The below article is an attempt to use a satirical historical comparison to demonstrate how we have drifted away from moral messages that convey our values and the seriousness of the situation in favor of treating a societal evil (emitting greenhouse gases) as a trade-able commodity that has a rightful place in our society.
“Cap and Trade Bill Passes House, Democrats Attack as Assault on Economy”
June 26th, 1859
The United States House of Representatives, in a victory for the nascent Republican Party, narrowly voted to substantially reduce the amount of slaves in the United States by the turn of the century.
“This is a great victory for freedom and equality” said Rep. Daniel Webster, Chairman of the Committee on Commerce of the House and lead author of the bill. ”By the end of the century, about 80% of the slaves alive right now will be free.” Webster worked closely with long-term ally Henry Clay to draft the legislation.
The two worked hard to negotiate in advance with representatives from slave states, crafting a compromise that would muster enough votes to pass, but still reduce the number of slaves in America.
Anti-slavery groups hailed Webster & Clay for their courageous vision: “Daniel Webster & Henry Clay took a bold and unequivocal stance that our current levels of slavery are unsustainable, and that we should gradually decrease the amount of slaves over the next fifty years,” said Andrew Smith, head of the Abolition Advocacy Program of the anti-slavery Former Slaves for Freedom (FSF).
The bill puts a “cap” on the total amount of slaves permitted in the United States, and gives each slave-owner a “credit” for each of the slaves they now own, with a few industries exempted. As the years go on, there will be a gradually diminishing supply of “credits” for slaves, until the turn of the century, where permits will exist for only 17% of the current number of slaves.
Slave Tax?
Democrats voted almost universally against the bill, saying it was equal to a ’slave tax’ that would cost hard-working Americans their jobs. “Our economy is dependent on slaves, plain and simple. How many small farms will go bankrupt because of Lincoln’s Slave Tax?” asked Rep. Joe Barbarion (D-TX), the ranking Democrat on the Committee of Commerce. “When we regain power, we will repeal this assault on American jobs.”
Most economists agree that a tax on slaves would be a more efficient way to reduce the number of slaves, but the ruling Republican Party did not want to be seen raising taxes with mid-term elections only a year away.
Freedom-Industry Jobs
Instead of losing jobs as Democrats claim, Republicans argued that the cap and trade slavery program would actually create new “freedom-industry” jobs. “Think about it,” said Rep. John Smith (R-MD), “every slave that’s freed is a slave who is going to need someone to teach them everything from grammar to farming. An entire new industry dedicated to the service of newly freed slaves will create far more jobs than will be lost.”
Yet this argument did not win over many recalcitrant swing-district Republicans, most of whom have substantial plantations in their districts. “Now look, as a privileged white male in congress, I care as much about equality as the next guy,” said Rep. James Bartholomei (R-VA), “but you can’t expect me to vote my district and this great nation into bankruptcy. We need slaves to power our economy. And if we start freeing them, even gradually, then other countries that still have slaves will undercut our cotton prices, and our nation’s economy will crumble. I just can’t vote for that.”
On to the Senate
The bill now waits an uncertain future in the Senate. Senate leaders indicate that they want to try to pass the bill this summer, but the Republicans have a smaller lead in the upper house of congress. While anti-slavery groups are publicly expressing optimism that they can increase slave reductions in the Senate version, they publicly admit that the opposite is more likely. An anonymous senator confirmed this, stating: “We just don’t have the votes to free that many slaves. But we’re hoping to pass a bill that will allow us to free as many as half of the slaves by the end of the century.”
Anti-slavery groups hope that once people start seeing former slaves become free, autonomous individuals without destroying the economy, public support for slave reductions will continue to grow.
Abolition
A few fringe anti-slavery groups attacked the bill, claiming that it was too little, too late. “Slavery is wrong, period.” said Josiah Bartlett, of Patriots for Freedom (PfF). “This bill will actually allow the number of slaves to increase until 1880, as slave owners here can buy new slaves, so long as other slaves abroad are ‘freed’. This will create a perverse incentive for people to capture slaves abroad so that they can free them, and slavery will continue to reign in our nation. This madness has to end now.”
Please note that this article is entirely satirical, and that the author is very much glad that slavery ended as early as it did, and indeed wishes that more citizens had been willing earlier to take a stand on this once-controversial issue in favor of liberty and justice for all.
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A clever and important contrast. But, some points for comparison:
* The movement to end slavery started in earnest in the U.S. almost 100 years before we got to the 13th Amendment in 1865. For many decades before that, legislation to end slavery wouldn’t have resulted in a compromise, it simply would have failed. Our movement, while imperfect, is making progress faster than that. (Here’s where someone points out we also probably have less time to act in some sense.)
