ALL the money that flew into "Fossil & Co" throughout the last, lets say, 50 or 60 years, including all implicit fundings, like state-building-streets or universities-masters-engineering-focus-ICE, all the money for lobbying, all the money for all the (counter)campaigns (from ALL sides), and all that money....
...WHAT IF we would have spent all of this money instead on Battery Research and all this Renewable Energy stuff?
Where would we be today on techdev curve? ;-) ;-)
“What If?” history is fun, but there are always Tradeoffs.
So in alternative world where oil would not be available coal will serve its role. The only big difference would be less geopolitical tensions as coal is much more evenly distributed.
And in yet another alternative where even coal is not available something like modern civilization will still be possible but the path to it will be entirely different.
This can be considered as the first method for extracting an almost pure chemical element from its compounds.
While in the beginning charcoal was used mainly for non-essential activities, like drawing, eventually charcoal was the reducing agent required for smelting metals from their minerals, first lead, then copper, then many others. Without charcoal, humans would have remained in the "stone age".
Without fossil coal, anything that is made from coal can be made from charcoal, except that this requires a lot of additional energy (for making first the charcoal; but with modern technology it is not necessary to pass through charcoal; carbon dioxide can be reduced to substances like methanol or formaldehyde or passing through syngas to hydrocarbons, which can feed other chemical processes).
Ungodly amount of money was spent on battery research since 1945, at least $100-150B since 2000 alone. Every combination of anode, cathode and electrolyte was tried, tested and evaluated. We got silver-zinc, Ni-Cd, NiMH and finally Li-Ion batteries as the result.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-rise-of-lithium-ion-bat...
Early Li-ion battery tech was developed by none other than Exxon itself (in second link)
I cant believe this esp. since CATL is reporting on a regular base new innovations. Im a layman here but if I think about the 3-digit amount of USD that Europe alone is spending on imports of oil, it seems unlikely that this money couldnt be spent on research batteries?
Same with solar: 20 years ago, 1 Wp was about 3-5 EUR, today its 7ct. This wouldnt have been possible if research wouldnt have been massivly accelerted.
I mean, batteries and solar panels are cool, but thinking about the future doesn't mean we should forget the present. The advance we could have gotten by diverting funding away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and batteries is to balance with the damage caused by using outdated fossil fuel technology before the transition.
Cities are breathable now thanks to all the progresses modern engines have made. They will be even more breathable with zero emission cars, but I prefer to wait a bit more in these conditions than waiting a bit less in a smog filled city.
Batteries are only a part of the equation. Practical EVs were enabled not just by Li-ion batteries but by IGBTs. And semiconductor development moved about as fast as possible.
And then there's a gulf between lead-acid batteries and Li-ions. I think only NiMH batteries would have been a reasonable midpoint, and even they would have been impractical for full EVs.