RAR: Welcome to GreenPunk

[madd0ct0r]

Down the millenia you have slumbered, only able to reach out and touch the mewling humans in their dreams.

It's 1800. Hundreds of Newcomen engines are in use already, and the new design by Watt is also starting to spread. This world appears essentially the same as our own, except for three key differences

1) 90% of fossil fuels older then the mid-Cretaceous period are absent
2) peat bogs and oceanic sediment are noticeably thicker
3) There is a large dark spot on the moon

Your mission. Interacting only through dreams, the first group to get humans to the dark spot on the moon (alive) wins.

[biostem]

Interesting scenario. Upon a little investigation, it appears dried peat can be used as a fuel source. Would the thickness of said bog make up for the lack of oil? It'd certainly be easier to collect in 1800. You could, perhaps, use that to generate some electricity with a good portion of that being used to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen as potential rocket fuel. I'm not really sure which direction to go in regards to actually controlling said rocket - you'd need to develop all the necessary electronics and such...

[Purple]

Electronics aside the alloys and other materials you would need to make a safe rocket just do not exist back in that day. Hell I am not even sure if the technology and tools you need to develop the technology and tools you would need to get said materials are there.

[Simon_Jester]

Oh, you could do it- it'd just take 100 to 150 years, plus delays created by the sudden disappearance of fossil fuels.

That really cramps people's style, by the way. Not so much because it directly makes it harder to build the rocket (though it does), as because it knocks out what was overall the most valuable source of industrial power and energy for the 19th and 20th centuries. Steam engines will have to be wood-fired, for example, and gasoline for automobile and airplane engines is very hard to come by.

So, especially for the relatively crude and fuel-inefficient technologies of the early to mid-Industrial Revolution, everything is going to be so incredibly much harder this way. Trains don't run as fast, cars and planes are far less economical... that has knock-on effects that make it a lot harder to put together a working space program.

[madd0ct0r]

So work around it. Canals instead of rail. Bubblepumps Biogas and wind power, wood and charcoal is still your goto base. The industrial revolution followed the path of least resistance. What is the New path?

[Simon_Jester]

Much, much harder?

I mean, maybe you grasp the sheer scope of the problem here; I'm not sure. But just to take obvious examples-

"Canals instead of rail-" canals work where the terrain is flat or nearly so. And where water is relatively available as well. If we had to rely on canals to get cargo across the Rocky Mountains or the Alps, though, those mountain barriers would probably still be impassable for freight travel today.

"Wind power-" wind turbines as we know them only became economical since World War II or so as far as I know- because the material science to create adequate blades and bearings did not exist.

Biogas, ethanol, biodiesel- etc... they all work but they all require that we grow plant material to make them. Which basically means that to create the necessary fuel we must permanently reduce the ecological carrying capacity of the Earth for humans- land that would feed a billion people instead goes to power X engines. Moreover, in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution, the industrializing powers will not control enough arable land or be able to farm it efficiently enough to derive any benefit from this.

Take as an example Britain- which had largely deforested itself by 1800 except for land specifically designated for preserves. But there was plenty of coal, which meant that fueling engines and industry was cheap as long as the coal held out. Remove the coal and Britain goes from an industrial powerhouse into a relative backwater.


And then there are knock-on effects: for example, hydroelectric power is still viable, right? But if we look at a project like Hoover Dam, the building of the dam was supported by massive amounts of rail and motor vehicle traffic, the intensive mining of gravel and mixing of cement. How much of that would be made more difficult by making fuel drastically more expensive?

The "remove all the fossil fuels" constraint makes this scenario vastly more challenging, to the point where I'd have to question whether the Industrial Revolution as we understand the term could even happen.

