use of fossil fyels in the industrail revolution

New ones would be fiendishly difficult to create from scratch. The electricity generated by a solar panel declines by about 1 per cent every year so, after a few generations, all our hand-me-down solar panels will have degraded to the point of uselessness. They do deteriorate over time, though, from moisture penetrating the casing and from sunlight itself degrading the high-purity silicon layers. Without moving parts, photovoltaic cells require little maintenance and are remarkably resilient.

If you find yourself among the survivors in a post-apocalyptic world, you could scavenge enough working solar panels to keep your lifestyle electrified for a good long while. Why couldn’t our civilisation 2.0 just start with renewables? It’s tempting to think that a rebooted society could simply pick up where we leave off. Solar panels, for example, represent a good option today, and are appearing more and more on the roofs of houses and businesses. Many of our alternative energy technologies are already highly developed. Is the emergence of a technologically advanced civilisation necessarily contingent on the easy availability of ancient energy? Is it possible to build an industrialised civilisation without fossil fuels? And the answer to that question is: maybe – but it would be extremely difficult. No, I want to answer a question whose interest is (let’s hope) more theoretical. Presumably everybody knows that we must transition to a low-carbon economy one way or another. We should be carefully preserving what’s left for the vital repertoire of valuable organic compounds it offers.īut my topic here is not what we should do now. Given the dwindling reserves of crude oil left in the world, it could be argued that the most wasteful use for this limited resource is to simply burn it. Many of the chemicals required in bulk to run the modern world, from pesticides to plastics, derive from the diverse organic compounds in crude oil. In fact, the problem is even worse than that. It is fossil fuels – coal, gas and oil – that provide most of this thermal energy. You can’t smelt metal, make glass, roast the ingredients of concrete, or synthesise artificial fertiliser without a lot of heat. But we also rely on a range of different industrial materials, and in most cases, high temperatures are required to transform the stuff we dig out of the ground or harvest from the landscape into something useful. In everyday life, their most visible use is the petrol or diesel pumped into the vehicles that fill our roads, and the coal and natural gas which fire the power stations that electrify our modern lives. It’s easy to underestimate our current dependence on fossil fuels. So, would a society starting over on a planet stripped of its fossil fuel deposits have the chance to progress through its own Industrial Revolution? Or to phrase it another way, what might have happened if, for whatever reason, the Earth had never acquired its extensive underground deposits of coal and oil in the first place? Would our progress necessarily have halted in the 18th century, in a pre-industrial state? Those, by the way, are distinct roles: even if we could somehow do without fossil fuels now (which we can’t, quite), it’s a different question whether we could have got to where we are without ever having had them. Fossil fuels are central to the organisation of modern industrial society, just as they were central to its development. Today, we have already consumed the most easily drainable crude oil and, particularly in Britain, much of the shallowest, most readily mined deposits of coal. Let’s make the basis of this thought experiment a little more specific. But here’s the question: how far could such a society rebuild? Is there any chance, for instance, that a post-apocalyptic society could reboot a technological civilisation? They begin the agonising process of rebuilding their technological base from scratch. Sooner or later, peace and order emerge again, just as they have time and again through history. The post-apocalyptic survivors find themselves in a devastated world of decaying, deserted cities and roving gangs of bandits looting and taking by force.īad as things sound, that’s not the end for humanity. The vast majority of the human race perishes. There’s a global catastrophe: a pandemic virus, an asteroid strike, or perhaps a nuclear holocaust. Imagine that the world as we know it ends tomorrow.

Use of fossil fyels in the industrail revolution