In an alternate history work of fiction, what would be a good way to rationalize/justify a world in which there is no usage of fossil fuels?
I think in this alternate history / worldbuilding idea, the physical matter still exists - there is coal, oil, etc, in the earth, but I am wondering if we can come up with a satisfying reason why humans could not make use of anything more efficient than peat in production. Is there a scientific-sounding explanation that could be given to make a world in which coal and oil are useless in industry?
I have been reading “The Future is Degrowth” and “The Origin of Capitalism” and that is what inspired this. The first book says something along the lines of “the capitalism we know, of endless accumulation, is fundamentally a fossil capitalism”. The second book makes a very convincing case that what existed in England centuries before fossil fuels was already distinctly (agrarian) capitalist. Interest in everyone’s thoughts and ideas about how this could be constructed, and what sort of events could play it out in the cradle of capitalism but also worldwide.
What a great question! I love thinking about this, so I spent way too long coming up with a response.
tl;dr: Have your primary industrializing nation (Alter-Britain) be poor in coal resources, rich in hydro resources, and decent at land management. Have your secondary industrializing nations (Alter-Belgium) be rich in coal resources. This way the steam engine is delayed and hydro tech becomes further developed and entrenched. Coal will still be needed for steel and this will get you that but at a lower cost to the environment overall.
Warning BIG!!
spoiler
I am confident that industrialization is possible without fossil fuels, however it’s quite improbable without magically making them disappear. Fossil fuels have a high energy return on investment (EROI). You are probably familiar with the fact that for most of human civilization, the vast majority were farmers that produced some surplus so that other humans could specialize in other professions. EROI describes a similar phenomenon. Whereas in Colonial America, 90% of people farmed to support the other 10% of the population, in Modern Civilization, something like 10% of the economy goes to producing energy required for the other 90%. EROI specifically is a ratio of the following:
The following are the EROI of various energy sources according to Energy and the Wealth of Nations: Understanding the Biophysical Economy:
Higher EROI is better, and indeed necessary for various ways of life. For modern civilization, I think our EROI is 10:1 (or maybe that is just America specifically). The book argues that from 1560 to 1720, Sweden was a great power with productive mines that relied on abundant energy in the form of charcoal. The EROI on this biomass was 4:1 until the woods were over-harvested in the mid 19th century. Since then, mass migration followed along with the decline of Sweden relative to its peers. If the EROI is lower than 3, it is basically useless.
With that out of the way, let us consider various sources of non-fossil power, their benefits, and their drawbacks.
- Hydropower - This actually dominated the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the 18th century. Today, the energy produced from hydroelectricity is equivalent to the energy consumed from coal in 1890. There are obviously some untapped sources but I am not sure what the total is. Wind mills have an efficiency of less than 60%, while turbines have an efficiency of 95%. While some turbine designs were developed before the Industrial Revolution, modern designs came after hydropower was displaced by steam engines. Water wheels are also disadvantageous to the bourgeoisie - steam engines can go anywhere, but a water wheel cannot. Electrification provides a solution, but it requires high capital investment and an invention of the mid 19th century.
- Wind power - Also something used in real life. Unfortunately, the industrialist does not like being told by nature when work must start and stop. Modern wind turbine design is a 20th century invention, although you can still get some decent power out of older designs. You can also go surprisingly big just with wood. In real life, they had trouble competing with cheap fossil fuels.
- Concentrated solar - A solarpunk 19th century?! The first solar thermal engine was developed in 1897, and the first solar thermal power plant in 1912. Concentrated solar power can also be used for very high temperature furnaces. They probably could have been developed earlier. However, one study suggests its EROI is a measly 1.6. I am not sure why.
- Biomass - Burning wood basically. See the Sweden example for why this is an issue. Also, the Industrial Revolution’s use of coal and the development of the steam engine is directly related to Britain running out of wood. If you look at this graph, you will see that relative to other sources, traditional biomass as a source of energy has barely grown in the past 200 years. There’s just not much room for growth.
- Biofuel - Oh boy. Biofuel ranges from barely usable to literally useless. This study states “EROIs for bioethanol were: 1.797 for sugarcane, 1.040 for corn, and 0.739 for wood. The results for biodiesel were: 3.052 for African palm, 2.743 for pinion, 2.187 for bovine fat, and 2.891 for swine fat.” So the best biofuels have an EROI similar to biomass from the Sweden example, but require complicated processing and probably can’t even be used to make steel. The only biofuel with good EROI is algae which will require genetic engineering - useless for this exercise. If you want biofuel to play a role in fictional industrialization, you will have to introduce fictional organisms.
- Photovoltaic - Surprisingly, these were invented by George Cove in 1905 before the mechanism for how they worked was discovered lol. The low-tech ones have really bad efficiency though.
- Nuclear fission - Maybe with a lot of dumb luck and death by radiation you could get one built earlier…
So it’s quite obvious that this alternate timeline will have to rely on hydropower. It works fine for textile factories, which is what the First Industrial Revolution was all about anyway. Really, you need to stunt the development of the steam engine. In England, they didn’t have enough wood, so they started mining more coal. The coal mines would be flooded with water, so they needed to pump it out. The invention of necessity was the steam engine - it used the coal and water already there to pump out the water. If the country doesn’t run out of wood, that would delay the engine a bit (although the population will continue to grow, so I’m not sure if this could last). If the country simply didn’t have much coal, that would be even better for hydropower. While steam engine development will be slow, water turbines will probably get developed much faster.
