alt Hacker NewsThe revolution could still have happened differently and slower.
I didn't say it would have been possible without ANY coal but you do understand that the amount of co2 we put into our atmosphere is not from 1760? All of that big huge co2 output happend in the last 100 year...
Solar plus batterie is currently winning. In germany the problem again is NOT the economy, its literaly the energy provider companies being slow as hell. This critisim is circling the media now for the last few years.
China is doing hydro, gas and coal because China is gigantic and they don't mind that coal still exists and we do not know yet at all how their end energy mix will look like but they are pushing very hard for renewable.
No as i told you, a lot of people around me literlaly don't want to do reneable for the reasons i told you. A L'ot of people DO NOT CARE about climate change.
Germany is trying to push for heatpumps in the old government, the new/current one is paddling back, AGAIN. This is happening under our noses. The discussion of the new heating law (from the prev government) created A LOT of controversy.
The main reason why the renewable energy transformation is happening at the current speed and not in the possible speed, is people not math. not economy.
We have protests against wind mills because they 'look ugly'. My neighbours hate my solar panel on the balcony but can't say something against it because the old government created a law for this.
Work collegues of mine hate EVs and don't want to switch over but my company only allows EVs since this year. Multily of them complained that an EV is not usable as a daily car while i own an EV for 4.5 years now and it is usable as a daily driver.
The transition in China is significanlty faster than in Europe.
The first coal powered steam machines were very inefficient. They only made sense at all being sited in an actual coal mine where coal was being extracted for thermal heating, so the fuel was abundant and cheap. Yet they were still barely worth it. From that they were iterated on, but it still took time for them to be made efficiently enough to work economically outside of the mine the fuel came from.
This points to the industrial revolution not being clear progress but requiring specific starting conditions. Steam machines had been around as a curiosity for a long time. And there's no guarantee there would have been slower progress to similar electrical technology without coal/steam because those things also accelerated the development of metallurgy and precision manufacturing specifically. Coal powered machines got efficiency with better precision made iron and steel, coincidentally things that required coal to make.
So I doubt we'd be where we are without coal, it might go further as without coal and the specific circumstances of coal access and necessity on the home island of a nation that has become an economic powerhouse by conquest.
But we can't run the world again. Hopefully we can bounce up to the next level and drop the majority of fossil fuel dependence. We've been pretty dumb about it imo in that we know there are potentially massive downsides too continuing to use it like we are, and we know there are areas like air transport that might have no alternative, so smart would be to transition everything as fast as possible to preserve the niche uses.