Screw the oil industry/clean energy wank

France's 1880s experiments with solar steam power lead to (primitive) solar panels by the 1920s and solar providing 1/4 of energy by the 50s or 60s.
 
With any pod post 1900, screw the oil industry as hard as possible. Or at least have cleaner forms of energy come into mainstream use. Or both. Preferably both. Bonus points if you screw the car industry and have the majority of people use public transportation/bikes/walking too.
Ok, cars run on Ethanol right from the get go. E85/15 is 85% Ethanol these days, and 15% Gasoline.

Some things I found hard to believe, but some folks actually believed the oil industries lies about ethanol as a motor vehicle fuel! I used to live in a house with 7 house mates a number of years ago, and one of them called me out on what he thought was BS about Ethanol being a better fuel than gasoline. His 'proof' was that he tried the E85/15, and didn't get the fuel efficiency that standard gasoline gave, and therefore the oil industries big propaganda campaign paid off, until I asked him to hop on the computer and google things like octane rating and compression ratios, and what his trucks engine was setup to burn, and had he had it optimized for ethanol only, and burned pure ethanol, not E85/15?

As for coal, the OP specified both "screw the Oil industry" & "clean energy wank", so electrical generation being done without coal is fair game. My "green new deal" would be to get Donald Sadoway a research grant ASAP, to enable the development of the liquid metal battery, and follow that up with bank and government tax incentives for rural customers to be able to go off the grid.
 
IMHO the known catastrophes as well as almost-catastrophes around nuclear power somewhat ... diksregard it as a 'clean energy'.

Hardly. There have been a few problems at nuclear reactors, but they’re incredibly safe. Just like planes are incredibly safe. The only really bad nuclear power disaster was a Soviet design. TMI and Fukushima were bad, but not even on the same order of magnitude.

So, short of crashing the world’s energy economy through hand waving, nuclear is the only way to go to achieve the OP’s challenge. I suggest that a effective way would be to avert WW2 entirely or end it quicker, so that the world’s first impression of nuclear technology isn’t its destructive power.
 
IMHO the known catastrophes as well as almost-catastrophes around nuclear power somewhat ... diksregard it as a 'clean energy'.
The catastrophes that had incredibly low death tolls and a total worldwide human cost over 60 years that is an order of magnitude lower of the yearly human cost of coal and oil pollution in the US - tens of thousands of early deaths caused by this pollution, according to MIT? We're talking about these catastrophes? Nuclear power is pretty damn clean and unlike solar or wind, doesn't need additional plants to cover the predictable and unpredictable lapses in power generation.

Which is why, BTW, the "clean power fanatics" Germany is actually the most polluting (per capita) country in Europe, to compare with their nuclear-powered neighbour.
 
A bit late, but I got another idea. Maybe have some massive oil related disaster that can turn public opinion against oil?
Can’t really. In the time when public opinion mattered, oil was already everywhere in everything. Try working without plastics, without advanced hydrocarbons. The word for this is suicide.
 
A bit late, but I got another idea. Maybe have some massive oil related disaster that can turn public opinion against oil?

Nope. Anything bad enough would literally have to be so bad that it is civilization threatening. There’s too many hours added on to people’s lives by cheap and available energy and hydrocarbon polymers.
 
I mean, Chernobyl ruined the reputation of Nuclear energy.

It did, but nuclear was still a new technology thay was only a minor part of humanity’s overall energy budget. You didn’t see humanity move away from nuclear, we just stopped moving toward it - Chernobyl just accelerated an existing trend.

Fossil fuels for industrial use go back to the 18th century - thats a mature technology. The entire industrial economy was built on them. Thats much harder to change.
 
Hmm, so, what can we do to make nuclear energy more popular? Avoiding ww2 would help

Thats the big one.

Also avoiding Communism and its shoddy record at pretty much everything. That avoids both Soviet-style reactors (terrible) and the Cold War - if the world is unipolar, the threat of nuclear annihilation isn’t hanging over the heads of 2-3 generations of people.
 
