A similar example would be the asbestos mining and manufacturing industry, which has been essentially fully destroyed by legal settlements.
Yes, this process is very energy intensive and generates like twice CO2 per energy used. But in a hypothetical world without oil and natural gas it may lead to earlier start with electric cars and renewables so the total amount of CO2 put into atmosphere would probably be the same. Plus, as coal is much more evenly distributed, there would be much less reasons for wars.
Then in a hypothetical scenario of 20th century without oil/natural gas nuclear energy would be much more widespread at this point and CO2 impact would be lower.
I'm strongly in favor of zero emissions. We also have to give fossil fuels their due for getting us here. I don't think the comparison to asbestos holds.
What I'm saying is more of an "externalities may exceed the value for any future time" than "we should go back in time and ban them from the beginning". I also suspect that as chemical feedstock and niche uses they'll effectively never be replaced, just probably be synthetic instead of extracted.
Electric wind and hydro solutions are hundreds of years old, at this point.
And of course, there's steam.
I think we'd have had a green revolution with wind and water. Petroleum wasn't necessary.
How do you make steam without burning something? If you say nuclear fission then you're proposing that humans would somehow have invented electric mining vehicles and mined enough ore to invent fusion without burning a single hydrocarbon molecule?
I suppose in an alternate reality where we simply had no fossil fuels this may have been the tech tree. It would have taken centuries longer though.
Distributing electricity isn't easy, but it also isn't particularly insurmountable. We had to solve it even with oil as a source of electrical generation.
And if you greatly restrict supply at a given price point, without changing the underlying demand, you'll end up with much higher prices and lower total volume, so we wouldn't enjoyed all the compounding benefits from access to energy.
And we have active political conflict between big oil and everyone else, where there seems to be an insatiable demand for socializing the externalities of oil and gas while receiving public funding to make oil production competitive and market viable. In that manner, it places itself in front of efforts to use literally anything else.
If oil and gas had never received a single dollar of public funding, including by way of public funding for externalities that support or recover from oil and gas, then it never would have been market viable as an energy source in places where it doesn't seep out of the soil. Roads would not have been paved, power plants would not have been built, suburbs would only exist for the very wealthy.
Your heart is in the right place and I sympathize with you about car-oriented development in North America. But I think you have a massive blind spot.
Fossil fuels were good and necessary for the modern world. Their owners have perpetrated heinous lies to keep us tied to them for far longer than was good or necessary.
Slower industrial and economic development would include huge human costs in terms of slower medical, social, economic and possibly also political development. It might have some beneficial effects as well though. I don't think it's an easy calculation to make.
I happen to believe that we would be a healthier, happier society if suburbanization had never occurred. If we walked more, and had better access to the services we need, then we'd be healthier and happier. And it would be cheaper to deliver services.
Walking more sounds great, but I'm not sure it compensates for what could be an order of magnitude less health care generally.
Consider that in the absence of suburbanization there is decreased demand for energy. Higher density housing is cheaper to service overall, but also provides greater efficiency in accessing services. The reduced efficiency of suburban residences _requires_ the existence of high density forms of readily accessible and consumable energy; it simply isn't viable to build an American suburb without cheap energy, because it is a hideously inefficient model.
But other models _do_ exist, and _are_ successful. The suburb can die and society will be better off for it.
Which existed. And were ripped up around the time the automobile took over; which has all sorts of theories around it as to why...
I think without oil we'd have higher density cities, better public transit, and healthier populations.
Wasn't the production of charcoal in Europe during the middle ages the cause of rather massive deforestation?
That's good for heating water, but I'm not aware of it generating a significant amount of electricity even today.
You're going to have to give us your calculations there.
Because a gigantic amount of life improvement is also attributable to using fossil fuels for energy. So how exactly are you weighing up the two sides? Not to mention, it's hard to see how we ever would have been able to create the modern forms of renewable energy in the first place without fossil fuels as an intermediate technological phase.
