What if in 1850 just as the industrial revolution starts ramping up all sources of fossil fuel disappeared?

[CaBil]

I was visiting Scotland a few years ago when I basically stumbled across a historical site that was focused on the industry of coppicing, the sustainable harvesting of wood to create charcoal that basically fell out of economic viability with the rise of coal. It reminded me of the discussion I once read about during the Napelonic wars about how wood that suitable for shipbuilding was a strategic resource for the UK. Basically, forests were so heavily managed in the UK to produce charcoal that trees were not really permitted to grow large enough to be used for shipbuilding, until the Napelonic era where suddenly they had to rapidly expand their navy and they didn't have the excess production to do so, and they couldn't wait the several decades it would take to grow trees that size. Which implies that basically all of the UK was managed that way.

As far as I can tell, coppicing was never a thing in the US, but it was a big deal in the UK and Europe.

Would it be a replacement for coal? No. But they had methods and strategies. Would the forests of the New World be preserved in order to be managed as huge coppicing farms? Or of Russia?

 

[YuffieK]

While steelmaking typically requires coke as a carbon source for the smelting and alloying process, one can bypass the need for it in the smelting stage via electrolysis. If one can get enough power, they can set up a electrolysis cell for the smelting of iron and then use whatever carbon source they want(eg from biochar made from waste) for alloyin afterwards.
It may be more expensive but this process when found can still lead to cheaper steel(just not as cheap as the standard coke based process). Of course, where one gets the energy needed for the process is a different matter altogether.

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No readily available/transportable power source means no way to effectively mine and process the vast amount of metal ore needed for Industrialization. No industrialization means you can't build the infrastructures needed to get around the lack of fossil fuels. Technological advance is stillborn.

 

[PossiblyEnos]

While steelmaking typically requires coke as a carbon source for the smelting and alloying process, one can bypass the need for it in the smelting stage via electrolysis. If one can get enough power, they can set up a electrolysis cell for the smelting of iron and then use whatever carbon source they want(eg from biochar made from waste) for alloyin afterwards.
It may be more expensive but this process when found can still lead to cheaper steel(just not as cheap as the standard coke based process). Of course, where one gets the energy needed for the process is a different matter altogether.

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Okay, and how do they get that electrolysis going in 1850?

 

[Alane1]

Admittedly people traditionally used charcoal in iron and steel production before they started using coke which had the advantage of being cheaper and on far less demanding on forests than charcoal so steel and iron production will likely continue as before but the sort of mass producing large quantities of steel that happened during the second industrial revolution in the post civil war period will be problematic without coke coal.

 

[cryptoam]

Okay, and how do they get that electrolysis going in 1850?

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That was for in the future after society has progressed past the initial shock. I don't think that the initial momentum of the industrial revolution will survive after the event postulated here. However, once enough time has past; I can see this method being the way forward and out of the entire quagmire.

 

[Memphet'ran]

One thing people are forgetting is that during the 1880s to 1910s cars were mostly battery powered and even then people looked at other forms of oils and gases to power them as petroleum refineries and plants were not that widespread and were in limited demand.

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Again, this sort of thing isn't the biggest problem. If you just want to build one car or one airplane and so on lots of alternatives and work-arounds are possible. The biggest problem is that without fossil fuels humanity is more-or-less stuck within the energy constraints of the biosphere for... I suspect a long time. Not being stuck within the energy constraints of the biosphere is a lot of what makes the modern world different from the Medieval and ancient world.

Sure, you can build battery powered cars. Where do you get the energy to charge the batteries? Burning wood to make steam to turn dynamos? Then you're limited by the rate of sustainable wood extraction from your forests, unless you want to basically treat your forests like mines and log them unsustainably instead, but if you do that sooner or later you're going to run out of wood. And there are a lot of people who will want to use that wood for things besides making cars run, notably lots of people are going to need something to burn to heat their homes in winter and cook their food.

Or maybe you fuel your cars with alcohol or palm oil or something. Then your fuel is a crop. You only have so much fertile land to plant crops on, and the crops you grow have to include the food people eat.

