- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://kbin.run/m/[email protected]/t/553659
A decline in fossil fuel power is now ‘inevitable’, the report’s authors say.
cross-posted from: https://kbin.run/m/[email protected]/t/553659
A decline in fossil fuel power is now ‘inevitable’, the report’s authors say.
We would have come up with lots of ways to make Steam. Electricity still would have happened. So I am guessing a lot of steam generating electricity. Hydro power would still be a thing as would thermal.
Wind power seems like the real candidate for early supremacy though. It can be purely mechanical ( eg. Grinding or running pumps ), it could store energy in the form of water pressure, and it could be used to generate electricity.
If we had a reliable electrical grid and no fossil fuels, things like batteries and electric cars would have gotten a lot further ahead sooner.
A smaller Industrial Revolution was totally possible on wind and water power. The next step would be electricity. Once we had electricity, a lot of the road we went down would be possible. Nuclear power would probably have been added to the mix more or less on the same schedule.
Perhaps the biggest deference would not be energy but rather plastics. It is hard to say what the materials side of history would have looked like without oil.