And it's not even clear how you'd attribute political violence to fossil fuels. You don't need fossil fuels for massive warfare. And if you remove one primary resource from the equation, then another resource now becomes primary, and people will be fighting over that. In the days of the Roman Empire, grain was the strategic resource.
That wasn't the point. It's clear that fossil fuels are a phase, one that can't last forever because they're finite. At some point they'll run out. But long before that can happens, we're more likely to transition away. Perhaps not completely, but to the point that they're something like whale oil.
Yeah you do. Compare the casualties and destruction in 19th century and 20th century wars.
Looking at Wikipedia's list of wars by death toll[0], it seems that people were capable of massive casualties and destruction without fossil fuels, too. Like the Taiping Rebellion in 1850–1864, with a death toll of 20–70 million. The Mongol invasions in 1206–1368, with a death range of 20–60 million, and the Three Kingdoms period in 184–280, with a death range of 34 million.
"With no reliable census at the time, estimates of the death toll of the Taiping Rebellion are speculative. Most of the deaths were attributed to plague and famine".
That just means there was a large population around that could die from the effects of the war.
> The Mongol invasions in 1206–1368 [168 years]... and the Three Kingdoms period in 184–280 [96 years]
If WW2 [6 years] had gone on as long as the Mongol invasions the death toll would've topped 1 billion.
The pen, pencil and paper are somewhat obvious. Less obvious is that we also need them to make glue at an industrial scale [1].
[1] https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/sustainability/sealed-fate-pe...
"And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."
The way fossil fuels have been exploited has been categorically evil, and from that perspective I think the "industry" is going to be seen as a net negative. The negative externalities are in line with the waste generated by the development of nuclear weapons (think Hanford) on an even grander scale. But it would have been impossible for us to reach a point where it was possible to produce solar cells, hydro, and wind energy without the incredible energy density of petroleum fuels. The fuel for the industrial revolution that gave us our modern livelihoods. Petroleum-derived fertilizers are what enable the global population that we have today, so in a very real sense you and I would not exist without the development of fossil fuels on a grand scale. Whether or not that is a benefit or a deficit to mankind will probably be left to the historians.
Lest anyone think I condone the irreparable damage done to the planet by the industrialization enabled by reckless exploitation of petroleum, I think the whole thing is shameful, and I feel a bit of shame every time I have to drive my gasoline-powered car to the store. But I think there was a responsible way to harvest and benefit from that natural resource and like most natural resources, human greed found a way to make the worst of it.
I think there's probably a lot of rosy math in this counterfactual. Perhaps one can argue that post the nuclear age, we could have made some choices that environmentalists would oppose that would nonetheless have been better for the environment, but "from the beginning of use"? I think that I'd like to see.
EDIT: It would be a fun universe to play with, though. Do we use solar concentrators to provide the power to make grain ethanol? We'd have to master food production first without Haber-Bosch though. That sounds like a real challenge.
Looked into how wars are being fought these days? Drones.
Likewise, curious about the cost and value that air conditioning and refrigeration have provided. I'm not sure how you do a back of the envelope calculation to address opening up the southern United States-- something that wouldn't have been likely without the low cost of electricity given by coal (outside the TVA region).
For a start, there are a ton of non-energy uses of fossil fuels (eg fertilizer, plastics, roads). There are certain vehicles with huge impediments to switching away (eg planes, ships).
And beyond all that there are a ton of other sources of greenhouse gases, notably construction, specifically concrete.
We’ve taken a ton of sequestered carbon from the ground. To get net zero we’d have to sequester at least this much and the real way we have is growing plants. There are only so many plants you can grow.
So how do you get to get net zero?
The Congolese Civil War and the ongoing M23/Rwanda-led War [0], as well as the Myanmar Civil War [1]. Even the Russian Invasion of Ukraine has a critical minerals component [2] as does the ongoing Central African Republic Civil War [3][4] and the Oromo insurgency within the Ethiopian Civil War [5].