However, there are some issues. Steel production was THE thing in the Second Industrial Revolution, and I am pretty sure that will require coal coke. Direct reduction with hydrogen requires a lot less coal, but it’s way more expensive and requires modern arc furnaces. Also, by delaying the steam engine, you are doing a terrible thing - creating a world without trains. Or perhaps pneumatic trains would be developed instead?
When electricity is discovered, electrification will probably proceed relatively quickly as it will be even more transformative. In this coal-poor, hydro-rich country, electrification would be great for transportation. Pneumatic trains cannot go far, steam locomotives are probably underdeveloped in this timeline and rely on imported coal or expensive domestic wood, and maybe there’s a couple fireless locomotives that run off of steam produced by a solar thermal power plant. The flexibility of electricity will be a great boon to the bourgeoisie - something they missed in this timeline’s 18th century when the steam engine was not developed. The state will probably start constructing gigantic hydroelectric plants as well.
OK it’s literally 2:00 AM at this point and I have been working on this for hours so I am just going to finish this with some rambling. Here are a couple socialist scenarios for preventing climate change. If lots of socialist revolutions happen between 1850-1900, the planet is probably fine. Marx was talking about the metabolic rift and there was conjecture about greenhouse gases as early as 1912. Global energy consumption didn’t explode until 1950, so plenty of time for socialist governments to do something. Also, if the Diggers somehow won the English Civil War and other peasant movements won in continental Europe, you might’ve had some weird not-capitalism kinda-socialism industrialization… it’s an under-explored topic in Alt History in my opinion.
Thank you for an incredible response. I plan to respond in detail in the morning but a few thoughts right now.
- I was kind of toying with an idea of tram ways lasting longer and being developed upon further, but yes, a world without trains is no fun. They’d have to be introduced sooner or later running on something else.
- Pretty cool that a photovoltaic cell was created so early. It wouldn’t be too extreme of a stretch for that guy to be born a few decades earlier and for developments to be made in the years following, at least to someone outside natural science / a “layperson” like me.
- A timeline in which socialist governments started taking over in the 19th century is also definitely worth exploring. I see a lot of talk on sci fi Twitter about science fiction as a vehicle for critique of the present and hopes for the future. In a way I think alternate renditions of the past could be too.
Of course! It was my pleasure to write it. 😀 Aerial tramways are really cool. You could probably power them with hydro, but the geography would be majorly constrained. Canals were also very big in Britain prior to railroads, and a bit less important in America. Canals would be even more important in this scenario. You could have canal trolley buses where boats are pulled along a cable powered by flowing water somewhere else. Check out this article. In real life, the cables were instead driven by steam engines. For passenger and freight shipping, there are several innovations in sail ships that could have been developed. Some ideas include improved sail design, rigging that requires less labor, catamarans, hydrofoils, and Flettner rotors.
Yeah a lot of scifi is dystopian and/or capitalist realist. And almost all socialist alt history is written by liberals and rarely ever hopeful. I’d like to write utopian literature in the vein of Looking Backward but I don’t really know where to start. It’s been years since I wrote (mediocre) fiction in school.
It seems like relying on waterways to travel and not being able to build railroads going west could have seriously slowed down colonialism in Western North America? It also makes me think of southern China. I just finished reading China: A History by John Keay, and I’m not retaining much, but the importance of watercraft in the south and horses in the north comes up over and over.
I’ll try and read Looking Backward, sounds cool! I also have no experience writing fiction after public school. I guess there is probably a lot of content online to dig into for writing fiction for beginners we can look into… that stuff would also make good posting here.___
I skimmed through Looking Backward and its sequel a few weeks ago. It’s kind of cool when the author ends up being right on the money when predicting future technologies like credit cards. Some of the concepts are pretty interesting as well like paper clothes becoming widespread (it was a trend later in the 20th century, and the idea of disposability being the future lasted another century). But the author is also a racist, so it gets weird. The sequel is open-minded when it comes to the status of women (they wear pants?!), but Edward Bellamy never got over his white supremacy.
tl;dr: Have your primary industrializing nation (Alter-Britain) be poor in coal resources, rich in hydro resources, and decent at land management.
BTW I have no idea which countries fit this criteria… Britain isn’t exactly rich in coal but it’s still evidently enough. Any other country and it’s not just an alter-industrialization but a completely different timeline with a POD several centuries in the past… My gut was Bangladesh/India especially since their textile industry was pretty advanced in real life, but surprisingly Bangladesh’s hydro resources are not good. Maybe the Congo as the first industrializer and the south African region following up? I think they fit the criteria well. And the tropical region is probably suitable for not-terrible biofuels. But the POD would have to be like a millennium ago.
