In an alternate history work of fiction, what would be a good way to rationalize/justify a world in which there is no usage of fossil fuels?
I think in this alternate history / worldbuilding idea, the physical matter still exists - there is coal, oil, etc, in the earth, but I am wondering if we can come up with a satisfying reason why humans could not make use of anything more efficient than peat in production. Is there a scientific-sounding explanation that could be given to make a world in which coal and oil are useless in industry?
I have been reading “The Future is Degrowth” and “The Origin of Capitalism” and that is what inspired this. The first book says something along the lines of “the capitalism we know, of endless accumulation, is fundamentally a fossil capitalism”. The second book makes a very convincing case that what existed in England centuries before fossil fuels was already distinctly (agrarian) capitalist. Interest in everyone’s thoughts and ideas about how this could be constructed, and what sort of events could play it out in the cradle of capitalism but also worldwide.
Thank you, great ideas here, I especially like the idea of a microorganism decomposing a great deal of it in order to explain a scarcity of fossil fuels. I’m interested in what forms of fuel you mean that would be enough for such an explosive economic growth as our timeline? Charcoal and vegetable oil? I didn’t mean to suggest that capitalism is dependent on fossil fuels neccesarily, but our timeline’s capitalism certainly was and is in love with them. Actually it’s the suggestion that capitalism could progress for hundreds of years in a different direction without fossil fuels that I think could be interesting.
If it’s charcoal and vegetable oil that fuel an industrial revolution instead, I suppose the capitalists would try to get a really good seed oil crop developed, like if some breed or modification of rapeseed. And they’d probably grow it on plantations at huge scale like sugar and tobacco were, or even more than those? Could a society with a capitalist mode of production but no fossil fuels eventually take a crack at nuclear power like our timeline did?
Yes, charcoal and vegetable oil but also sugarcane ethanol has proven to be a very effective fuel for smaller engines such as those of cars. In the end though, if such a large portion of the energy economy is supplied by large fuel-producing plantations, hydroelectric dams may look more palatable than nuclear power plants due to the skipped developments in coal mining and such. But now I think my speculation is reaching “it can be whatever the writer wants it to be” levels.