* LONG before Congress got around to a comprehensive solution, states took action on their own to end or reduce slavery, at least within their borders. Sound familiar?
* Congress made only moderate progress on slavery almost 50 years before it actually got around to ending it – it banned the importation of new slaves in 1808 but didn’t ban slavery. Having known about the scope of human-made global warming for less than 30, Congress is taking action faster than that.
While you wrote this like ACES is the 13th Amendment, and we’re working hard to make it that, I think your timeline is off. We’re at maybe 1808, with an important, inadequate bill, and lots more action coming from us until we get the bold, just legislation we need.
I think Craig’s point, though, is that abolitionists weren’t calling for 80% slave reductions – the point is that abolitionists wanted it ABOLISHED because it’s WRONG. Similarly we need to abolish the burning of fossil fuels because it’s WRONG. And every moment we spend not arguing that the burning of fossil fuels is wrong is a moment wasted. You work for what you actually want, and let the politicians make the compromises.
Thanks for the clarification, Jay. That is indeed the ‘moral of the story’ (pun intended).
By trying to pretend like we can or should do this in a cost-effective, revenue-neutral way, we are completely forgetting the fact that, in the rights of Ed Markey at Power Shift ‘07, ‘we are right and they are wrong.’
The truth of the matter is that burning fossil fuels kills people. Period. By getting into arguments about costs and benefits, job creation, etc, we completely lose sight of the fact that we are talking about the future prosperity and stability of the planet and our species, while they are talking about short-term economic effects that everyone knows will be irrelevant if we don’t take action and negligible if we do.
The point of this article is not what was achieved, but the tone of the article, which closely resembles the tone of articles written about Waxman-Markey. There is nothing written about the lives that were saved by the passage of the bill, nor the lives that were lost because of the compromises given. It was written in such a way as if it didn’t really matter if the bill was passed or not, as if human society can continue on its present trajectory impossible.
We allow this perspective to perpetuate itself by refusing to demand what we know the science is saying: we need to immediately shift away from fossil fuels and adopt clean, renewable electricity, and then move on to the other sectors (transportation being next and easiest with electric cars).
By talking about 2050 and 80% reductions, we completely sacrifice the moral high ground, and the bill’s opponents were quick to seize by talking about its effects on their constituents. We all know that their constituents are screwed if we don’t take action, and there was no mention of that anywhere by anyone.
“treating a societal evil (emitting greenhouse gases) as a trade-able commodity that has a rightful place in our society”
no. try: our atmosphere is something we own in common, and it is being abused by industry and consumer behavior because it costs them/us nothing to do so. we have the right to protect it. Our strategy is to put a price on emissions, eliminating the externality and forcing markets to respond.
the comparison with slavery is way off the mark. slavery is actually an expensive form of labor: slave owners have to provide for their slaves but slaves have little incentive to work efficiently. paid labor (wage slaves) are equally bound to the providers of their sustenance (capital), but the carrot that is their wage motivates them to work far more efficiently. so a transition from slave labor to paid labor is easy because capital gets an efficiency boost and why would it resist that?
carbon-pricing, on the other hand, raises the price of energy, which is a component of every industrial process, so of course it will be resisted. the underlying implications, however, are even more threatening to global capital. capitalism thrives on perpetual growth (an average of something like 2.5% for the past 400 years). sustainability implies 0% growth, which threatens profit-seeking, the very foundation of capitalism. what does a 0% growth economy look like? I don’t know, but I do know it will look a lot different, and those with a vested interest in the status quo will not go there happily.
look, self-righteousness feels good and all, but until we crazy enviros can speak language that’s comprehensible to the mainstream, we marginalize and hobble ourselves. do you imagine that saying “burning fossil fuels is evil” is going to get us anywhere? no. emitting greenhouse gases is something you do every time you breathe or fart. are you going to make friends telling people they are evil? you’re just pissing off the disenfranchised rural folks whose support we desperately need. they drive cars and work in coal mines out of day-to-day necessity, not because they hate future generations of bangladeshis. right wing politicians know how to wrangle their support (often against their own interest: why are poor rural folk so anti-union?) because they speak language they respond to. we need to learn from this.
so: cut off your dreadlocks, learn a little bit about economics and psychology. trade in your moralizing for tactics. study mao, machiavelli, sun-tzu, guerilla insurgency, game theory. outrage and the liberal blogosphere can be cathartic, but shit like this seems masturbatory at best and damaging at worst. let’s take stock of the tools at our disposal: ACES is one of them.
off-topic: love the West Wing reference – go Josiah Bartlett!:
A few fringe anti-slavery groups attacked the bill, claiming that it was too little, too late. “Slavery is wrong, period.” said Josiah Bartlett, of Patriots for Freedom (PfF) Tthis bill will actually allow the number of slaves to increase until 1880, as slave owners here can buy new slaves, so long as other slaves abroad are ‘freed’. This will create a perverse incentive for people to capture slaves abroad so that they can free them, and slavery will continue to reign in our nation. This madness has to end now.”
