Is carbon the new slavery?
The evolution of morality
Some readers will know that every year I ask students to predict how public morality will change in their lifetimes. I point out that American attitudes toward slavery changed dramatically in the lifetime of a person born in 1776, when slavery was legal in all states, who lived until 1865, when it was banned by constitutional amendment. Students have suggested various contemporary practices as candidates for future condemnation, but the one most mentioned of late is the emission of greenhouse gases that produce climate change.
Some of the students realize that the reason I give the assignment is not to test their prognostication skills but to make them think about how morality changes over time. Opponents of slavery on moral grounds were few in America in 1776. No one wanted to be a slave, but the institution of slavery seemed as old and inevitable as disease and war. Attitudes changed after America adopted the politics of republicanism, with its philosophical premise of equality, and as the country developed the economics of capitalism, with its competitive requirement for a flexible workforce. By the middle of the nineteenth century the opponents of slavery were no longer considered cranks. In 1865 they ended it.
Today it’s hard for students, and many other people, to believe that good-hearted, honest men and women could ever have countenanced slavery, even participated in it. Yet they did.
Will the grandchildren of my students look on climate change similarly? Some of my students think so. Are they right? Time will tell.
Certain dynamics are already apparent. A generation ago few people considered the possibility of climate disruption a moral issue. Many people didn’t think it an issue at all. Some thought that such disruption as might occur would be a bother but nothing more.
Gradually the numbers shifted. As the reality of climate change became harder to deny, more people felt a responsibility to do something about it. Part of this was self-interest, part concern for future generations, part for people in countries most exposed to climate effects, part for other species harmed or even extinguished by climate change.
Some of this tracked what had happened regarding slavery. With American independence came the possibility of changing the slavery laws inherited from Britain. This possibility entailed responsibility for remedying the evils of slavery. Some critics of slavery focused on the evils suffered by the slaves themselves. Others decried the damage slavery did to American democracy. Thomas Jefferson worried about the retribution that must be visited upon America in the future. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever,” Jefferson said. Abraham Lincoln experienced the retribution, in the form of the Civil War, and considered it deserved.“If God wills that it continue,” Lincoln said of the war, “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
Even among those who acknowledge the reality of climate change, there are differences of opinion regarding what to do about it. Mitigating the change will be expensive.
Similar objections arose among critics of slavery. Ending slavery in the northern states was relatively inexpensive, because slavery wasn’t essential to the northern economy. Things were quite different in the southern states, where commercial agriculture depended on enslaved labor.
Hardcore abolitionists refused to accept cost as an excuse not to end slavery. Likewise today the most committed climate reformers often treat cost objections as an excuse to do nothing. Yet progress toward emancipation required expanding its constituency by considering the cost concerns of moderates. Similarly today progress toward mitigating climate change requires dealing honestly with cost concerns.
America’s struggle to end slavery exemplified a principle germane to the debate over climate. Individuals make moral choices for idiosyncratic reasons, but for society as a whole, what’s moral is always a subset of what’s affordable. Many southern slaveholders had qualms about slavery, but as long as their section depended on slavery, most couldn’t afford to moralize on it. And more than a few took umbrage at northerners who did moralize on slavery, with the southerners observing that emancipation would cost the northerners nothing.
The costs of reducing reliance on carbon are falling. The more they fall, the easier it will be for people to treat climate change as a moral issue. When the moral curve crosses the cost curve—with the former rising and the latter falling—action on climate change will accelerate.
Slavery again furnishes a model. The moral curve crossed the cost curve in the northern states by 1800, at which point all had set slavery on the path to extinction. For the nation as a whole, the moral curve crossed the cost curve during the Civil War, with the northern sense of morality outraged by the southern attempt to break up the Union, and the cost to the Confederacy ultimately including its defeat and destruction.
Should the climate reformers win their debate with the skeptics, and should their actions halt or reverse climate change, thereby preventing great disruptions to humans’ present way of life—in other words, should the climate wars have a happy ending—the grandchildren of my students might well wonder how anyone could ever have opposed the measures that produced the happy ending.
That’s how you can tell progress has been made: our forebears become morally unrecognizable.
Thank you for your post on “Is carbon the new slavery.” It raises an intriguing question for students to consider.
There are two points I would suggest adding to the discussion, both of which require broader consideration of the costs and morality involved.
First, you mention that the costs of reducing reliance on carbon are falling. I respectfully disagree. While incremental costs in some cases may decrease, the total system cost is undeniably rising—often significantly. An analogy may help illustrate this: consider a family debating whether to add a second car. The additional car, such as a compact vehicle, might be less expensive than their existing SUV. While the second car provides more transportation options and flexibility, the total cost of transportation for the household clearly increases. Similarly, while renewables may have lower per-kilowatt costs than traditional baseload power stations, the total cost of integrating renewables into the grid—such as building new transmission infrastructure—substantially increases.
This leads to a moral question: Is it justifiable to impose these rising costs, which disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, when the added renewable power may have little measurable impact on the global average temperature?
Second, is it morally acceptable to require the six billion people worldwide who currently lack reliable energy systems to adopt electric vehicles and depend on intermittent renewable sources? These populations aspire to the same standard of living we enjoy in the West, and the most accessible path for them often involves fossil fuel-based systems, which are more affordable and reliable.
I would argue that your students’ grandchildren may have no way of knowing whether the actions we take—or don’t take—today will meaningfully affect climate change in the future. It’s impossible to independently test these scenarios. What they will recognize is the extent to which we may have strained our economy in pursuit of a goal that remains unprovable.
Also worth noting that climate change is no longer the existential threat it was once thought to be. A huge problem to be solved, but not an existential threat to humanity. Also, so many of the “solutions” put out by the green new deal radicals are unrealistic at best and disastrous at worst.