Or maybe you have electric cars and charge them with hydroelectricity. That can work fine... in regions with good hydropower potential. But hydropower is inherently limited by availability of large volumes of water running downhill. Today hydropower is 15.8% of world electricity production and 6.4% of world energy production.

You can easily have some automobiles in a no fossil fuel world. You probably can't have car ownership as a thing for the masses in a no fossil fuel world (not on a global scale, anyway). Not until you invent nuclear power to provide cheap energy to charge the electric car batteries with. And those sorts of dynamics are going to show up all over the economy. People in a no fossil fuels world will be able to have technologies we associate with modernity (factories, aircraft, railroads, electricity, etc.), but they won't be able to apply them on the same scale that we did (not until they invent nuclear power). And scale matters a lot.

 

[TaleMaster Redux]

We really have been locked into the whole 'no coal means no industrial revolution mindset' and anything without that is impossible, which just shows why we are in this forum and not out there creating new nano-tech and ground breaking sciences.

We have to remember this is the time of geniuses like James Watt, Edison and Nikolai Tesla and their peers, they will find some way to make things work. Hell for electrolysis even today it is not fueled by coal or nuclear by raw Hydro-electric power which can be used to make steel even make aluminum even cheaper much more earlier than before spurning new sub-tech tree of technological advancement.

On a global scale waterways would then become all the more important and boy oh boy are the Amazon and the Neil river going to prime strategic places if the world goes all in in the Hydroelectric power-route.

Disregard that.

I just recalled one thing that we are overlooking and that is gooddamn windmills, with the advent of electricity and dynamo we can have windmills to power them and produce electricity while others try to figure out what is more efficient in the long run.

Also geothermal is a thing and you bet your ass that people are going to be flocking to make use of it.

Are they the most efficient? Hell no, but will they get the job done? Hell yes. Sure the industrial revolution would not be the big boom that it was in out timeline but electricity is a damn game changer and will make people look into it more.

These people also have no concept of solar energy apart from the basic sun heats and dry things and is somehow good for plants, so they might focus on developing much more efficient dynamos and windmills and turbine engines or create some form of synthetic fuel that is worse than petrol but better than average bio-fuel.

The industrial revolution might be slowed down by a century or so but in return they might have more advance tech of some of the tech we are developing currently.

One big constraint of windmills and hydro plants is that they are constant power generators and hard to throttle and thus waste lots of excess energy and may have a period of inactivity where it may cause grid damage or overload.

Batteries come into play here as they are good for storing that access energy. Even if that were not the case there are always the flywheel to store energy and we may see serious development in Flywheel and battery tech with the emphasis on energy storage than generation due to the low power generation capabilities.

Also we may see a world where planned Obsolesce never takes root due to the sudden disappearance of all coal and fossil fuels.

It may never happen again but the people do not know that and would try their best to keep some old tech around and focus on longer service life.

A shift in thinking would also be in search of energy sources that are long lasting or building devices that are easily compactible with multiple energy sources. Modularity would be the name of the game here and we might see devices that are centuries old but work damn well with modern energy sources.

Do not underestimate the skills of engineers and scientists would go to make things real if they think it is possible and what they would do out of spite and desperation which this scenario is perfect for them.

 

[PossiblyEnos]

Not until you invent nuclear power to provide cheap energy to charge the electric car batteries with.

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And you have problems inventing nuclear power because without the prerequisite industry you have a hard time obtaining the tools to do it.
A lot of the precursor science panned out because there was the industry available to adopt it, refine it and show why it is worth pursuing further. And manufacture the apparatus for its pursuit at an affordable price.

 

[NinjaMAster]

All forms of whales get hunted to extinction for whale oil. The same thing happens to most large tuna varieties, and probably the larger seals and sea lions.

Remember, conservation is relatively new.

 

[Memphet'ran]

An issue I see with generating electricity with windmills (and also solar) in this scenario is building enough of them to generate OTL-like amounts of electricity would use up a lot of steel, wood, etc., and those materials might be a lot more expensive/valuable in an energy-starved world. Unless maybe you could build the windmill towers out of passively air-dried mud-brick?