[madd0ct0r]

it partly comes from the work I'm doing at the moment building one of these for Bangladesh, a country with pretty minimal fossil fuels. I do think you're underestimating the driving force of the industrial revolution: greed. It's a truly renewable resource
The revolution would be slower, would look very different and would almost certainly result in a different layout of cities.

so the Rockies and Alps are still impassable to freight? I guess coastal freight would be more important then.
Examples of canals going through obstacles:
http://www.chirk.com/aqueduct.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudley_Tunnel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_and ... ood_tunnel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standedge_Tunnels

Windpower. Definitely not economical when coal is in much shorter supply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wind_ ... _Brush.jpg

A water powered chair factory in 1907
http://78records.files.wordpress.com/20 ... .jpg?w=584

There is a huge demand for power and products. Factories can make them much more efficiently then the old cottage industries, and a new wave of prosperity is being driven by this. There is money to be made in solving power supply issues. Perhaps we should deforest Canada?

[Simon_Jester]

it partly comes from the work I'm doing at the moment building one of these for Bangladesh, a country with pretty minimal fossil fuels. I do think you're underestimating the driving force of the industrial revolution: greed. It's a truly renewable resource

The real obstacle is that greedy people will have less desire to industrialize, because the advantages of industrialization are decreased. Some innovations will be adopted quickly (watermills will spread just as fast as historically). But the overall pace of innovation and change is decreased because there's less advantage in it- the new machines cannot be made to provide as much power, as quickly, as historically... or cannot do so at anything like the same price.

so the Rockies and Alps are still impassable to freight? I guess coastal freight would be more important then.
Examples of canals going through obstacles:
http://www.chirk.com/aqueduct.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudley_Tunnel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_and ... ood_tunnel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standedge_Tunnels

Yes- but what this does not do is, for example, make mining operations in the high mountains economically practical, except on a pick-shovel-pack-mule scale. Wood-fired locomotives running on iron rails (because steel production is lower) can help make up the difference... but you get less freight, moved more slowly, with more frequent disruptions of supply.

It's not that you can't get a canal over a valley or through a range of hills. It's that it is hard, and borderline impossible if we're talking about blasting our way through thousands of meters of rock because of the sheer size of the tunnel you need for barge traffic.

...

For that matter, the relative lack of things like powerful locomotives and steam shovels will even interfere with coastal shipping, in the context of dredging harbors, building major canals (particularly the Panama Canal), and getting goods to the port facilities. Steamships will be slower and smaller, et cetera.

It's not that this is totally insurmountable. But it changes the character of the Industrial Revolution so sharply that we need a completely different word for it. Economic change will be much slower. Long-distance freight is less practical overall, and in the case of shipping will tend to remain dominated by sailing (and thus at the mercy of weather) for a longer period of time. Efficiency gains from changing over to new types of powered machinery will be diminished in some cases, although increased in others. Major infrastructure projects will not occur, or will occur long, long after they were originally conceived of- because even in the most developed nations it takes more capital to do something like build a major dam or levee.

As a result, the "Revolution" becomes a slower, more drawn out affair- with consequences I can't predict off the top of my head.

Windpower. Definitely not economical when coal is in much shorter supply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wind_ ... _Brush.jpg

It's not that it's entirely uneconomical. It's that it costs more, per horsepower of applied work, than a coal furnace driving a steam plant does in real life. If it didn't, we'd be using wind turbines almost exclusively by now.

As a result, there is less energy to go around per dollar of investment capital, and maintaining the industrial base you have becomes more expensive in both energy and financial terms. This is already enough of a problem in modern times (with highly efficient and reliable sources of renewable energy). With the less efficient machinery of the early Industrial Revolution, it's more of a problem.

A water powered chair factory in 1907
http://78records.files.wordpress.com/20 ... .jpg?w=584

Yes- but, again, there are good reasons why ultimately water power has faded. It's not that it doesn't work. It's that it's inherently less efficient, it doesn't pay as well. Again, in relative terms it reduces the economic advantage of industrialization, because it reduces the economic 'profit margin.' Of each joule of energy you extract from the environment, you are plowing proportionately more of it back into extracting the next joule.

