In 2005, while teaching history at a French university, I was struck by the general disbelief among students that rational and sensitive human beings could ever hold others in bondage. Slavery was so obviously evil that slave-holders could only have been barbarians. My students could not entertain the idea that some slave-owners could have been genuinely blind to the harm they were doing.
At the same time, I was reading a book on climate change which noted how today’s machinery – almost exclusively powered by fossil fuels like coal and oil – does the same work that used to be done by slaves and servants. “Energy slaves” now do our laundry, cook our food, transport us, entertain us, and do most of the hard work needed for our survival.
Intriguing similarities between slavery and our current dependence on fossil-fuel-powered machines struck me: both perform roughly the same functions in society (doing the hard and dirty work that no one wants to do), both were considered for a long time to be acceptable by the majority and both came to be increasingly challenged as the harm they caused became more visible.
The history of slavery and its abolition shows how blurred the frontier between what is considered good and evil can be, and how quickly it can shift. We have a mental image of slave-owners as cruel, sadistic, inhuman brutes, and forget too easily the ordinariness of slave ownership throughout the world. To many, slavery seemed normal and indispensable. In the US, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Lifestyles and healthy incomes were predicated upon it, just as we today depend on oil. Similarly, many slave-owners lived with the impression that they were decent people.
Obviously, there are differences between the use of slaves and of fossil fuels. Fundamentally, slavery is a crime against humanity. Fossil fuel use is not a moral evil, but burning coal or oil contributes to global warming, already causing widespread harm: it now directly or indirectly kills 150,000 people per year according to a 2004 World Health Organisation study. States and energy companies’ lust for oil also leads to wars and the toppling of democratically elected governments. Our addiction to fossil fuel is increasingly destructive.
Unlike the harm caused by slavery, the harm in the use of fossil fuels is of course indirect, long range, even unintended. It seems at first glance to be a fundamentally different kind of harm, and the unintended consequences of ongoing use of fossil fuels have only recently become understood. Initially, their use was seen as positive and progressive. But now that we know the consequences, and continue, globally, to increase emission levels, how can we still consider these consequences “unintended”?
Consumers of goods made by slaves or absentee plantation owners who lived in Britain in the 18th century also benefited from the slave system without maintaining direct connections to it. Those beneficiaries can certainly be said to have committed a morally comparable sort of human transgression to that of people who benefit from fossil fuels today.
Why is all of this relevant for climate change policy? Our contemporary economies have become extremely dependent on fossil fuels, just as slave societies were dependent on their slaves – indeed far more than the latter ever were. As one scholar remarked: “That US Congressmen tend to rationalise fossil fuel use despite climate risks to future generations just as southern congressmen rationalised slavery despite ideals of equality is perhaps unsurprising.”
It should thus come as no surprise that there is so much resistance to climate science. Our societies, like slave-owning societies, have a vested interest in ignoring the scientific consensus. Pointing out the similarities between slavery and the use of fossil fuels can help us engage with the issue in a new way, and convince us to act, as no one envisages comfortably being compared with a slave-owner.
Furthermore, because of the striking similarities between the use of slaves and of fossil fuels, policymakers can find inspiration from the campaigns to abolish slavery and use them to tackle global warming. For example, the history of the abolition of slavery, in the UK at least, suggests that an incremental approach and the development of compromises worked better at moving the cause forward than hardline stances.
The evidence also implies that slavery came to be challenged and finally abolished when people became aware of an alternative. This alternative – steam power – was of course a great moral improvement until we came to know the consequences of fossil fuel consumption. This, in turn, suggests that we will restrain our use of fossil fuels if we can favour a new energy transition and find clean sources of energy – and that we should concentrate our efforts on developing “green” technologies at the same time as reducing our consumption of fossil fuels.
If we do not change, the human family will pay heavily for the consequences of our reckless activity. Moreover, future generations will look back at us and wonder how our civilisation could have been so backward and have lived in such appalling moral blindness. Will the next generation have any awareness that industrialised societies had mitigating circumstances? Probably not. They are more likely to curse us for the irreparable damage we have done to the planet. Surely, they will say, we were a barbarian people.
blacknail on Fri, 3rd Feb 2012 7:48 pm
Interesting that the writer doesn’t see the moral wrong in using up our one time gift of fossil fuels now while depriving future generations the chance.
