Were log cabins, whale blubber and the horse and buggy "sustainable"?

Question

Did it require coercive taxes and regulation to force people to switch to the methods of construction, lighting and transportation that we use today, or did market forces cause those shifts to occur?

Answer 1

Those were all sustainable in small quantities and yes market forces caused the shifts to modern technologies to occur.  Although people still do use all of those today.  Just in very small levels.  Inuit tribes take whales for food each year, people have log cabins all over the country, and horse and buggies are still around in some places.

Answer 2

In the short term, all these things are "sustainable".  Without significant government investment, we would not have had the electrical grid, or the street system (including interstate highway system) that we do today.  

I am not entirely sure where log cabins fall into this, but in the case of electrification and the development of the transport system we have today, there was no individual private entity that would have had the money to sustain this, and it would not have had a sustainable business without government support.  

Eventually, we might have been able to develop a privately funded transport system, but the cost of initial investment and the transaction costs needed to extract sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile would have made it prohibitively expensive.The same is true of the electricity grid.  Some government involvement was necessary to get these projects off the ground, and without it, these projects would not have occurred.

Answer 3

Yes they were sustainable in my opinion.  I don't know how much carbon emissions they had but they were probably sustainable.  Furthermore, the environment wasn't very bad back then so it wasn't an issue.  What caused people to switch away from that were new, better technologies.  Cars, planes (which I admit didn't come until maybe (for consumer usage) 1900s same with cars), and better ships made people stop using horse and buggies and also switch to faster, better things.  No one forced people to do that.  However, with more effective, quicker goods, people bought them and took advantage of them.

Why is it not the same with oil?  Currently we have too much dependence with oil.  Gas-power cars and things that depend on gasoline are highly popular and/or the majority of what's in use.  There isn't that much solar and/or alternate energy out there.  There is some, but its not in high usage.  That will change for the better over time.  There will be more people using alternate energy thanks to high gas prices and a deteriorating environment.