One might draw an analogy to the "rocket equation" which governs rocket engines, and which predicts that as you use more and more energetic forms of rocket, the amount of fuel required to accomplish a given task decreases exponentially. The author there uses the example of trying to accelerate an orbiting object to escape velocity by hitting golf balls. It turns out that for the average amateur you'd need a mass of golf balls larger than the solar system... but for a high-performing professional golfer you 'only' need one the size of, say, the Earth. Or maybe even the Moon. Why?

Purely because the professional can hit harder and send the balls going faster. This (literally) exponentially improves the efficiency of the process.

Now, this is only an analogy, but it's a relevant one. You get a very different development dynamic if, say, 75% of each joule produced by industrial machinery has to be reinvested in producing the next joule, compared to what you get if it's 25% or 10% or 5%.

There is a huge demand for power and products. Factories can make them much more efficiently then the old cottage industries, and a new wave of prosperity is being driven by this. There is money to be made in solving power supply issues. Perhaps we should deforest Canada?

Sure- but you can only do it once, and you need massive timber-hauling capability to make it happen. I'm not really qualified to calculate, and don't have the information handy, but basically your problem is to compare the amount of carbon accessible by chopping down forests, and the amount accessible by mining coal. You'd also have to factor in transportation costs, which are a real killer.

Historically timber has been more valued as lumber than as firewood and there are still large forests it was deemed uneconomical to log until relatively recently... and "recently" means "with the benefit of gasoline-powered heavy machinery to cut down the trees."

[Purple]

Perhaps we should deforest Canada?

Yea, how about not? Deforesting Canada is all fine and well even if you have to do it by hand. But how would you ship the wood back to Europe in sufficient quantities to keep up with demand for fuel without steam ships?

Furthermore if this is a world without cheap and abundant coal that would lead to a history of wood and by relation charcoal being used a lot more as a fuel substitute. So the historical deforestation of Europe might come much sooner and have much greater consequences by the 19th century.

[madd0ct0r]

hmmm.

Steel production is reliant on the type of furnace, it doesn't need more energy then iron production. I'd guess we'll see iron production changing to steel at the same ratio but I agree we wouldn't see tonnage production increasing anywhere near as fast, the main limitation being shortage of wood for charcoal (in the UK at least). Since the energy input is more expensive, the output will also be expensive so you might see steel replacing iron even more quickly as it has better properties for the price?
I also found this cool summary of the Indian techniques, although I've also found reference to wind-powered furnaces but no full description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel


Why can't we use explosives for mining and tunnel building? They've not been banned in the OP. I agree that certain areas will not be economical to mine any more, but remember that at the start of the revolution they suffered pretty similar problems. Steam engines were invented to pump existing deep mines and locomotives to pull existing mine rails (horses and labourers before that). Most of the inventions arrived in America fully formed, but we're looking at the time before that. In the UK, a lot of the work was not steam shovels, but Irish Navvies and brute force.

I like your argument of joules/dollar investment capital. Most of the big projects in the UK were built on money raised as shares and subscription. Most of them also failed to ever turn a profit I think we can agree that the same amount of capital will be available at the start of the revolution, and that business owners will still invest to switch to more profitable technologies once the opportunity is available.
Assuming gdp directly correlates to energy input into the system (which might not be true) then GDP would increase less quickly, and the rate of the rate of increase would increase less quickly. But it's still a positive feedback loop

As for the Canada question, I was being flippant. I'll run the numbers and get back to you
I suspect the answer would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_driving from the hills to a water-powered sawmill and charcoal maker, with finished charcoal shipped out by rail or barge.
This gives a good breakdown of the numbers for an african area: http://www.fao.org/docrep/s4550e/s4550e09.htm
Table 2 here is also a very useful source for forest ha to tonnes charcoal: http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5328e/x5328e02.htm#1.3. calculating an energy balance

In the longer term, biomass would be the key resource the way oil is for us. Countries with higher biomass potential would do better, so Brazil would be one power house, with tropical countries either doing well or becoming managed plantations. Rubber seed is a great biodiesel source, so anywhere that had rubber plantations in real world would probably do well in this one.

