Building society the first time around, we were able to take advantage of various useful natural resources such as relatively plentiful coal and (later) oil. After a nuclear war or some other civilization-wrecking catastrophe, it might be Very Difficult Indeed to rebuild without those resources at our disposal.
We have a huge mountain of coal, and will do for the next hundred years or so. Doing without doesn’t seem very likely.
How easily accessible is that coal to people whose civilization has collapsed, taking most of the industrial machinery with it? (That’s a genuine question. Naively, it seems like the easiest-to-get-at bits would have been mined out first, leaving the harder bits. How much harder they are, and how big a problem that would be, I have no idea.)
We have a huge mountain of coal, and will do for the next hundred years or so. Doing without doesn’t seem very likely.
How easily accessible is that coal to people whose civilization has collapsed, taking most of the industrial machinery with it? (That’s a genuine question. Naively, it seems like the easiest-to-get-at bits would have been mined out first, leaving the harder bits. How much harder they are, and how big a problem that would be, I have no idea.)
It’s probably fair to say that some of the low hanging fossil fuel fruit have been taken.