What would the state of the climate crisis be without World War 1?Perhaps the first climate conference would not have been in Rio in 1992, but in Stockholm in 1932. Perhaps climate change would already be a largely solved problem today.The First World War, the preparations for the Second World War, the Second World War and the Cold War tied up many scientists and engineers. Enormous amounts of money and manpower were invested in the development of weapons. Without the First World War and its aftermath, the Second World War and the Cold War, global military spending would probably only be 1/3 as high today. The cause of the Cold War between the West and the Eastern Bloc was that Germany brought the communist leader Lenin, who was living in exile in Switzerland, to Russia. Without this act of war by Germany, Russia would have become a constitutional monarchy with no potential for conflict. Perhaps an economic bubble would have burst around the same time, the Black Friday of 1929. Svante Arrhenius put forward the greenhouse gas theory as early as 1895. Without the First World War, it might have been taken much more seriously. Serious enough to hold the first international climate conference in his honor in Stockholm in 1932. The technical possibilities in 1932 were wind energy, thermal solar collectors and thermal insulation. That was a good start. There was a lack of technical development at the time:
Indispensable, from the tiny transistor found in billions in ICs to transistors in power electronics where megawatts are switched. Indispensable in inverters and DC-DC converters. The first patent for this already existed in 1925, but it was not yet possible to manufacture it at the time. One of the most decisive weapons in the Second World War was the spacer fuse. It was an extreme technical challenge to develop a tube-based circuit that could withstand acceleration in a gun barrel. The stand-off fuse enabled the USA to protect its ships much better against attacks by Japanese bombers. In the European theater of war, the first use was in the "Battle of the Bulge", known on the German side as the Battle of the Bulge. This would have been much easier with transistors. If it had been possible to use transistors for this in 1943, the USA would have done everything in its power to develop this circuit with transistors instead of tubes. Therefore, the timing of the development would not have been any different.
The battery technology of the time was so poor that the electric car lost out to very primitive combustion engines. Let's take a look at the engine of a Ford T compared to modern engine technology. A huge difference in performance and efficiency. The triumph of modern electric cars began in 2013 with the Tesla S. 600 kg battery with 85 kWh. Let's imagine this with a 600 kg lead-acid battery. Around 24 kWh went into it. But lead batteries don't like two things at all: deep discharge and high currents. Drawing 48 kW would have been a serious battery abuse. Discharging to less than 50% would have been too. I myself tested an electric scooter with lead batteries for 17,300 km from 2006 to 2009. During these 17,300 km, I wrecked 3 lead batteries from a range of 60 km to less than 20 km. I can therefore understand from personal experience that inadequate battery technology caused the demise of electric cars at the time. The first electric cars with lithium batteries were not tested until after 1990. Perhaps this could have been achieved one or two decades earlier, together with a much faster increase in production.
The first photovoltaic had 6% efficiency in 1954. Until then, the development would probably have been the same. Only much more would have been invested in research and production. The 400 GW of global production in 2023 would thus have been achieved two decades earlier.
The development of the B 29 bomber was as costly as the development of the atomic bomb. In another world, all this development work could have been invested in the development of wind turbines. Wind turbines, thermal solar collectors and thermal insulation would have been the basis for CO2 reduction for the first three decades after the first climate conference in 1932. Then supplemented by photovoltaics and the switch to electric cars.
The world without the First World War would have been about 20 years ahead in containing the climate crisis. Only 20 years, because decisive technologies were only possible from the middle of the 20th century. I hope these were not 20 years that decided everything. |