[madd0ct0r]

ghetto edit. The Suez and Panama canal might not be as useful, since only steam ships can use them and they will be much more expensive to run.

[Purple]

Steel production is reliant on the type of furnace, it doesn't need more energy then iron production. I'd guess we'll see iron production changing to steel at the same ratio but I agree we wouldn't see tonnage production increasing anywhere near as fast, the main limitation being shortage of wood for charcoal (in the UK at least). Since the energy input is more expensive, the output will also be expensive so you might see steel replacing iron even more quickly as it has better properties for the price?
I also found this cool summary of the Indian techniques, although I've also found reference to wind-powered furnaces but no full description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel

Unlikely. More likely what we would see is much less production of either due to the increased cost and thus less willingness to experiment with steel leading to far fewer high quality alloys being discovered. Remember, not all steels are equal. And this would lead to less trust in steel as a replacement for iron as a whole. So steel development would suffer and the industrial revolution with it.*


*By this I mean actual industrial grade steel and not the kind of medieval stuff used for swords.

Why can't we use explosives for mining and tunnel building? They've not been banned in the OP. I agree that certain areas will not be economical to mine any more, but remember that at the start of the revolution they suffered pretty similar problems.

Explosives of the time will be either Nitroglycerine, TNT or dynamite. The first is very dangerous and this will tend to make life hell for miners, as it did historically. And the other two require charcoal as an ingredient. A commodity that has just become very expensive due to the fuel crisis. So suddenly that tunnel became much more expensive to blast. And I don't think you can find anyone to support a manual slave labor project to dig them by hand. Not even if you used the Irish.

Steam engines were invented to pump existing deep mines and locomotives to pull existing mine rails (horses and labourers before that). Most of the inventions arrived in America fully formed, but we're looking at the time before that. In the UK, a lot of the work was not steam shovels, but Irish Navvies and brute force.

The navvies built the railway tracks but it was the trains that ran through them at very high speeds (for the time) and extreme fuel efficiency (again for the time) which made the tracks worth building in the first place. Ships, especially pre-steam ones just don't have the capability to make building an equivalently vast canal network worth while. After all there is only so much wind to push you around canals. And the alternative is getting some strong rope and a horse.

I like your argument of joules/dollar investment capital. Most of the big projects in the UK were built on money raised as shares and subscription. Most of them also failed to ever turn a profit I think we can agree that the same amount of capital will be available at the start of the revolution, and that business owners will still invest to switch to more profitable technologies once the opportunity is available.

The problem here is that you basically removed all the really good opportunities leaving only lackluster ones. And that means optimism for the new "revolution" is going to be neutered as well. People won't be as willing to throw their money away at new stuff if they don't feel it has the potential to be worth their while.

As for the Canada question, I was being flippant. I'll run the numbers and get back to you
I suspect the answer would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_driving from the hills to a water-powered sawmill and charcoal maker, with finished charcoal shipped out by rail or barge.

This gives a good breakdown of the numbers for an african area: http://www.fao.org/docrep/s4550e/s4550e09.htm
Table 2 here is also a very useful source for forest ha to tonnes charcoal: http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5328e/x5328e02.htm#1.3. calculating an energy balance

It's not about how much charcoal you can produce on site. That's the easy part. The problem is shipping it back to Europe at sufficient speed to fuel an industrial revolution using nothing but sail ships.

In the longer term, biomass would be the key resource the way oil is for us. Countries with higher biomass potential would do better, so Brazil would be one power house, with tropical countries either doing well or becoming managed plantations. Rubber seed is a great biodiesel source, so anywhere that had rubber plantations in real world would probably do well in this one.

Or more likely the various colonial empires would bleed the rest of the world dry trying in vain to feed their domestic industry with all the charcoal they can make leading to a world wide energy crisis. It's not like any colonial empire is realistically going to move their industry to Brazil or Canada.

