So, there's a lot of focus on deforestation from making charcoal - and while I think that that would happen to an extent, it would never reach the fever pitch it reached in the actual industrial revolution because every tree that gets cut down needs to be powered by plant or animal calories (chopping down trees with steam engines powered by charcoal is probably a net loss, though I'm just guessing on that). Without a lot of easily-accessible coal and later oil to turbocharge it, industrialization would be heavily restrained by the capacity of arable land to sustain the workforce.
Agricultural production steadily improves until the "second agricultural revolution" where people figured out crop rotation and stuff to the extent that they were able to rapidly increase the food supply, and I think that that becomes the primary driver for the "no-coal industrial revolution" that will still happen. Lots of people move to the mining towns and the new larger and denser than ever cities, but there is a hard cap to how many people can move to non-agricultural labor because you still need a lot of people on the farms - for example, in China until the Revolution, 90% of the population were agricultural laborers, while at present the number is about 25%. In the no coal timeline, I don't see the number of farmers going below 50% of the general population.
The no-coal industrial revolution probably brings with it a lot of rethinking of already-existing tech, like water wheels and windmills, and applying those forms of power to the high-demand labor necessary for industry instead of using steam engines. Tesla or someone like him probably figures out how to generate electricity with a water wheel, and the electro-arc furnace is invented some time later, both of which are necessary to push society into refitting all of its hydro power to be hydroelectric energy generation. Wooden windmills get similar retrofits, and the first use of solar power is driving steam pumps in mines - without cheaper coal fired steam engines competing against it, wind or solar-based pumps become the only way to go once your mine starts digging past a certain point.
While there's no smog or CO2 emissions, there are certainly massive environmental impacts from all of this. The first large scale electricity generation likely comes from hydroelectric dams, whose environmental impact is pretty big and well understood by now. A lot of the industry that would grow as agricultural workers moved to cities would be a lot less land efficient than the fossil fuel powered one its replacing, so when European powers run out of suitable rivers for water-powered industry, they would start looking towards their colonies for more suitable locations. Agriculture itself would be the biggest offender of course, as it has been throughout human history, since even as it becomes more efficient it would never hit anything like the efficiency of today.
But I think that while you would still get chemicals in the water, acid rain in certain places, entire forests lost to growing demand for metal and entire biospheres poisoned by the spoil from mining - the overall effect would be much less than what we can see in our world, because the large number of people who would need to stay on the farms would limit population growth substantially in every country.
With fewer people in specialized fields, and fewer people generally, I think that technology progresses much more slowly. The economic incentives still end up mostly the same, so most likely capitalism still starts somewhere and spreads - but it's possible that slowing down capitalism's spread also allows communism to get out in front of it in more places. The revolutions in both Russia and China were in part possible because of the fact that proletarianization was incomplete when they started, while the revolution always got crushed in fully proletarianized countries like Germany.
So, there's a lot of focus on deforestation from making charcoal - and while I think that that would happen to an extent, it would never reach the fever pitch it reached in the actual industrial revolution because every tree that gets cut down needs to be powered by plant or animal calories (chopping down trees with steam engines powered by charcoal is probably a net loss, though I'm just guessing on that). Without a lot of easily-accessible coal and later oil to turbocharge it, industrialization would be heavily restrained by the capacity of arable land to sustain the workforce.
Agricultural production steadily improves until the "second agricultural revolution" where people figured out crop rotation and stuff to the extent that they were able to rapidly increase the food supply, and I think that that becomes the primary driver for the "no-coal industrial revolution" that will still happen. Lots of people move to the mining towns and the new larger and denser than ever cities, but there is a hard cap to how many people can move to non-agricultural labor because you still need a lot of people on the farms - for example, in China until the Revolution, 90% of the population were agricultural laborers, while at present the number is about 25%. In the no coal timeline, I don't see the number of farmers going below 50% of the general population.
The no-coal industrial revolution probably brings with it a lot of rethinking of already-existing tech, like water wheels and windmills, and applying those forms of power to the high-demand labor necessary for industry instead of using steam engines. Tesla or someone like him probably figures out how to generate electricity with a water wheel, and the electro-arc furnace is invented some time later, both of which are necessary to push society into refitting all of its hydro power to be hydroelectric energy generation. Wooden windmills get similar retrofits, and the first use of solar power is driving steam pumps in mines - without cheaper coal fired steam engines competing against it, wind or solar-based pumps become the only way to go once your mine starts digging past a certain point.
While there's no smog or CO2 emissions, there are certainly massive environmental impacts from all of this. The first large scale electricity generation likely comes from hydroelectric dams, whose environmental impact is pretty big and well understood by now. A lot of the industry that would grow as agricultural workers moved to cities would be a lot less land efficient than the fossil fuel powered one its replacing, so when European powers run out of suitable rivers for water-powered industry, they would start looking towards their colonies for more suitable locations. Agriculture itself would be the biggest offender of course, as it has been throughout human history, since even as it becomes more efficient it would never hit anything like the efficiency of today.
But I think that while you would still get chemicals in the water, acid rain in certain places, entire forests lost to growing demand for metal and entire biospheres poisoned by the spoil from mining - the overall effect would be much less than what we can see in our world, because the large number of people who would need to stay on the farms would limit population growth substantially in every country.
With fewer people in specialized fields, and fewer people generally, I think that technology progresses much more slowly. The economic incentives still end up mostly the same, so most likely capitalism still starts somewhere and spreads - but it's possible that slowing down capitalism's spread also allows communism to get out in front of it in more places. The revolutions in both Russia and China were in part possible because of the fact that proletarianization was incomplete when they started, while the revolution always got crushed in fully proletarianized countries like Germany.