If you could erase one event from history, what would it be?
If I could erase one event from history, I would not choose a battle, an assassination, birth of an individual or the rise of a particular dictator. However terrible such events were, their consequences were ultimately bound by time and geography. Rather, I would erase the building of the industrial civilisation around the large-scale combustion of fossil fuels. In one fell sweap I’d return the British Isles to an agrarian society but we’d also prevent climate change.
Strictly speaking, this was not one event on one day. It was an historical tipping point: the rapid adoption of coal (in Britain) during industrialisation, followed by oil and natural gas. It transformed human society. It also committed us to extracting carbon that had been locked underground for millions of years and releasing it back into the atmosphere. However, my argument is not that humanity should have remained pre-industrial. It is that, without cheap fossil fuels, we would have used our ingenuity to industrialise differently, perhaps more slowly, by developing renewable energy, electrification and eventually nuclear and solar power without first making combustion the foundation of modern life.
Before coal became dominant, societies already made extensive use of water and wind. Water wheels powered mills, workshops and early factories; windmills ground grain, pumped water and performed other mechanical work. Had coal not offered such a concentrated and convenient source of energy, there would have been far greater pressure to improve these technologies. Industrial development would probably have been geographically constrained and slower, but necessity might have driven earlier advances in turbines, mechanical efficiency, energy storage and the transmission of power.
Electricity would then have become the crucial breakthrough. Once mechanical energy could be converted into electricity and transmitted over distance, factories and settlements no longer had to stand beside the source of power. Hydroelectric schemes could supply towns and industries from distant rivers and reservoirs, while increasingly sophisticated wind generation could feed the same networks. A civilisation forced to work within the limits of renewable energy might have invested much earlier in efficient electrical grids, storage and demand management.
This alternative history should not be romanticised. Coal succeeded because it was exceptionally useful. It was energy-dense, transportable, storable and available on demand. It also supplied the intense heat and coke required by heavy industry and ironmaking. A world without fossil fuels would therefore have faced serious technological obstacles. Industrialisation might have taken decades longer. Different methods of metallurgy, transport and manufacturing would have had to emerge. Yet slower progress is not the same as no progress. Human ingenuity would still have had powerful incentives to find solutions.
By the twentieth century, nuclear energy could have provided another major step. Nuclear fission arose from advances in physics rather than from the discovery of fossil fuels themselves. In a civilisation already committed to generating electricity without combustion, nuclear power might have been developed principally as a high-density energy source rather than as an addition to an overwhelmingly fossil-fuelled system. Later, solar photovoltaics and increasingly efficient wind turbines could have expanded the renewable base, supported by better storage, transmission and energy efficiency.
The tragedy of fossil fuels is not simply that they cause climate change. Their combustion has also damaged human health on an immense scale. Coal, oil and gas produce fine particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, sulphur compounds and other pollutants associated with asthma, chronic respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, stroke and lung cancer. The World Health Organization estimates that ambient air pollution causes millions of premature deaths each year. The same process that has destabilised the climate has therefore also shortened lives and damaged lungs on streets, in homes and throughout industrial cities.
The environmental consequences reach far beyond breathing polluted air. By transferring enormous quantities of geological carbon into the active carbon cycle, humanity has raised atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and driven modern anthropogenic climate change. The oceans absorb part of that additional carbon, causing acidification. Rising temperatures alter rainfall, intensify extreme heat, contribute to sea-level rise and disrupt ecosystems. A technology adopted because it seemed extraordinarily useful locally has produced consequences operating across the entire Earth system.
There is also a deeper historical paradox. Fossil fuels undoubtedly helped create much of the modern world I would not wish to lose. They accelerated transport, industry, agriculture, communications, sanitation, medicine and improvements in material living standards. That is precisely why the question is difficult. Erasing fossil fuels cannot mean simply erasing everything they helped make possible. The more interesting counterfactual is to ask what humanity might have invented instead.
Without abundant coal and oil, civilisation might have moved through a different sequence: increasingly sophisticated water and wind power, electrification, large-scale hydroelectricity, greater efficiency and storage, followed by nuclear power, modern wind generation and solar energy. Progress might have been slower and some developments delayed, but technological effort would have been directed towards living within renewable energy flows rather than exploiting ancient stores of carbon.
So I would not erase the Industrial Revolution. I would erase its marriage to fossil carbon. I would want humanity still to industrialise, invent, travel, communicate and improve living standards, but along another technological path. We might have reached many of the same destinations later, but without first constructing a civilisation dependent upon combustion.
Wars end. Empires fall. Political systems disappear. Men die. The consequences of releasing hundreds of billions of tonnes of ancient carbon endure for centuries. They are visible not only in a warming atmosphere and acidifying oceans but in polluted cities, damaged lungs, premature deaths and disrupted ecosystems. For the scale of its influence, the length of its legacy and the possibility that another path might have existed, I can think of no historical turning point I would rather undo.
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