They’d also be kind of wrong factually, because barring coal, yet still critical alongside it, what greased and fueled the industrial revolution and its commodity production was the mass-murdering of whales to the point of almost extincting every single species of whale on the planet (and properly extincting uncountable intermediate species that relied on whalefall or nutrient cycling because whales are keystone species) extracting and using their bodily compounds to make things like ‘whale oil;’ and we owe them more than we could ever give them, but least of all to not keep destroying the planet, fucking up the oceans (and making them so painfully loud it disrupts their ability to communicate and hunt and contributes to beachings), killing them with fishing bycatch and with commercial boat strikes, and non-arctic-indigenous industrial peoples who still hunt them. Which is all economics as always.

We only stopped (at least, to that level) industrial-murdering them after discovering the modern fossil fuels (petroleum et al) and realizing that it was easier to pull millions-year-dead plankton and peat and trees that got their energy condensed and liquefied because fungus hadn’t evolved to break them down and utilize it yet — than it was to find the previously-numerous-but-now-scant beings (of incredible intelligence, complex capability, compassion, and culture [even among different speices], much of which was lost to their communities forever); who also sometimes escaped or fought back and killed people and made crews have to eat each other (“Whale attack” they say. Whale self-defense).