No easy energy but also not nearly as much co2 long term. It's hard to imagine people discovering nuclear power or being able to use it without fossil fuels in between, mining fissile material is pretty intense.
Horses and animals probably still used at a daily mass scale. Hard to imagine cities getting huge but places like Teotihuacan, Beijing, Vijayangar, etc all had pretty big populations (sub 1 million though). Probably more rural and pastoral life.
Waterways even more important than now. Ships are pretty much how you could transport a lot of stuff. London used to have tons and tons of boats up and down the river, I don't know when that stopped (maybe even only middle 20th century) so just imagine traffic on the river of whatever town you're in.
You'd probably need postal mail way more. They used to mail babies so they could visit relatives, believe it or not. Sears catalogue would ship you an IKEA diy house with materials and instructions.
No plastics either. Everything is metal, glass, paper, felt, hemp, concrete, etc. I bet you'd have way more airships, that'd be like THE cool way to get around, just need massive helium... or try hydrogen anyway its not like you have fossil fuels to burn on board and risk hindenberg disasters.
Offices, if around, would be loud as fuck. Type writers everywhere just clacking away all day. They probably don't have personal computers for a long time. Multiple phones on your desk instead of call waiting or a single phone with multiple lines at least until cellphones - but it'd hard to see miniaturization being successful without plastics, imagine the cell phones they'd have if they can only use wood or metal. I guess iphones are aluminum, right?
A lot of modern agriculture uses fertilizers derived from natural gas. No more green revolution, population caps out at what... 2 billion? Maybe intense famines by the 1970s. Could be like a Star Trek thing where they go through some very intense problems for a few decades but emerge with a much more equitable society.
Cities probably stink from the animal manure. At least indoor plumbing doesn't need fossil fuels. I bet there'd be nice gree parks and walkways, I wonder if there'd actually be grids or if the US would have a grid road network? It might all just be however makes sense in the natural landscape vernacular instead of imposing grids.
I think socialism might win sooner in this world. It'd be harder to get through the necessary accumulation of productive forces, but the bourgeoisie don't have as much power and aren't able to resist as hard. They'd try fighting back with way more propoganda and soft power instead of the Jakarta Method we had irl.
No fossil fuels means other means of a/c are necessary. The Harahappan or Indus Valley civ whatever it was used upwells in big buildings. Imagine you go into a local skyscraper and the bottom floor just has a massive, clean pool. It passively absorbs heat during the day and releases it at night. And it's like that everywhere. Just a reception desk maybe a cafe and a big ass pool on the first floor.
You've made great points about agriculture (and I can't believe I overlooked plastics not being a thing), but I disagree with you on the abundance of boats. I believe that without fossil fuels, people would be forced to used wood for charcoal production instead of as lumber, which means the costs of building ships would've gone up.
I tend to disagree. Charcoal was a massive industry before the industrial revolution, and people still managed to make a lot of boats. Thing is, the amount of labor it took to dig up a bunch of coal made it economical to burn it by the ton to run industrial processes - the amount of wood it would take to make the same amount of charcoal would take so much more labor to produce that I don't think it would ever be economical to burn charcoal for steam engines.
I wrote about charcoal, steel, solar furnaces, concentrated solar power, and hydropower on the other thread. Here's a link: https://hexbear.net/post/202359/comment/2548095
Forestry driven steam engines, significantly suckier in power, plus Europe would be even more barren (till 20th). No trains for long ass time (till 20th). Industrial centers located near hydropower locations (till now), significantly more distributed grain processing via windmills (till 20th). No international shipping (at least not on the scale it is) until nuclear power sources penetrate civilian life (70s). Electricity would be delayed till 30s-50s in much of the world, due to hydropower rarity/nuclear demands. No city lighting aside from whale products till electricity. Internet would be delayed for 50 years at least. No high quality steel and aluminum till electricity as well
Prolly empires would collapse much quicker, with no aviation (completely unfeasible till roughly now) and long range logistics. Artillery being stuck in ww1 level of horse pulling. Also a lot more horses.
