There's a reasonable argument that the entire industrial revolution was just the result of cheap carbon, and we've been running on that ever since. The Haber Process allowed us to get out of agriculture (and thus have time to make all of these breakthroughs) and then electrification (courtesy coal/gas) got us out of having to do manual labor. So we had lots of free time! And we used that to develop transistors and MRI machines and spaceships and everything else. But the returns to that free time seem to be diminishing rapidly, and we still rely on power growth to get GDP growth.