[Simon_Jester]

Why can't we use explosives for mining and tunnel building? They've not been banned in the OP.

We can, but supplying the tunnel-building operation is harder, extracting ore from a mine is much harder, and canals require much larger tunnels than railroads to move anything like the same amount of freight, so boring a tunnel through a mountain to let a canal through is prohibitively difficult. This is especially serious for major continental mountain ranges like the Rockies and the Alps, because there are often distances of hundreds of kilometers between the headwaters of the highest-altitude navigable waterways on one side of the range and the other.

I agree that certain areas will not be economical to mine any more, but remember that at the start of the revolution they suffered pretty similar problems. Steam engines were invented to pump existing deep mines and locomotives to pull existing mine rails (horses and labourers before that). Most of the inventions arrived in America fully formed, but we're looking at the time before that. In the UK, a lot of the work was not steam shovels, but Irish Navvies and brute force.

Yes- and the total industrial resources of the globe wind up limited by what can be accomplished by navvies and coolies and brute force.

A staggering amount of work was done, not so much in Britain as in the US, Russia, and other second-wave industrializers, using the heavy machinery of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was that which created the industrial world as we know it today- until that point, the bulk of the economy in developed nations was still mostly rural and at most semi-industrialized.

I like your argument of joules/dollar investment capital. Most of the big projects in the UK were built on money raised as shares and subscription. Most of them also failed to ever turn a profit I think we can agree that the same amount of capital will be available at the start of the revolution, and that business owners will still invest to switch to more profitable technologies once the opportunity is available.

Yes; it's just that the return to the economy (not to the investors) is reduced, irrespective of the effect on the shareholders themselves.

Assuming gdp directly correlates to energy input into the system (which might not be true) then GDP would increase less quickly, and the rate of the rate of increase would increase less quickly. But it's still a positive feedback loop

The thing is, if you damp out the multiplier effects in a positive feedback loop it doesn't work as well, and may indeed run backwards under unfavorable conditions.

It's like... compound interest. At an interest rate of 10% investments grow rapidly. At an interest rate of 5% less so, at 3% less still- and at some point, your interest rate drops to the point where inflation may actually cause the investment to shrink when the economy isn't on your side.

Making energy and resources more expensive decreases the "interest rate" of return on investment in industrialization. Maybe not so much the financial return, as the energy and labor return on investment. Less labor is saved, less physical power is available to do physical things, even if the money still flows.

In the longer term, biomass would be the key resource the way oil is for us. Countries with higher biomass potential would do better, so Brazil would be one power house, with tropical countries either doing well or becoming managed plantations. Rubber seed is a great biodiesel source, so anywhere that had rubber plantations in real world would probably do well in this one.

The problem then is colonial exploitation- and to what extent it occurs.

[madd0ct0r]

I agree that certain areas will not be economical to mine any more, but remember that at the start of the revolution they suffered pretty similar problems. Steam engines were invented to pump existing deep mines and locomotives to pull existing mine rails (horses and labourers before that). Most of the inventions arrived in America fully formed, but we're looking at the time before that. In the UK, a lot of the work was not steam shovels, but Irish Navvies and brute force.

Yes- and the total industrial resources of the globe wind up limited by what can be accomplished by navvies and coolies and brute force.

A staggering amount of work was done, not so much in Britain as in the US, Russia, and other second-wave industrializers, using the heavy machinery of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was that which created the industrial world as we know it today- until that point, the bulk of the economy in developed nations was still mostly rural and at most semi-industrialized.

Question - given that the first wave of industrializers won't go down the coal-> steam route, why are you assuming the 2nd wave can only use the tools that were invented in the real world?

[Purple]

Question - given that the first wave of industrializers won't go down the coal-> steam route, why are you assuming the 2nd wave can only use the tools that were invented in the real world?

The laws of physics.

