This isn’t really an unpopular opinion, but it’s a bit of a slantwise way of thinking about it.

Though fossil fuels kick-started our technological revolution and largely made possible the second phase of the Industrial Revolution, by causing so much harm it’d have been better overall for humanity if their major uses had never been discovered or their usage severely restricted.

Though I know the strict determinists and those who enjoy spreadsheet fuckery will protest, there is a path for humanity where we went electric in the early 20th century, never depended much on fossil fuels, and rapidly increased the efficiency and prevalence of electric engines. In this world the airline industry never developed and we made widespread use of high-speed trains since the 1950s. Ocean crossings are undertaken by fast cruise liners with nuclear reactors (60 knots cruising speed), so it takes two days to go from NYC to London, but you do so in a nice cabin with all the amenities, not packed in like lab rats in some population pressure experiment.

Don’t let anyone tell you this world was impossible — in fact, we could build it right now, and it’d only cost a few years of the DoD budget.

I agree that without such heavy dependence on fossil fuels tech development would’ve been delayed 60-90 years. But with them, it’s likely we will make the planet largely uninhabitable. So that’s not really a win in my book.