilities were abandoned in years past, and I heard that the Model T Ford was built with ethanol in mind.

So...ideas, anyone?
 
Radburn New Jersey was a town which was planned to accomodate cars but not depend on them, apparently people walk more in this town then elsehwere. It was founded in 1929 but the depression meant that similar planned towns didn't go ahead, and the car then drove town planning not the other way around. If this town was founded a few years earlier, and its planned follow ons were built as well maybe this would be the way to reduce our impact on the environment before the car becomes entrenched and is the tail wagging the dog, so to speak.
 
Have some engineering savvy people in the Romantic movement in the beginning of the 19th century.

Smog and soot are unsightly and something just must be done about it.

The environmental and resource-saving benefits would be accidental. :)
 
Have some engineering savvy people in the Romantic movement in the beginning of the 19th century.

Smog and soot are unsightly and something just must be done about it.

The environmental and resource-saving benefits would be accidental. :)

Couple this with William Forster Lloyd's 1833 studies on population and resource allocation. Full-blown economics-based environmental movement possible by mid-century. Always remember that energy concerns exist in a broader framework of environmental concerns. If you can get people to think of a resource like a piece of money, they'll start to grasp the differences between "renewable" and "finite."
Britain already had experience with the loss of most of its great forests by the end of the Napoleonic Wars. And- this next point is perhaps specious reasoning- given that the nature of discourse in Jane Austen novels concerning wealth revolves around an inherent grasp of- and reliance on- the concept of interest, and assuming this understanding was generally held by the voting population of Britain, one can easily imagine a situation where untrammeled growth gives way to well-tended caches in all fields.
The trick is getting this to catch on elsewhere.
 
Nazis like Himmler were fairly environmentalist, though I don't know how much of that would have made it into policy after a very hypothetical Nazi victory.
 
Have some engineering savvy people in the Romantic movement in the beginning of the 19th century.

Smog and soot are unsightly and something just must be done about it.

The environmental and resource-saving benefits would be accidental. :)

I seem to recall an alternate history that was the reverse of this -- which had the technophiles almost completely wipe out the Romantics to the point where you had an almost Victoria-wank at the cost of most of the environment in Great Britain. There was also a Manhattan Commune and a fractured United States... I forget the name of the work.
 
I guess if world war 1 is much less entrenched and there is a greater use of gas and /or britain gets invaded then people would be more concerned about the environment especially if residues from the gas pollute rivers and generally ruin farming. I guess you could have some herbicide like molecule in the gas.
 
I seem to recall an alternate history that was the reverse of this -- which had the technophiles almost completely wipe out the Romantics to the point where you had an almost Victoria-wank at the cost of most of the environment in Great Britain. There was also a Manhattan Commune and a fractured United States... I forget the name of the work.

That would be The Difference Engine...

Someone made a map of that world... I was looking at it earlier today. Its in the first map thread (search for Difference Engine).
 
An idea i had a while ago was:
Thomas Davenport invented an electric motor in 1835, and in the next year he built a demonstration railway. His main problem was that there was no good way to generate electricity. I've read several times that if his motor was hooked up backwards, it would generate electricity. So, somehow Daveport's motor gets hooked up backwards (idiot assistant, setting up a demonstration while very tired) and Davenport figures out how to make a generator.

Well, here we have electric generation in the 1840s, and water-mills are very important at the time, mostly for milling grain and sawing wood. I think many of these mills would incorporate a generator by the 1860s. In this TL, hydropower would be so wide-spread that "Rural Electrification" wouldn't be the issue it was OTL. Larger plants (coal-fired steam probably) would take over in the cities but, at least through the '60s, most towns would still have an old hydroplant. With no Rural Electrification, farms would have the wind-turbines they had OTL, and some would get power from a local mill. I would predict that some sort of "Rural Electrification" would be implemented by the '70s. If not, rural populations would remain lower due to no ubiquitous power supply (building new lines would be the expense).

An interesting add-on to this idea would be if there was continued development of hydropower, there could be many local plants still competitive with the larger producers. Fewer in number, doubtlessly, and many bought up by a larger company so that there might be several companies specializing in small-scale hydropower.
 
Very early where it makes sence. Gaining heat by burning renewable resourses: firewood. Getting power from nature: water power. And so on. The trick is to avoid make it into a movement. A movement requires a lot of.. requierments. Inventions here and there just require a inventor.

That said, how about WWII. It was a huge resource shortage on every side so ideas like that makes sence.
 
You could get something evolving from H.G. Well's books could do it. He was basically the first hippy, writing about environmentalism, globalism, free love, etc. And it has the benefit of proposing scientific solutions which would continue to be popular for the next half century.
 
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