Awesome post and analogy, I think it hits on exactly the right points.
However, as Kyle mentioned, we are on a timeline. This makes a huge difference. With slavery, there was no point where slavery couldn’t be solved. Climate tipping points change the game. At some point in the very near future (if it hasn’t already passed) we wont be able to fix this regardless of how bold our actions are. The most importnat thing to do now is to start. We’ve spent 8 years with government funded climate denial, this is an amazing departure
Now, that said, I think youth need to be hardlining the moral message, we in no way should be the ones compromising. This is our future and both inaction and weak action is unacceptable. Within this, I think there is room to directly oppose the bill.
Now here is where the timeline problems come in. Environmental groups cannot keep antagonizing eachother. Friends of the Earth and NRDC need eachother. We need the fringe and we need the deal cutters. And they need to be working together, even if they are calling for something different. We all need to be pushing in the same direction. If the subsequent legislation that gets passed isn’t strong enough, it’s our fault for not doing enough. We need to take what we can get, learn from our mistakes, and move onto the next opportunity.
Though ACES was a scientific failure in terms of reducing emissions at the level we need, it was a political success in that this is the first time the US has ever passed climate legislation focused on reducing GHGs. The debate is being reframed and shaped in our favor.
Craig, this is pure brilliance. I hope you’re disregarding all the nit-picking above. The comparison you draw is smart, relevant and compelling despite the obvious technical differences in the two situations.
Indeed, history will judge today’s dirty energy economy very similarly to the way we judge the system of slavery – abhorrent, despicable, and destined to be overturned. Let’s just hope we get to the point where we’re looking back on this struggle and how long it took to win.
And Joe Barton is definitely a barbarian.
who moderates these comments? is my (contrarian & critical) comment from earlier still “awaiting moderation” because I used a cussword? sorry, I promise not to use any more. I would like to see my comment go up, I think craig’s premise is flawed and unhelpful. critical dialogue is important and all the other comments have been softballs.
nice!
Responding to “e”,
No I don’t have dreadlocks, (and neither does Craig for goodness sakes!) but the point is that paying attention to what “economics” and “psychology” won’t tell us what we want.
To continue the analogy, with a hat tip to economics, the problem of slavery actually fits the current one. Like now it is rural poor whites that were the most vehement defenders of slavery. Why? Because they had theirs and they didn’t want it taken away by freed blacks. They were scared of upsetting the status quo because they feared for their jobs and their “way of life”. So on the contrary, this is a very analogous situation. Rural working class whites, and their defenders in Congress are probably the most anti-climate folks out there and want to maintain the status quo because they have theirs and don’t want it taken away.
But the anti-slavery movement didn’t try to appease these folks, they convinced more people (and decision makers) that they were right. This isn’t about us being self-righteous and comparing ourselves to the abolition movement, but is taking a look at history and using successful movements of the past as examples to learn from, and we have much to learn.
Because under this thinking ACES isn’t a tool, ACES is an outcome of organizing and advocacy. And less than stellar organizing and advocacy at that. The purpose of tools is to build power to accomplish our goals, and under this definition ACES is not a tool – it does not help the climate/clean energy movement build power and accomplish our goals.
For folks who think that pushing on economics is going to win us a lot of ground with “the public”…
I heard a pretty interesting lecture on the BBC today, it’s their sort of “big thinker of the year” lecture about the limits of markets in solving democracy’s problems. Highly relevant to the topic, and indeed the speaker references carbon trading and although he doesn’t dismiss it outright, he does point to the fact that it can encourage “the public” down some not so great intellectual pathways if our interest is in promoting concern for the ecology that keeps us all alive.
worth a listen:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kt7rg
it’s parts 1 of 4 as well as 4 of 4 where he talks about carbon trading.
Btw, the idea that because “our atmosphere is something we own in common” and therefore we should support carbon trading is one of the most preposterous claims I’ve ever seen on this website.
Carbon trading PRIVATIZES the right to pollute the atmosphere, effectively making it something we DO NOT own in common.
