Here’s a link to an discussion in an open thread a while back where I posit that one rarely mentioned reason that humanity came to have a technological civilization is that earth’s history was unusually conducive to the formation of large hydrocarbon accumulations just waiting for us to find and exploit: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ecf/open_thread_september_115_2012/7bcy
A planet needs to host life for hundreds of millions of years to generates the level of oil, gas and coal that we find. Imagine our civilizational trajectory it there was no possibility of an industrial revolution.
At least I feel like there should be a factor for “fossil energy availability” in the Drake equation.
Is there something special enough about coal, oil and gas kickstarting an industrial revolution that can’t be replicated using (larger amounts of) wood as a combustible?
The worst things I could think of being that burning wood can produce toxic carbon monoxide more than coal, produces ash, and may not pack as much energy per volume/weight. Still this doesn’t sound like it would have been enough to prevent its use.
We already appropriate something like a fifth of primary photosynthesis productivity via agriculture and other harvests of non-agricultural productivity, and it’s unclear how much more you can appropriate before you start really messing with ecologies we depend upon (more than we already are at least). To give an idea how this translates into energy terms, a third of the vast American corn harvest is turned into biofuel to produce something like ten percent of our automotive fuel, itself only a portion of energy use (Though the high-intensity farming used to cram large amounts of corn productivity per acre themselves use a lot of that fuel, so the net energy produced is less than it would seem. Between running the fields and fermenters I believe the consensus is that a given amount of ethanol energy actually requires between 50% and 80% of that energy in fossil fuel to be burned to produce it.)
Geologically processed fossil fuels are ridiculously dense in energy and represent a portion of hundreds of millions of years of photosynthetic productivity.
For one thing, you can’t really power a moving vehicle without a pretty energy-dense fuel. It’s hard to imagine an industrial revolution without the ability to move huge amounts of freight.
If you were just using the wood to generate electricity, there would be some probably pretty low maximum generation rate that could be sustained without quickly depleting all wood resources.
It’s interesting to me that our culture has vilified fossil fuels to the extent that many people don’t want to admit that our modern society depends on them.
Here’s a link to an discussion in an open thread a while back where I posit that one rarely mentioned reason that humanity came to have a technological civilization is that earth’s history was unusually conducive to the formation of large hydrocarbon accumulations just waiting for us to find and exploit: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ecf/open_thread_september_115_2012/7bcy
A planet needs to host life for hundreds of millions of years to generates the level of oil, gas and coal that we find. Imagine our civilizational trajectory it there was no possibility of an industrial revolution.
At least I feel like there should be a factor for “fossil energy availability” in the Drake equation.
Is there something special enough about coal, oil and gas kickstarting an industrial revolution that can’t be replicated using (larger amounts of) wood as a combustible?
The worst things I could think of being that burning wood can produce toxic carbon monoxide more than coal, produces ash, and may not pack as much energy per volume/weight. Still this doesn’t sound like it would have been enough to prevent its use.
We already appropriate something like a fifth of primary photosynthesis productivity via agriculture and other harvests of non-agricultural productivity, and it’s unclear how much more you can appropriate before you start really messing with ecologies we depend upon (more than we already are at least). To give an idea how this translates into energy terms, a third of the vast American corn harvest is turned into biofuel to produce something like ten percent of our automotive fuel, itself only a portion of energy use (Though the high-intensity farming used to cram large amounts of corn productivity per acre themselves use a lot of that fuel, so the net energy produced is less than it would seem. Between running the fields and fermenters I believe the consensus is that a given amount of ethanol energy actually requires between 50% and 80% of that energy in fossil fuel to be burned to produce it.)
Geologically processed fossil fuels are ridiculously dense in energy and represent a portion of hundreds of millions of years of photosynthetic productivity.
For one thing, you can’t really power a moving vehicle without a pretty energy-dense fuel. It’s hard to imagine an industrial revolution without the ability to move huge amounts of freight.
If you were just using the wood to generate electricity, there would be some probably pretty low maximum generation rate that could be sustained without quickly depleting all wood resources.
It’s interesting to me that our culture has vilified fossil fuels to the extent that many people don’t want to admit that our modern society depends on them.