There were things like sewer systems before there were fossil fuels, though there may or may not be things like sewage treatment plants without a readily available source of energy. Plastics might not be in the picture at all, unless it's possible to synthesize polymers from other sources. Cars wouldn't have gasoline or diesel to run on - would there be electric cars instead? How would we even get to the point where we could make batteries/cells for electric vehicles without coal and oil-fired power plants and machinery? Aircraft, if they existed, wouldn't have petroleum-based fuels. Would people just get around the world a little less? How would that impact the transmission of information?
it was a real example of humanity sorting out waste in the dumbest way possible. Basically take the past 100 years of progress, any advancement we've made like cars, planes or computers, it basically wouldn't have happened at all. There would be no plastics without petroleum. Human history dictates anything that didn't seem worth the effort pretty much didn't happen.
There are alternatives to wood that aren't petroleum, though I don't know how good they would be for anything beyond a fairly small scale. Animal products like herbivore dung, beeswax, whale oil, animal tallow, and vegetable-derived oils come to mind.
Sometimes it takes a matter of needing a better option to spur progress and development, and selling someone on a need for an alternative to burning forests' worth of trees to fuel things is a hard sell when they think the forest will always be there, this is true.
It's mostly just that people would have been content to just keep chopping more wood because chopping wood is easy.
Would the increased consumption of wood prompt a more rapid development of forestry techniques and search for alternatives when it became evident that burning wood on a certain scale was unsustainable? Was forestry as we know it now even a twinkle in someone's eye before the Industrial Revolution?