Hydropower is likely to have a similar issue. Building something like the Hoover Dam is going to take a lot of concrete, which might be more of an issue in an energy-starved world. Not to mention the added logistical challenges of transporting all the construction materials, feeding the work crews, etc. in a world where fuel is much more expensive (a world plausibly still heavily reliant on animal-drawn wagons for overland transportation).

For that matter, there might be similar issues with e.g. making all the copper wire needed for a modern-style power grid.

This is part of that nerf factors compounding thing I mentioned: no fossil fuels makes so many things harder, and that includes creating a lot of the potential substitutes for fossil fuels. Even OTL much of humanity has living standards substantially below what is possible with modern technology, and that was even more dramatic in the past; IIRC it wasn't until 1950-ish that 100% electrification was approached within the USA, and it took decades after that for the whole world to even begin to approach it (there's still a significant chunk of humanity it hasn't reached, 100 years after electrification of US and European urban areas). This is, among other factors, because building infrastructure is hard.

I think a no fossil fuels world will get electricity eventually, but I suspect its availability will be more uneven than in our world for a long time.

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Regarding whales, if whale oil is really valuable maybe eventually people will start farming them? At least in the sense that game in royal preserves was kind of farmed, i.e. being careful not to kill too many of them and protecting them from poachers. If they're a valuable resource sooner or later people will realize they're being hunted unsustainably and killing them all is depriving future humanity of a valuable resource.

On the flip side, actually protecting whales in the ocean would probably be really difficult with basically nineteenth century sailing ship technology. Maybe some whales could be encouraged to stay in sheltered bays and the like all year by feeding them? Aside from that, the most feasible way to go about it might be an international effort to heavily regulate the whale oil/product trade, setting limits on how much can be sold in a year. In which case there might be a big black market. Now I've got a mental picture of sorta Jack Sparrow-ish people making fortunes selling bootleg whale oil. Moby Dick meets Breaking Bad!

 

[liberty90]

Like I said before, it would be much more kind for the world for this to happen in 1820 or 1800. London and Chinese cities would still suffer from lack of coal enormously (China was not industrialised at all, but used coal for heating since medieval times); but most other things would be much more fine. In particular, trade routes would be completely intact, no railroads yet, and very advanced sailing methods, the whole globe already known.

 

[Rhymehouse]

I wonder how the environment would be different in this world. Climate change and global warming probably wouldn't be a concern unless all the forests are destroyed for charcoal. It will take some time but in this world, renewable sources of energy will be the main source of energy.

 

[Memphet'ran]

I wonder how the environment would be different in this world. Climate change and global warming probably wouldn't be a concern unless all the forests are destroyed for charcoal. It will take some time but in this world, renewable sources of energy will be the main source of energy.

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Global warming is more-or-less a non-issue, since there are no fossil fuels to burn (except maybe peat). Which reminds me, in this scenario the little ice age may last longer (early industrialization may have caused its end). There will probably be a lot less industrial pollution for a long time, since there will probably be a lot less industry for a long time. The big issues will be habitat destruction and deforestation and running out of agricultural land as the population slowly but steadily increases. It's going to look like Europe in the fourteenth century and the early modern period, or Japan in approximately the same period, or Easter Island. The long-term trend will be toward every bit of land where crops and trees can grow being turned into a farm or a tree plantation, and toward populations in chronic food and fuel stress. Various wild animals (e.g. whales) are likely to be over-hunted for food and oil.

With slower industrialization and slower technological advance and slower increase in living standards, population growth will be slower; it'll likely stay at something like its nineteenth century rate (around .5% per year, took about 100 years to go from 1 billion in 1805 to 1.6 billion people in 1900), if it even gets that fast. This will not necessarily translate to less resource stress though, because slower industrialization and slower technological advance also means slower productivity growth. This scenario's 2020s world might have something like 1.5-2 billion people, most of them agricultural peasants, many of them experiencing chronic food insecurity as this population is bumping up against the global carrying capacity with the technology available to them.

 

[Amv2]

About warming.
Destruction of whales =>reproduction of zooplankton=>destruction of phytoplankton=>saturation of the atmosphere with greenhouse gas.

Destruction of Canadian and Russian forests (the main sink of carbon dioxide) = > temperature rise => melting of permafrost and methane hydrates.