We mined all of the easily accessible drywall gypsum too, I guess we wouldn't be able to have houses either and would have to live outside in the cold and rain!
There are lots of other building materials available. What other sources of energy are there which are suitable for driving a new industrial revolution if you’re starting over? Wind and solar aren’t worth too much without high tech to enable them. Biomass is insufficient. Nuclear needs high tech. Hydro could do, but it’s pretty limiting.
Insufficient for a hydrocarbon sugar high, but hardly insufficient for bootstrapping a civilization. Yeah, bio and hydro are limiting. So we would deal with the limits for longer until we worked our way past them. It's wildly condescending to imagine that this would be a show-stopper, doubly so when you review the history of all the things that were historically not stopped by the lack of fossil fuels.
