We can, literally today, see how society responded to an opportunity to bring energy costs down an order of magnitude. Nuclear plants were built, people got spooked from Chernobyl and the industry was basically shut down. It takes no imagination at all to think people in the Roman days looked at coal and just said no. Western civilisation arguably did just that in the 70s. There is even a large contingent recently who say that using coal is a terrible mistake and we should be willing to move to more expensive energies (the exact positions got a bit murky as we don't have enough fossil fuels per-capita and solar is getting cheaper, but back through the 80s, 90s, 00s the positions were clear). Thinking about the dynamics of debate someone in Roman times had known what we know now and started a scare campaign over climate change they could easily have made an argument for just forgoing the industrial revolution. Let alone whatever imaginary threats a pre-industrial civilisation would have come up with in practice. I've seen the weather reports out of China, the downsides of industrialising on the environment aren't exactly subtle.
The evidence of it taking specific conditions to trigger a step change is quite high. We know how important energy is because of the industrial revolution. The Romans didn't have that knowledge. Any resistance at all to the use of coal (like not having coal mines on hand) would have been a real obstacle.
I'm probably in the minority though.
The series on bread starts here: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
The series on clothing starts here: https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
Discussion:
The other thread:
How to Roman Republic 101 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36903149 - July 2023 (30 comments)