Is Fossil Fuel the New Slavery?

This post is part of Blog Action Day, which is uniting over 8300 blogs in 147 countries to talk about how climate change affects all our lives.

Robin Chase poses this interesting question on Huffington Post. Her theory: The U.S. economy has always been based on some under-valued energy source, which is how it has grown so fast and large. That energy source used to be slavery, and now it's fossil fuel. In general, I steer away from "blank is the new blank" statements because they practically drop to their knees and beg for criticism as imperfect analogies. In this case, the comparison holds some water, but it over-simplifies the historical and current connection between fossil fuels and slavery.

First of all, let's stop talking about slavery like is disappeared at the end of the U.S. civil war. The legal institution of slavery may have been shot down, but what we now call human trafficking, or modern-day slavery, has existed a long, long time and continues to thrive. And secondly, if we're going to talk about either slavery or fossil fuels today, we need to do so in a global context. Neither environmental damage from fossil fuels nor slavery stop at international borders, so why should out thinking?

These few criticisms aside, Ms. Chase is very right about one thing: the American economy is built on under-valued resources. Here's your 10 second American economics lesson: in a capitalist system, a business hoping to make a profit must make sure that the cost of labor plus the cost of production is less than the market value of what he's producing. Easy peasy, huh? For the plantation owners in the American South, the answer to reducing labor costs was chattel slavery. Today, some business traffic or exploit workers and cut back on benefits like health care to reduce labor costs. Others, and arguably a whole lot more, use dirty, non-sustainable, cheap energy to reduce production costs.

The problem with this thinking is that fossil fuels, like slavery, have an actual cost that is higher than the perceived cost. Trafficking appears to be an easy way to save money on workers to the business owner, but it incurs high social costs when you factor in the cost of rehabilitation for survivors, prosecution of traffickers, and the social disorder which human trafficking and other forms of exploitation create. Similarly, using fossil fuels to power a factory may seem like a bargain when compared to more sustainable choices, but the high environmental costs of fossil fuels includes global warming, natural disasters, increase public health problems and more. They are both short-term, lazy ways to produce increased profit at a high cost to society and to the future.

Chattel slavery in the U.S. brought about a civil war. The fight against global human trafficking has embatteled millions -- government officials, students, law enforcement, business owners, religious leaders, and more. With one war the bloodiest in American history and another still raging on the global stage, what will the war against fossil fuel look like? And more importantly, which side will you be on when it is waged?

Photo credit: Don Hankin