Would it be possible to create an Industrial Revolution without relying on coal, oil, or natural gas run factories? Or is it only possible to get to greener sources of energy by first going through carbon emitting energy?
This post is inspired by recent evidence suggesting serious human-driven climate change begins with the Industrial Revolution and has been accelerating ever since. It makes me wonder if the Industrial Revolution itself is a Great Filter
The big importance of fossil fuel in the early industrial revolution was to keep the houses of Britain warm after the British had deforested their island. In that early stage, industry was driven by the high population densities coal heating+potatoes allowed, the wealth surplus created by the slave plantations of the West Indies and transport improvements via canal and machine productivity increases driven by water power.
Without coal, well, Britain may not be a great centre of industry, and instead decline as it lost people to the American colonies and Europe. But the South German industrial complex, based around water power from the Alps, would not be derailed as early as Britain. The wood bottleneck would definitely slow human development, and Europe may see a trajectory more like 18th and 19th Century China, with Europe having an amazing 18th Century, and then suffering a century ravaged by war, famine, disease, outside invasion and other delayed consequences of the 18th Century boom and deforestation. But would that stop the Enlightenment? I'd argue no. The US, Brazil and Canada would still be well placed, the Spanish colonies in the Americas likely also perform well relative to Europe, Russia may find herself enjoying a swifter rise, the Balkans, which were running with a population far below the carrying capacity of their lands will perform well, though without coal-fueled industrialization, it's hard to say who will end up owning the various Balkan lands in the 19th Century.
Especially as the lack of heating coal would mean a much weaker Britain and very possibly a French victory in the Napoleonic wars, if there are such wars in this scenario.
So who is strong when could be very different without fossil fuels, but Europe was already a leader in the use of machines, was already undergoing a scientific flowering that compared well to the Roman/Hellenic flowering, the Arab flowering and the Chinese flowering. And importantly, Europe was in the position to stand on the shoulders of those prior greats, developing the ideas and discoveries of the Arabs, who developed the work of the Roman and Hellenic savants, and also added in a bit of what they'd learned from China and India. Human civilization will advance, though it remains agrarian for at least another 200 years, perhaps longer.
Don't think this necessarily translates into a "greener" civilization though. In the context of 18th Century and 19th Century Europe, coal
was green. It saved the last forests of the continent from extinction and allowed them to recover a little even. Without coal (and eventually the massive quantities of cheap iron and steel it allowed), wood is the indispensable material for heating and ship-building. Spain's miss-management of her forests was the main reason why they were a declining power in this period. Britain could build ships from timber harvested in her New England colonies, the Ottomans could build ships from the relatively well managed forests of the Balkans. Spain, running low on well-managed forests, kept robbing the future to cover the weaknesses of the now, and cut down trees when they were immature, then didn't cure the immature wood for long enough, building her ships out of wood that was too young and too green to be equal to the materials that made Ottoman galleys or English frigates. And of course, the deforestation to sustain her navies was also hurting Spain's agricultural potential. Potentially, this is the fate waiting for all of Europe, as the various countries cannibalize their long term naval capacity and population capacities in order to meet the crises of the day. Eventually resulting in a more barren continent.
However, wood, charcoal and plant oils are all much superior to oil and coal in their suitability as fuel, use in chemical industries and the like. Only the very best grades of fossil fuel has a qualitative parity (or, with the right technology maybe an advantage) most fossil fuels only have an advantage because they were cheap. Gasoline became the favoured fuel for the internal combustion engine because it was a waste product of an oil industry built around supplying kerosene for lighting (itself a substitute for the superior oil harvested from whales) and the oil industry was desperate to get rid of it. An enormous amount of ingenuity needed to be applied to figuring out how to replace high quality charcoal with coal dug from the ground. Even so, many grades of coal just aren't good for steel manufacture, and we use it to generate electricity.
Latex rubber is superior to synthetic rubber in many ways - modern synthetics do have advantages but that's only after decades of work by some of our best minds figuring out how to use cheap oil in the place of natural latex from plantations.
Many of the industries today dominated by coal or oil derived products followed the same pattern of starting with some feedstock from the agro-forestry sector, being forced to switch to the cheaper but inferior fossil-derived feedstock and then scaling up on the stored wealth of hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis.
Potentially, one could power a civilization very like our own (only with more arc furnaces for steel and less consumer-end energy use) solely from hydro-power. The question is, can one build large hydroelectric dams without the massive concrete output that fossil fuels allow? Arguably, big scale hydro-power requires plenty of fossil fuels.
fasquardon