[madd0ct0r]

you miss my point. Both of you are looking at this very much from an american viewpoint, as a 2nd waver that used the tools developed in the first wave. You're arguing since the fuel for those tools doesn't exist, the 2nd wave can never really happen.

I'm looking at the first wave, and arguing since the fuel for those tools dosen't exist, something else would have been invented, in the same way we don't rely on machines that run on the natural hydrogen in the atmosphere*. Since those tools weren't invented, but the social conditions (rural unemployment, growth of cities); accumulated capital; scientific knowledge and benefits from changing to factory and company organisation all remain the same, some sort of industrial revolution would happen. The tools it creates in the first wave would be very different to what was created in the real world, and the tools created would be ones that fit the constraints of the world it's invented in.
We never reached the limit of steam engines before diesel replaced them. We never reached the limit of waterwheels and wind turbines before coal replaced them.

The netherlands managed to reclaim large areas of land from the sea without needing coal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinderdijk
Ironically, under the OP scenario, they've now actually got one of the best peat reserves in the world

*Somewhere on Jupiter, a couple of mantas are arguing how could an alien society industrialise outside of a gas giant with it's copious layer of hydrogen

[Purple]

you miss my point. Both of you are looking at this very much from an american viewpoint, as a 2nd waver that used the tools developed in the first wave. You're arguing since the fuel for those tools doesn't exist, the 2nd wave can never really happen.

Hate to break it to you, but I am from Europe. And you are completely wrong for unrelated reasons which I will explain.

I'm looking at the first wave, and arguing since the fuel for those tools dosen't exist, something else would have been invented, in the same way we don't rely on machines that run on the natural hydrogen in the atmosphere*.

And what are the reasons for this? It's because it ain't worth it.

Since those tools weren't invented, but the social conditions (rural unemployment, growth of cities); accumulated capital; scientific knowledge and benefits from changing to factory and company organisation all remain the same, some sort of industrial revolution would happen. The tools it creates in the first wave would be very different to what was created in the real world, and the tools created would be ones that fit the constraints of the world it's invented in.

No one is arguing against this as you seem to think. What we are saying that the limitations of this setting means that said tools will by necessity be vastly inferior in performance to the ones that happened in our world to the point of making the fundamental leap which happened historically difficult if not impossible.

We never reached the limit of steam engines before diesel replaced them. We never reached the limit of waterwheels and wind turbines before coal replaced them.

Firstly, steam engines have not been replaced and won't be for as long as we have power plants burning coal. And secondly the reason why people switched over from one technology to the other was because the new one was better. We did not switch over to diesel because we wanted progress but because diesel > coal.

Yes you can run a limited industry on water and wind power alone. But you can not run a rapidly expanding industrial economy with them. Not even using modern technology. Bottom line is that if you remove coal and oil the only third source with any potential for achieving what they were is atomic energy.

The netherlands managed to reclaim large areas of land from the sea without needing coal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinderdijk
Ironically, under the OP scenario, they've now actually got one of the best peat reserves in the world

It's one thing to pump water and another to run a thriving economy which absolutely relies on rapid and reliable transport of huge amounts of goods.

That's actually the main point here. Factories don't make the industrial revolution. Transportation does. Without it you can't get the food from the villages to feed your work force and you can't bring the raw materials to your factory or deliver your goods to market. The reason why things took off so quickly with the advent of the steam engine was not because you could suddenly power factories cheaply. Indeed, many factories were water powered or just used manual labor. It was because suddenly the shipping costs for resources and finished products dropped sharply with the advent of the railways. And workers could afford to move into factory towns since food could be delivered to their markets.