BillT on Sat, 4th Feb 2012 2:00 am
Each American has the equivalent of 200 human slaves in the energy available at their finger tips. 800 slaves for a family of 4. THAT is what oil has done for you. Those oil slaves are dying out.
Guess what? You soon will be doing EVERYTHING for yourself. R U prepared?
DC on Sat, 4th Feb 2012 5:21 am
Kinda funny title. There is double meaning buried in there. Fossil-fuels have been used to make US slaves, not machines but people. Slaves to the Auto-oil-road complex that turns out toxic crap, and has gamed the system so you pretty HAVE to own a car, and put up with the huge expense and health effects of operating them. Slaves to the fraudulent FIRE economy that finances it all, and amortizes criminal interest rates over many years to pay for it all. And that doesnt even get into the fact that actuall slavery still exists. Fossil-fuels didnt make that go away, it just made it less noticeable. Like teengage girls in China working 20 hour shifts for slave-wages so we can have new Ijunks.
jeannick on Sat, 4th Feb 2012 6:26 am
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Well you are on the right track
a worker can produce 60 watts work equivalent during an 8 hour day
it require ~1800 K calories to produce the work ( depend on the climate age, etc )
some waste occur for supervision,services and entertainment
Slavery isn’t the worst ,in fact in period of deep famine , families can sell themselves for a square meal , the alternative is death for everyone .
it’s been done in many place and during many times periods
bonded service is one universal institution under all climates amongst the farming societies
the great transatlantic slave trade started a bit by accident but as soon as the new world got into a cash crop economy , sugar then tobacco and cotton
there was no turning back .
the slaves were considered as farming implements , to mistreat one’s slave demonstrated a fault in one character and a lousy sense of economy , they cost a fair bit actually ,usually about two year worth of their food.
repression cost in manpower and “downtime” it is much more efficient to keep the labor pool contented
the market price was strictly geared to the utilitarian function , young males were the standard , trace of the whip would devaluate the value ,it would indicate lazybones or a stubborn character .damage such as weak leg or sicness was in the same class as second or third hand machinery
some merchants specialised in buying “faulty slaves or nearly dead ones and restoring them to some health then selling them .
the slave market had some preferences on the models
the guineans had excellent reputation as hard workers with an easygoing attitude ,wollos from Mali had the reputation of being clever , great linguists but treacherous
women were not required as breeding the stock was not cost effective , children would eat for years before being useful for heavy farm labor.
freeing an old slave was an act of bastardness , since he was too old to work that meant he would be trows out to starve.
the relation of most master to their slaves was often enough paternalistic
since they were ,in law, their responsibility ,
during the 17th and 18th century they were treated not worst that free peasants in continental Europe often rather a bit better . since they were worth something
ultimately the steam engine made the trade an economic dead end ,
Europe switched to sugar beet that was the death knell of the West Indies
once there was no money to be made , Britain forbade the trade.
it kept going in some place either because of a particularly high demand such as cotton in the South , but wherever it survived was always a backward place and a technical back-wood
It became an anachronism , Cuba fred it’s slaves on the perfectly sensible calculation that the need for labor is only during two months of the year , why feed people all year round when one could simply let them starve and pay them as needed
Johny K on Sat, 4th Feb 2012 11:43 am
“Only barbarians could be so rude and enslave people”
actually that was the exact opposite, the barbarians – uncivilized, primitive people – were the only ones who did NOT have slavery, every civilization in the world had some kind of slavery or other form of oppression to create lower classes to work for the
BillT on Sat, 4th Feb 2012 3:35 pm
You are all corporate slaves…if you buy anything you did not make yourself. What are you slaving for? A new I pad. I pod, PC, Laptop? Nikes? Air Jordans? The latest fad from Asia? The latest game? Havbe you ever stopped to think about how much of your life you are giving up to own something that is already obsolete when you take it out of the store? If you make minimum wage, and buy an I-pad…say $500… you have to work for a minimum of 100 hours to pay for it. and in less than a year, it will be obsolete and you will want another with the newest additions and there goes another 100 hours or maybe more this time. A car takes at least one day a week for as long as you own it, maybe more.
Look around. How many days of your life are in the corner, in the closet, basement, attic, garage? More than you think, if you are a typical American. And you think Europeans are lazy because they value life and living it more than working for these toys? They get along on half the energy per person that Americans use. And are happier.