If you’d allow me to quote from the book “Carbon Trading” by Larry Lohmann (the whole book, but especially pages 75-85 should really be required reading for anyone talking about carbon trading):
“Property rights come in many shapes and sizes. A lot of property rights are temporary. Think of monthly or yearly leases. Think of mining, logging or grazing concessions that governments give out to corporations for 30 years or 75 years. Think of copyrights, trademarks, and licenses. Think of fishing quotas or seed, gene or drug patents, all of which expire after a certain length of time.
All of these temporary property rights have been used to privatize or enclose various goods. All have been used to make billions for private companies. And all have been used to transfer wealth and power to the rich, sometimes igniting bitter conflict over democracy and how human beings’ environments are to be treated. Emissions allowances are no diferrent. Industry, economists, govern-ments and legal scholars all agree that, in giving away these allowances, emissions trading schemes do give away something quite substantial.
As the International Accounting Standards Board notes with regard to the EU ETS, allowances are ‘assets…owned by the company concerned…and as such represent a significant and immediate creation of value to companies’. They should be seen as a ‘government grant, and accounted for as such, i.e. treated as deferred income in the balance sheet and recognized as income on a systematic basis’.
Temporary or not, emissions permits constitute a ‘major input factor to production.’
Allowances aren’t valuable just because they enable polluters to avoid having to spend money on pollution control. They also enable corporations to borrow money more easily and give them a better share price. And they set a precedent for granting them further entitlements. They can also be bought and sold for clear profit. They have market value.”
I should apologize for the dreadlocks comment, that was snarky and rude.
Look guys, I hate money as much as the next anarcho-syndicalist, but it is a serious mistake to pretend it doesn’t matter. Economic power is real power in the real world.
“our atmosphere is something we own in common” shouldn’t be so shocking.
I’m referencing the tragedy of the commons (if you haven’t read Hardin’s 1968 essay, you should, it’s available at http://dieoff.org/page95.htm). The discussion on pollution is germane, I don’t think “global warming” had quite entered the lexicon. Hardin believes the solution to such a tragedy is “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” I tend to agree. People respond far more readily to economic incentives than to lectures about morality. And governance is our mechanism for mutual coercion.
The appropriate comparison is not slavery but fisheries. Compare a relatively recent, well-managed fishery like Alaskan Salmon to a very old, historically unmanaged fishery, like George’s Bank, which collapsed. Cascadia Brian may dislike that certain individuals and corporations profit from a natural resource, but short of a total fishing ban, which is never politically feasible until it’s too late (see George’s Bank), what other option do we have?
Look, I’m a pragmatist. I don’t want to save my soul, I want a decent world for my great-grandkids. I’m not in love with carbon trading. The important part is to put a money price on carbon emissions, because money is a kind of language both individuals and corporations respond to. The trading part is indeed a bone we throw to industry to make it politically feasible, because a straight tax is just a non-starter. Ideally the trading is a mechanism to reduce the total social cost of a given level of emissions reduction, and for sure the potential for abuse is vast. Which is why people like us who actually care need to work on it, rather than abandoning it to corporate lawyers to shape as they wish. I’m open to other ideas too, if they produce real results in the real world.
An us-and-them approach is not useful when trying to build broad coalitions. Which we need. Craig’s piece just reinforces views of environmentalism as something for wacko extremists. Public opinion is moving, oh… so… slowly…, in the right direction, let’s not marginalize ourselves.
Jay says “The purpose of tools is to build power to accomplish our goals.” Exactly. I maintain that abolitionist-style moralizing and 60’s-style oppositional protest are obsolete tools. (not that anyone brought them up, but so are labor unions and deconstructionism.) Power learns to deal with them. Old tools get dull. We need new ones.
Cascadia Brian, I should thank you for mentioning Larry Lohmann. I looked him up and found a bunch of his writing on http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk
including this paper
“Climate Crisis: Social Science Crisis”
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/SocSci.pdf
which pretty much eviscerates every good argument I’ve ever heard for carbon trading. I need to pour myself a stiff drink and process that for a while.
heh, glad to hear it!
drop me a line brian at risingtidenorthamerica dot org and we can mail you a copy of the book he edited on the topic (which you can also read online)… carbontradewatch dot org is also a great site and Teryn’s article today http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2009/07/08/new-climate-bill-may-create-a-super-lobby-of-powerful-opposition/ is also very good.
The problems with carbon trading are not incidental, they are fundamental.
It’s hard to get that across to folks, but to me it’s the single most important task at this point. In the words of Paraguayan activist Simone Lovera:
“If we hold up banners saying climate change kills and we want more government action, the very power groups driving the destruction will cheer and might give us even more carbon finance or agrofuels. Instead, we need to mobilise against the false solutions and for real, meaningful actions that will actually cut emissions and deliver climate justice.”