Since this has become a discussion largely about nuclear, I woukd like to recommen ‘Power to Save the World’ by Gwynneth Craven. Its over a decade old, so its dated now - pre-Fukushima and the revolutions in the fossil fuel industry - but its a solid starting point. It also gets a bit preachy in its conclusion - much of the “we’re all going to die if we don’t adopt my preferred policy” schtick.
 
"Kill the car industry"? "Only nuclear"? Really? So run-of-the-river hydro is impractical anywhere? Ocean thermal is impossible (especially at high latitudes)? Solar power satellites are impossible?

Motor fuels from other sources than oil are possible, not least algae oils or hydrogen from ocean thermal.

Generating methane from landfills would be a good start.
 

SwampTiger

Banned
I doubt you can change much before nuclear power arrives. Some improvements to urban transport, laws limiting auto and truck use in central urban areas, taxation similar to Britain, investment in hydro power and wind energy in the Thirties, and support for suburban and regional rail may allow a reduction in the Big Oil. However, the lure of freedom with the automobile has been hard to control, see China in the last several decades and Russia after 1990. Petroleum is still the most energy dense fuel available. Maybe someone discovers a cheap, highly productive method to produce butanol from Clostridium bacteria. Mixed with gasoline, it will produce less harmful emissions and use less petroleum.
 
Early improvements in other tech, like silicon chips and computers, will allow research in other clean energy to go by quicker as data processing improves. A computer wank world could easily develop into a clean energy wank world.

Also, wank battery tech and lithium/rare metal production and solar becomes way more effective.

Also, wank electric trains, and green energy will do better.

In certain areas Solar (especially with improved batteries) with its low maintenance cost and 0 fuel cost is competitive now/would be in a wank.

Its why RN both the Indonesian and Phillipino Govt's are heavily investing in solar.

On these 1000's, which currently rely on diesel generators that require fuel and maintenance to be shipped in. Solar, which only needs to be washed and has ample sun at that latitude. Is much more cost-efficient without subsidies. Ironically, the main issue with solar in Indonesia is from a jobs perspective, as it kills many maintenance jobs. As a result, the Govt. has given those individuals jobs as Solar-Panel washers!

In the Phillipines solar power investments is being considered as a part of the response to Islamic extremism in the southern islands as the cheap power,without the need for maintenance, is potentially the way to transform the remote communities economically and thus make ISIS less palatable.

Back to the initial premise, solar is easily an option in tropical areas, even more so on Islands, even if it wouldn't be able of doing so worldwide.
 
Ford is stubborn enough to keep on pumping money to the electric taxi plan at New York (skips Fordlandia, for example), and really ruins his relations with the oil barons as a result.

Out of spite and racist paranoia he then starts to envision a business model where the oil companies are cut out of his business as much as possible. Enter the model E-T, the Electric Ford, combined with mass-produced cheap power generators for chargers, running with the similar windmills that are already familiar to homestead farmers.

The ability to have a vehicle that essentially runs on wind after one buys it is popular enough to be a commercial success, and competitors follow suit. By 1930s electric farm cars form a sizeable share of the market.

Enter 1930s and ideas of autarky. The electric Volkswagens and Fiats are a cynical ruse to focus petroleum reserves for military use, but the same logic applies for Russia as well. Leninism means electrification, and in the late 1950s an electric Ziguli is the way to go at Ukraine and increasingly elsewhere, especially because the Soviets learned to produce more cold-resistant batteries for their Siberian and arctic territories. The postwar era sees the American suburb population to follow suit, especially since the Atomic Age solves the problem of power sources with small-scale nuclear reactors. Large plants are soon a curiousity, as decentralized grid is much more resilient against hostile nuclear strikes. Accidents do happen, but the scale is so small that the psychological impact is similar to all other industrial disasters.

By 1960s the economy keeps humming along, as solar and wind power generation technology starts to compete with oil, that is increasingly seen as a fuel for ships and heavier-than-air traffic that still competes with airships that are increasingly often carrying their own nuclear power sources.

Sure, plastic is everywhere and ships, tanks, and trucks still tend to run on gas, but the average citizens find the idea of owning a gasoline-engine car a bit funny - why buy an expensive toy when you can drive around with a real car?
 
Top