Displacing fossil fuel for mobility with green hydrogen + electricity will reduce a large portion of those energy sources.
Hydrogen for heating + for shipping + heavy duty transit -- more.
California has already decoupled increasing amounts of electricity use and emissions through a combination of policies to increase adoption of renewables and through codes and standards for home heating/insulation/good build practices.
So while your statement may resonate with some of the past - it does not handcuff us to a future trajectory. It is possible to change and it is happening - it just needs to happen faster and increase in its scale.
Also - we did stop using whale oil in the early 1900s so your statement is not 100%.
Whales were going to go extinct so I don’t think there was much choice. Also it had just one main use at the time for oil lamps. That can certainly be disrupted. But if it was a plentiful source it may have been possible to figure out how to use it more broadly.
I agree that history is not destiny. But in this case only if we first understand history.
Random aside, the fantasy world in the Dishonoured games series is a parallel version to ours wherein whale oil formed the basis for the industrial revolution.
This is I think a riff on the Fallout universe, where the transistor was never invented and electronics still bloomed via it's predecessor, vacuum tube technology.
Hydrogen for heating + for shipping + heavy duty transit -- more.
California has already decoupled increasing amounts of electricity use and emissions through a combination of policies to increase adoption of renewables and through codes and standards for home heating/insulation/good build practices.
So while your statement may resonate with some of the past - it does not handcuff us to a future trajectory. It is possible to change and it is happening - it just needs to happen faster and increase in its scale.
Also - we did stop using whale oil in the early 1900s so your statement is not 100%.