Comment by ninalanyon

> Air quality would have been a disaster.

What do you mean would have been? It was a disaster. Perhaps you are too young or insufficiently well travelled to have experienced the effects of burning coal in, say the UK in the 1950s and 1960s or in China even in the last few decades.

Without oil the push to solar and wind would also have been accelerated, probably.

What is it about oil and as that you think made it accelerate semiconductor R&D?