[madd0ct0r]

If we're going to focus on transportation and freight, then we have to remember the canals came first. Until they came in horses and shit roads couldn't carry heavy stuff fast enough. The classic anecdote about the first canal in the uk linking a colliery and manchester dropped the price in coal there by a half.

ugh. wikipedia has good data tables for canals, but can't find equivalent for UK rail build out. The curves would be an interesting comparison.

http://imgur.com/ucE7Q6X

Cardiff became an industrial powerhouse becuase it had water transport, and access to coal and iron coming out of the valleys. Without that coal, I'm not sure industry would have located here. The rule of thumb is minimise transport except on the highest value goods (so short for ore, coal, pig iron; longer export is fine for wrought iron and steel products).
So you might see empire industrial centers springing up where forest, ore and waterways all combined. maybe.

[Purple]

If we're going to focus on transportation and freight, then we have to remember the canals came first. Until they came in horses and shit roads couldn't carry heavy stuff fast enough. The classic anecdote about the first canal in the uk linking a colliery and manchester dropped the price in coal there by a half.

Emphasis on coal. A steam driven canal ship is as good as a freight locomotive. It's a reasonably fast and reliable machine which moves in all weather and regardless of conditions. Take the steam part away and you are stuck pulling the ship via horses or oars or praying for wind which will newer come.

[InsaneTD]

Peat bogs are excellent sources of gas, which isn't that hard to produce anyway. I think gas would become the new oil for power in this scenario, but we wouldn't have internal combustion engines until much later. The need for oil to lubricate the engine would be the problem there. You would see gas used to fire boilers and power steam engines in place of coal though.

[Sea Skimmer]

Emphasis on coal. A steam driven canal ship is as good as a freight locomotive. It's a reasonably fast and reliable machine which moves in all weather and regardless of conditions. Take the steam part away and you are stuck pulling the ship via horses or oars or praying for wind which will newer come.

Steam power was never much used on most canals in the UK, or most of the rest of Europe until very late in the industrial revolution though. The average canal was too small and fragile to withstand the prop wash of powered vessels. On the other hand horsefeed was incredibly cheap even if the movement was slow, and it was plenty reliable. Later on people began enlarging canals, and also adapted trolley canal systems, but this took a long time to take root and saw many smaller canals simply abandon or greatly reduced in importance.

The main advantage of rail though was that you could build it anywhere you wanted purely as a matter of money. Canals are much more sensitive to geography, and of course water power wont work at all without a significant elevation change.

[Simon_Jester]

Question - given that the first wave of industrializers won't go down the coal-> steam route, why are you assuming the 2nd wave can only use the tools that were invented in the real world?

The problem isn't that they only can do this. It's that they'll be forced to fall back on cruder, weaker tools as they try to build themselves up in turn.

And this doesn't only affect "second wave" industrialization. It also affects early adopters trying to modernize and advance. For instance, Britain's position as an industrial metropole in the Victorian-Edwardian era had a lot to do with its ability to import massive amounts of food and raw materials via fast, reliable steamships. Force everyone to fall back on wood-fired and charcoal-burning steamships (with reduced range because those fuel sources have lower energy density), and sailing vessels, and that trade diminishes. Synergy effects like the demand for powerful high-pressure steam engines encouraging advances in metallurgy, which in turn encourage people to design more powerful and efficient engines that run at the limit of what the material science of the day allows, will be less effective. Travel is harder- hell, heating homes is harder; a lot of 19th and early 20th century urban areas relied on coal furnaces for heat.

you miss my point. Both of you are looking at this very much from an american viewpoint, as a 2nd waver that used the tools developed in the first wave. You're arguing since the fuel for those tools doesn't exist, the 2nd wave can never really happen.

I'm looking at the first wave, and arguing since the fuel for those tools dosen't exist, something else would have been invented, in the same way we don't rely on machines that run on the natural hydrogen in the atmosphere*. Since those tools weren't invented, but the social conditions (rural unemployment, growth of cities); accumulated capital; scientific knowledge and benefits from changing to factory and company organisation all remain the same, some sort of industrial revolution would happen. The tools it creates in the first wave would be very different to what was created in the real world, and the tools created would be ones that fit the constraints of the world it's invented in.

We never reached the limit of steam engines before diesel replaced them. We never reached the limit of waterwheels and wind turbines before coal replaced them.

