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Comment on When we started burning coal it was called the industrial revolution. Was there a name when we started burning oil? The car revolution?

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someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

It’s useful to think about things by turning them on their head, aka inverting them. In this case: Burning of coal facilitated the industrial revolution. Yes, yes, yes, I know all the things that it was not caused by the burning of coal, it as not “just about burning coal”, it was not named because of the burning of coal, things were iterative, etc, etc, etc. But it behooves you turn things on their head and think through them in different ways.

In the bigger sense of turning things on their head, we can look at energy sources as we go through history: We burned wood. Then we burned coal. Then we burned oil. Then we burned atoms.

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nous@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

We burned wood. Then we burned coal. Then we burned oil. Then we burned atoms.

That is not a useful way of thinking of things. We have been burning oil and coal for a very very long time. Coal has been used in smiths to forge metal and oil to light lamps for 1000s of years.

It is not what we burnt that changed, it is what we did with the energy that changed things. Aka the steam engine was the real keystone technology in the industrial revolution. It was not the burning of oil that changed anything - but the internal combustion engine being put into cars.

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- someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  If you didn’t have things to burn, then you couldn’t access certain advancements. Not nearly as easily anyway. We would have needed charcoal for steam engines. Without something liquid (and very energy dense) combustion engines would have been very hard.
  
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  - Peppycito@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Treadles were the first source of power in the industrial revolution. Coal came way later.
    
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setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I’m not sure if I entirely follow what you mean by “turning things on their head”. What are you getting at?

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- someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  dictionary.cambridge.org/…/turn-on-head
  
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  - setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I understand the turn of phrase. I don’t quite know what you mean in the application here.
    
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    gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    They mean inverting the flow of logic, not looking at consequences but at causes, i guess.
    
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gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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- someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  ? Your point being that we didn’t stop burning coal? I am aware.
  
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  - Peppycito@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Looking at that graph and extrapolating from your comment, you’re saying the industrial revolution started in 1900?
    
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  - gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Yeah i basically just wanted to tell you that there’s actual data on stuff and if you wanna know, you gotta read it all, there’s a lot. I don’t know what it would help you and ask a question such as “is there a name for the time when we started to burn oil?” because if i give you an answer, what do you do with that answer? if you can’t embed it into a broader context, that answer seems pretty useless to me. So if you actually wanna know, maybe start reading it all. idk. maybe i come off arrogant, but that’s not my intention. i just don’t understand what your motivation for asking this question is?
    
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