Uplifting News

That's largely ahistorical.

The invention of the dynamo, combined with early industrial wind and water wheels, would have changed where and how we were able to efficiently industrialize. But we had the capacity even without discovering large coal fields in the American coal belt, Russia, and Australia. Hydroelectric dams and heavy investment in wind turbine engineering would have yielded steady surpluses in domestic electricity across a different distribution of domestic real estate.

What large cheap surplus deposits of coal gave us was an opportunity to put off investing in nuclear energy for the better part of a century. Nuclear power is generally cheaper, cleaner, and more abundant than coal. And we had industrial scale nuclear powered electricity plants by the 1950s, with nuclear shipping made possible through the prototype NS Savannah in 1961.

Coal's biggest benefit wasn't its energy density nearly so much as its portability. Unlike with wind and hydro, you weren't geographically constrained in where you could build. And unlike with nuclear, you didn't have these huge upfront engineering and R&D costs.

Coal boosted the efficiency of early industrial mass transit and allowed a rapid colonization of the frontier regions. But it required the same continual westward expansion to tap cheap labor markets and access new coal fields. Hydro was far more energy dense. Nuclear was late to the party. Wind was temperamental and needed significantly more engineering prowess to harness efficiently. But all of these were solvable problems within the span of decades.

In my country we have about 40% hydroelectric plant. They are reliable. Water mills and tide might be something that started the industry.

Keep in mind that many big cites are located near the ocean. Many benefits from water.

Today many companies throw as much money as they can at renewables. They are simply cheaper but limited the amount of opportunities. Example Google could not find enough clean energy to cover their own footprint. Google have a lot of many that they don't know what to do and want to be climate neutral for their data centers. It is much faster to put in new energy hungry graphic cards the getting a new power source running.

We would certainly have valued hydrothermal and other clean sources a lot more. Iceland could have been a superpower.

Possibly at the expense of the food supply

To some degree sure, but not in all cases. If you have a tractor that burns wood gas for power but it helps you harvest more crops quicker, it may outweigh the cost of the land used for the trees.

At the beginning there were only horses. Then came bicycle and cars. Both with fossil fuels and electric ones. I think even hydrogen was on the table. What won? the cheapest and easiest one.

Industry revolution might have been look differently. Water mills, tie water etc can be helpful. Energy cost nothing.

It would certainly be rough, but not impossible to do things. The we were pretty close to having an early industrial revolution, we even had the steam engine invented really early on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

If inventions like that had been further developed, things could have gone somewhere.

I think the point they're making is electric technology / batteries haven't been very good until recently, so we'd have a lot fewer cars out there if we didn't have fossils fuels in the first place since they can store more energy than batteries.