But we used simpler forms like oil to bootstrap renewables. For instance, making solar panels takes lots of energy. Would it be possible to go straight to renewables?
Wind power existed for hundreds of years before we started drilling for oil. I doubt you can make useful solar cells, but you can make useful windmills, rechargeable batteries, light bulbs (incandescent), and motors.
However just the above list needs a large list of industry to pull off. Can you make a wire? What about a ball bearing - they are made by the millions of insane levels of precision and are cheap. All those little details are why you can't pull it off. Sure if given all the parts you can pull off the next step, but there are so many steps you can't do it.
I've thought a lot about these problems and you eventually hit the need for stronger than natural magnets. Without electricity it's a hard challenge, but without magnets creating electricity in a simple bench scale is a lot harder.
I ended up thinking that you'd need to do a chemical battery to bootstrap electricity and then with electricity generate the electromagnet to create stronger magnets and then iterate from there.
Your next stumbling block from there would be optics as everything else can be made with horrible tolerances. Even lathes and similar machinery can be made with pretty good tolerances without optics. But when you start needing time keeping or miniaturizing components for improved efficiencies, it becomes a blocking issue.
You also need to discover photo-reactive elements to do lithography, but that's a lot easier since it's just silver nitrate and you'd already have the components when you are working towards the initiate bootstrap battery.
would you need to rediscover the table of elements and atomic theory in your version of things? There's a lot of a scientific learning we take for granted that is actually important when building a new civilization from scratch.
If you include Coppicing for charcoal and building wood, along with modern knowledge, it should be possible to go straight to wind power and rush solar.