Yes, but there are good reasons why we didn't- because marginal improvements in the potential of steam engines no longer offered significant advantages over internal combustion engines. Marginal improvements in windmills couldn't really compete with industrial-sized watermills, and certainly didn't compete with steam engines... and many of the technologies that made windmills become more competitive once again were first developed in a steam context.

Remove fossil fuels and there might well be a gradual rise of industrial technology- but it would be a much slower process, and more vulnerable to being reversed by bad economic trends. For example, demand for firewood would be huge and entire nations might hit economic disasters when their readily available suppliers of wood started to run out of accessible forests. Britain actually had this crisis in real life, which was part of why they were so focused on coal in the 1700s- they'd effectively deforested most of their own country in the late Middle Ages, as had many other European nations. They were forced to switch to coal-burning in some contexts... and here that coal would largely not be available.

Heck, you might actually preempt the Industrial Revolution as we know it by creating a fuel and nutrition crisis in Europe before it even happens.

We can argue that something else would have happened somewhere else. The problem I'm trying to point out to you is that the resulting "alternate history" is so very alternate as to be practically unwritable and unpredictable, except in the broadest possible terms. We do know that many of the existing centers of economic and industrial power in real life would not exist without fossil fuels. We can only begin to guess at what might replace them, and how long it would take to do so.

So you might see empire industrial centers springing up where forest, ore and waterways all combined. maybe.

You might- but such places are relatively few (the Great Lakes region comes to mind), and remote (the Great Lakes won't even be reached on a significant scale until the mid-19th century, and industrializing them will be slow, especially if the US as a whole remains an economic backwater).

[madd0ct0r]

Peat bogs are excellent sources of gas, which isn't that hard to produce anyway. I think gas would become the new oil for power in this scenario, but we wouldn't have internal combustion engines until much later. The need for oil to lubricate the engine would be the problem there. You would see gas used to fire boilers and power steam engines in place of coal though.

that's interesting. - What do you do, stick a pipe down and suck?

[madd0ct0r]

If we're going to focus on transportation and freight, then we have to remember the canals came first. Until they came in horses and shit roads couldn't carry heavy stuff fast enough. The classic anecdote about the first canal in the uk linking a colliery and manchester dropped the price in coal there by a half.

Emphasis on coal. A steam driven canal ship is as good as a freight locomotive. It's a reasonably fast and reliable machine which moves in all weather and regardless of conditions. Take the steam part away and you are stuck pulling the ship via horses or oars or praying for wind which will newer come.

Sorry Purple, as Sea Skimmer says pretty much all canals in the UK were horse drawn. They were in use before moveable steam engines existed.

@Simon-Jester. It's a RAR, guessing is allowed
I went and had a look at Clippers, becuase I recalled them falling out of use not because of steam, but because only steamships could use the Suez. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper#Decline
Given they started building clippers with auxiliary steam engines, I guess the scheduling and reliability was worth the investment and lost cargo space. Still, that quoted paragraph is very interesting for our purposes. It suggests
1) sailing ships will continue to dominate long distance shipping
2) charcoal boilers will be limited to shortish trips and high value goods
3) The increase in fuel/cargo efficiency will drive the construction of larger ships as fast or faster then real world.

[InsaneTD]

Peat bogs are excellent sources of gas, which isn't that hard to produce anyway. I think gas would become the new oil for power in this scenario, but we wouldn't have internal combustion engines until much later. The need for oil to lubricate the engine would be the problem there. You would see gas used to fire boilers and power steam engines in place of coal though.

that's interesting. - What do you do, stick a pipe down and suck?

Capture would be the problem. I admit to not having the knowledge to even guess how it could be overcome. I would say largish domes that could be moved combined with bellows to pump it out of the capture area maybe? Once chemistry moves forward enough to figure out which gas is the one they want, other ways of capture and creation would be found. Sustainable forestry would probably be embraced a lot earlier and a lot more fully too.