But that isn’t going to work if half the country is without power and no access to a refinery within a couple hundred miles. Let alone the logistics of trying to fuel thousands of trucks.
It would be worse the 1900 because back then you had a large percentage of people in rural areas still that could provide for themselves. Today you have the majority of people in cities or suburbia which requires electricity for the essentials (food, heat, water).
It allows us to observe the sun in an accurate manner that is needed for the technology that is in place today and not in 1859. You did not have to worry about the accuracy or strength of a CME in 1859. Today you do. If you did not have that accuracy that is only available by space borne instruments you might be putting critical satellites into safe mode all the time “just in case”..
How would you provide fuel for those vehicles when all the pumps run on electricity? You would not have enough generators to fuel up all the vehicles that are used just to provide necessities such as food.
Except melting on Greenland directly impacts the sea level. There weren’t billions of people living “near” the ocean hundreds of years ago that would now be directly effected.
