No, there would have been no industrialization without fossil fuels. The carbon density of wood is insufficient.
There are plenty of ways to rationalize anything into making it seem fine or even great, at least by comparison. Just because it's framed in a binary manner where one option is clearly the worst doesn't make the other option good. It's still a fallacy. Your cynicism might block you from realizing that mining for coal instead of cutting down trees doesn't make it "a net positive" for the environment, just a lower net negative.
So I'm glad that we can agree on one thing though. Mining never had any kind of net positive impact on the environment.
Wouldn't a wood-powered industrialization period have incentivized the growing of trees?
A wood-powered industrialization would have led to mass deforestation and then fallen over hard. (Or, more likely, switched fuels.)
That, in fact, occurred. Steel was produced using wood charcoal for millennia, denuding huge swaths of forest, which often became desert rather than growing back. Such deserts can sometimes be reclaimed by careful stewardship.
Seems very cynical and reductive..."a few watersheds"... if one was to replace the ravenous need of workers for privacy in new electric cars...seems like a lot of lithium... here's hoping for fast development of solid state batteries...
but also, isn't it often a case of cost as in how cheap corporations can bilk poorer countries and their political class of important resources...? higher prices/legislation could be a way to force innovation to develop alternative extraction methods...geothermal extraction https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/geothermal-lithium-its-extrac...
The environment would be in much worse shape if industrialization had been fueled with wood rather than coal.
Poisoning a few watersheds in Asia for lithium and cobalt is far preferable to continued oil and coal extraction which would poison orders of magnitude more
There's no good, just less bad and we don't know if undefined impact sea mining is less bad or more bad than the status quo.
I'm inclined to think it's probably worse per amount of material moved than conventional mining but I suspect there may be a few niches where productivity per amount of material moved is sufficiently greater to have a lesser overall impact.