If we are looking for a point-of-divergence within recorded history, there’s probably not going to be a scientific reason humans wouldn’t be using fossil fuels. That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be other, less-scientific reasons, like a complete reshaping of 19th century society, or an industrial revolution happening centuries earlier that is more dependent on hydro-power than coal.
While successful socialist revolutions are interesting (it’s the main theme of my current writing project), a equally intriguing idea would be to start the industrial revolution in the first century CE. Where Hero of Alexandria1 was building rudimentary steam engines not long after the founding of the Roman
PrincipateEmpire, maybe he finds a semi-fictional patron2 that is looking for more practical applications for this steam engine, for example: farming, textiles, or papyrus production. Then, while using the predictable flow of the Nile for hydropower, industrialisation slowly mechanises the province and spreads from there.Another fun companion idea would be to have this new industrialisation rise alongside and compete with early Christianity. As one of the main draws of the latter was its relatively good treatment of the poor4. But, they view the new technology as a further sign of the coming apocalypse. While the farmers and other labourers are just enjoying not having to work so hard for food and clothing, leaving them free for more creative endeavours. This could create some conflict for a story, in addition to the general anti-Roman-state viewpoint of the Christians5.
1 Here’s a fun little write-up on a gaming website of all places.
2 This person could release the technology for the hydro-power engine for free, à la Tim Berners-Lee and the world wide web. Rather than waiting for people to procure machines and spread industrialisation through more creative methods3.
3 For more information on this topic see: Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the origins of American Industrial Power by Doron Ben-Atar
4 “… by the time …[of] the late first or early second century organized poor relief was no doubt underway in parts of the Christian world, conducted by either local workers specifically designated for the activity, or by volunteers who heard the cry of the poor.” from Yale
5 "The Christian movement was revolutionary not because it had the men and resources to mount a war against the laws of the Roman Empire, but because it created a social group that promoted its own laws and its own patterns of behavior. … Christianity had begun to look like a separate people or nation, but without its own land or traditions to legitimate its unusual customs."6 Wilkens, R. The Christians as the Romans saw them pg. 119
6 Furthermore, early Christians refused to participate in politics, religion, and to fight in the empire’s wars.What if a different scientific advance occurred in green energy or nuclear technology that made early fossil fuels obsolete? The reason fossil fuels took hold after steam engines is that it was the path of least resistance.
If any of the biomass fuels @AlbigensianGhoul and I mentioned, like sugarcane ethanol or seed oil, could reasonably be employed, that could be a cool way to go. Just spitballing, but what if the sugar production of the West Indies started being sucked into energy production, increasing the demand? would the colonial powers expand their colonies and build more plantations?
I’m no chemist but if you go very science fantasy you can maybe try and justify the lack of existence bit by saying that some specific microscopic lifeform is able to decompose the material relatively fast even in real-life inhospitable conditions, which makes the formation of fossil fuels very scarce. Probably gonna have to handwave a lot of the ecological and biological implications of that though. It’s important to note that even if fossil fuels were never abundant, there are many forms of fuel that are just as harmful that could also be used in such a world, so that would probably go into direct contradiction with the notion that capitalism is dependent on fossil fuels.
But there’s always the possible alternative that humanity never properly figured out thermodynamics and heat engines, and steam engines never got advanced enough for widespread use. That way things like metallurgy, pitch torches, pyres to the Outer Gods, Greek fire and other fossil-fuel-based fun stuff can exist, without any “Industrial Revolution” based on automation. In either case slavery and serfdom should probably play a very large role in your fiction as that’s usually the second favourite thing of the powerful classes after automation. I think capitalism is still possible in such circumstances, but a global capitalist hegemony would prove very difficult without the mass production of bullets and tools to maintain control of the colonies. You could even have some minor (compared to the current one) humanmade climactic events like the Roman Warm Age under such conditions.
Thank you, great ideas here, I especially like the idea of a microorganism decomposing a great deal of it in order to explain a scarcity of fossil fuels. I’m interested in what forms of fuel you mean that would be enough for such an explosive economic growth as our timeline? Charcoal and vegetable oil? I didn’t mean to suggest that capitalism is dependent on fossil fuels neccesarily, but our timeline’s capitalism certainly was and is in love with them. Actually it’s the suggestion that capitalism could progress for hundreds of years in a different direction without fossil fuels that I think could be interesting.
If it’s charcoal and vegetable oil that fuel an industrial revolution instead, I suppose the capitalists would try to get a really good seed oil crop developed, like if some breed or modification of rapeseed. And they’d probably grow it on plantations at huge scale like sugar and tobacco were, or even more than those? Could a society with a capitalist mode of production but no fossil fuels eventually take a crack at nuclear power like our timeline did?
A podcast called “Invent the Future” did this episode: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/invent-the-future-1196254/episodes/episode-4-carbon-pt-1-74484016
Description: In this wide-ranging episode first part of a two-part series, Ethan talks about the history of fossil fuel extraction and how it has shaped global capitalism.
There isn’t a part 2 for this episode.
This is a topic that requires a lot of research so I am hesitant to toss my opinions around willy nilly.
In absence of fossil fuels, I can still envision dynamos being invented and improved so I think a path to eventually nuclear energy is still possible though it will be very different.