Forest would become prime resource I believe, you can’t even make gunpowder without coal, it would dominate 18th-early20th century dynamics. Also, sans more driven abolition movements, slavery would be much more, eh, feasible.
You'd probably never pick up a pound of flour once a year. That shit used to spoil so fast, they added preservatives to let it keep for better transportation. If every town has a local mill, you'd just go and get flour when you need it and not enough that it'd spoil.
I dunno about slavery. Abolitionists would still be around. It wasn't tech that made slavery unproductive compared to wage-labor it was the actual mode of production. I think capitalism is definitely blunted without easy access to energy.
It seems without cotton processing via steamdriven engines, collected cotton can only be processed manually/animals driven, so that collapses very fast, uk cannot feed so many animals, so primary commodities will have to be processed in places. This requires more man labor :shrug-outta-hecks:
As I’ve mentioned, imperialism would be significantly challenged sans quick logistics (at least late imperialism with quick shipping and quick commodities movement).
Yes, but you need lots of it, but if charcoal is eaten by steam engines :shrug-outta-hecks: and it’s not like modern explosives are easy to make without oil
So, there's a lot of focus on deforestation from making charcoal - and while I think that that would happen to an extent, it would never reach the fever pitch it reached in the actual industrial revolution because every tree that gets cut down needs to be powered by plant or animal calories (chopping down trees with steam engines powered by charcoal is probably a net loss, though I'm just guessing on that). Without a lot of easily-accessible coal and later oil to turbocharge it, industrialization would be heavily restrained by the capacity of arable land to sustain the workforce.
Agricultural production steadily improves until the "second agricultural revolution" where people figured out crop rotation and stuff to the extent that they were able to rapidly increase the food supply, and I think that that becomes the primary driver for the "no-coal industrial revolution" that will still happen. Lots of people move to the mining towns and the new larger and denser than ever cities, but there is a hard cap to how many people can move to non-agricultural labor because you still need a lot of people on the farms - for example, in China until the Revolution, 90% of the population were agricultural laborers, while at present the number is about 25%. In the no coal timeline, I don't see the number of farmers going below 50% of the general population.
The no-coal industrial revolution probably brings with it a lot of rethinking of already-existing tech, like water wheels and windmills, and applying those forms of power to the high-demand labor necessary for industry instead of using steam engines. Tesla or someone like him probably figures out how to generate electricity with a water wheel, and the electro-arc furnace is invented some time later, both of which are necessary to push society into refitting all of its hydro power to be hydroelectric energy generation. Wooden windmills get similar retrofits, and the first use of solar power is driving steam pumps in mines - without cheaper coal fired steam engines competing against it, wind or solar-based pumps become the only way to go once your mine starts digging past a certain point.
While there's no smog or CO2 emissions, there are certainly massive environmental impacts from all of this. The first large scale electricity generation likely comes from hydroelectric dams, whose environmental impact is pretty big and well understood by now. A lot of the industry that would grow as agricultural workers moved to cities would be a lot less land efficient than the fossil fuel powered one its replacing, so when European powers run out of suitable rivers for water-powered industry, they would start looking towards their colonies for more suitable locations. Agriculture itself would be the biggest offender of course, as it has been throughout human history, since even as it becomes more efficient it would never hit anything like the efficiency of today.
But I think that while you would still get chemicals in the water, acid rain in certain places, entire forests lost to growing demand for metal and entire biospheres poisoned by the spoil from mining - the overall effect would be much less than what we can see in our world, because the large number of people who would need to stay on the farms would limit population growth substantially in every country.
With fewer people in specialized fields, and fewer people generally, I think that technology progresses much more slowly. The economic incentives still end up mostly the same, so most likely capitalism still starts somewhere and spreads - but it's possible that slowing down capitalism's spread also allows communism to get out in front of it in more places. The revolutions in both Russia and China were in part possible because of the fact that proletarianization was incomplete when they started, while the revolution always got crushed in fully proletarianized countries like Germany.
No industrialization unless an alternative with a similar technological barrier of entry was magicked into existence.
It’s like that thought experiment of what if dolphins developed a higher level of intelligence: without fire they would be trapped in an aquatic anprim and existence.
