A Lesson for Climate Change: History, Slavery, and the Power of the Incremental (Mouhot)

Jean-Francois Mouhot of the University of Birmingham writes his first analysis for EA WorldView:

Last week the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun concluded, with far less attention that its 2009 predecessor in Copenhagen.

But can we learn anything from the latest meeting? Let's look at history. Let's look at slavery.

In an interview last year about Copenhagen, NASA's Jim Hansen suggested that only radical change would work and that it would be better for the planet if the conference ended in collapse rather than a flawed deal. Hansen claimed that dealing with climate change "is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln….On those kind of issues...you can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%."

Hansen is right to warn that a weak compromise might give the general public the impression that climate change has been "solved" and that, because a deal has been struck, we can now carry on with our lives as before. He is also right to draw a parallel between slavery and climate change: "energy slaves"  (machines powered by fossil fuels) now do the work in our homes, fields and factories which used to be carried out by slaves in the past, and both slavery and reckless fossil fuel burning are morally unacceptable. [Editor's Note: For more similarities and analogies in the use of slaves and the use of fossil fuels, see Mouhot's recent article in Climatic Change.] 

Yet, Hansen is wrong to claim that there were no compromises during the campaign to abolish slavery. Slavery was abolished in Britain through a series of tactical moves and compromises. Campaigners realised it would be almost impossible to abolish slavery in one fell swoop and chose to focus strategically on abolishing the slave-trade. A watered-down bill was surreptitiously introduced to Parliament that "only" banned British merchants from participating in the slave trade with foreign colonies. This was a shrewd move, as the bill stayed below the radar of the pro-slavery faction,by concealing all humanitarian motives. The focus on national and military self-interest was difficult to attack, and the Foreign Slave Trade Bill was easily passed into law in 1806.

This seemingly innocent bill was part of a step-by-step approach calculated to weaken the powerful lobbies who were opposing the end of the slave trade altogether. It eventually made possible the abolition of slavery i in Britain's colonies in 1833, more than two decades later. There were more compromises: large concessions were made to the slave-holding lobby, including the gradual emancipation of slaves through the apprenticeship system and the payment of compensation for loss of property. In Britain, the aim of abolitionists was achieved through gradualism.

In the US, an incremental approach to abolition was also attempted and in the North, which resembled Britain, it worked. But in the 19th century, any hint of antislavery incrementalism directed toward the South, or toward the South's ambitions in the West)served only to entrench slavery more deeply and to make Southern slave owners and politicians more intransigent. The new Republican Party of the 1850s was not abolitionist, yet when Lincoln was elected, the South still seceded. Incrementalism clearly did not work in the American South because it was not just a society with slaves in remote colonies as in the case of Britain; it was a slave society, heavily reliant on bonded labour for its economy and way of life.

Is there any evidence that something could have worked to abolish slavery in the American South, as an alternative to the Civil War? The tactics of hard-line abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison, who refused to accept anything but the immediate and complete emancipation of all slaves, were actually counter-productive too. The leading historian of slavery, David Brion Davis, has suggested that Garrison's "eccentricities and extreme rhetoric may have deterred many potential converts", and this might explain why "American abolitionism was always confined to a small minority". Lincoln won the Republican nomination for President because he was a moderate and, like most westerners, took a dim view of abolitionists, saying that he loathed their "self-righteousness".

There is no evidence that an incremental abolition could have worked in the 19th-century American South. Yet there was another development playing a very important role both in Britain and in the US: the Industrial Revolution. As John and William McNeill put it, the harnessing of fossil fuels and the abolition of slavery "were connected events and roughly simultaneous. The use of inanimate energy gradually made labor less scarce, and forced labor less appealing. It made communication of antislavery ideas easier... Industrialisation, energy use and egalitarian morality all flowed together to refashion the human condition."

Fewer threats to basic existence resulting from industrial advances also fostered sensibilities and moral standards supporting abolitionism, and through industrial development, the North grasped victory in the American Civil War. This, in turn, suggests that we will restrain our use of fossil fuel if we can find clean sources of energy. 

Yet history also suggests that technological fixes have rarely been without unintended consequences in the long run. For all its promises of liberation from toil and social progress, few could have imagined the Industrial Revolution's long-term effects: the warming of the atmosphere. Even if a truly clean and harmless form of energy such as nuclear fusion could now be found, one wonders if this would be such a good thing for us, given what we have done to the planet with the extraordinary powers that fossil fuels have given us in the past century.

In comparison to the headlong flight towards more technological fixes, self-restraint and humility in admitting our human limitations present far fewer dangers. But could it work? Self-restraint clearly failed to abolish slavery in the American South --- nothing bar a war succeeded. But the future is not written, and we can learn from our mistakes. History suggests that in order to reduce the risk of runaway climate change, governments and people should push for incremental self-restraint while making sure people are offered an alternative to fossil fuels.