This does not mean that we shouldn't invest in building renewable and battery capacity (we in fact need to further enhance capacity), but we need to recognize that hard power trumps soft power in a multipolar world.
Renewable power doesn't imply pacifism. It is powered by critical minerals that all regional powers are rushing to control either with ballots [6], bribes [7], or bullets.
Renewable power will be covered in blood, but less blood than will be caused by anthropogenic climate change. If we need to make deals with devils, so be it. Such is life.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/us-struggling-de-risk-c...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-explores-rare-eart...
[2] - https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/commentary/blog/lithium-the...
[3] - https://dayan.org/content/central-african-republic-between-f...
[4] - https://energycapitalpower.com/exclusive-central-african-rep...
[5] - https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/36610/
[6] - https://www.ibanet.org/Rule-of-law-Milei-election-win-raises...
[7] - https://www.ft.com/content/401a9e84-3034-4375-bf39-56b92500c...
A painful reminder of the harsh costs of automobile dependency.
We've had the solutions to get off this rollercoaster since the 19th century, but weird ideologues continue to throw up barriers to any and all change. The reality is that enabling the alternatives wouldn't just limit climate change, but save us money too.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/9/we-are-going-make-a-...
But answering the question, "what's not to like?" The main thing is the fact that none of this scales. All the good benefits you're describing rely on the fact that other people aren't doing them. Other people need to live in "cages" so that you can have all this extra space.
Similarly an enjoyable experience in a car free of traffic relies on other people not driving. If all the people that are using transit were driving a single car, the traffic congestion would spike and you'd be in misery.
None of it scales due to the unchangable dynamics of physical geometry.
In other words, this might be true because the “inflation-rate“ was high, but it was high because the cost of oil went up.
No way. Housing and food have gone way up from Obama-era levels, but gas has yet to even come close to the cost at the time.
Edit: If anything, it's really the opposite. Cheap gas has been holding down inflation estimates.
Its not like they done it before, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanker_war no, don't look at history, its for the woke.
Its not like they've been planning it for the last 30 years either.
All it has to do is outlast the attention span of trump
> Trump first said military action was expected to last "four to five weeks" but on 7 March White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the operations could last up to six weeks.
> A day later, Trump told Israeli newspaper The Times of Israel that a decision on when to end the war would be decided mutually with Israel.
> Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of war that the campaign would "continue as long as it is needed".
As Iran Crisis Upends Oil and Gas, Clean Energy Gets Complicated - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-02/middle-ea... | https://archive.today/fIND6 - March 2nd, 2026
> The European Union has already seen the benefit of pivoting to renewables after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though it also sought alternative sources of gas which are now under threat. Between 2019 and 2024, EU countries installed enough wind and solar capacity to avoid burning 92 billion cubic meters of gas and 55 million tons of hard coal in 2024, according to Agora Energiewende.
> “We’ve had tangible results,” said Frauke Thies, the think tank’s Europe director. “It was thanks to renewables that Europe wasn’t hit harder by the last energy crisis.”
If these fields are currently in production, certainly, it squeezes some more life out of them unfortunately.
https://cyrusashayeri.substack.com/p/restarting-fieldwide-sh...
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a70578826/ford-brings-3-li...
For a moment I was excited. I'd be a little bit interested to see someone come up with a smaller V8 -- more efficient, but still all the right noises! Still have higher pumping losses compared to fewer cylinders, but might be worth it even still.
The engine is still 5.0L. The supercharger is 3.0L. And that is why it makes 810 horsepower.
(Looks sadly at the 1.3L Eaton supercharger on my workbench and feels inadequate)
There may be some short term spikes, but $100/barrel is the hard limit now. We actually have effectively unlimited oil supplies now, but the economics of it don't converge until that price. At 100$, it becomes feasible for all of the more expensive fracking infrastructure to come back online, which puts a hard cap on the price.