Last night I was reaching a chapter in JFK's book, Profiles in Courage, about US senators in the 1800s who defied their home states to seek compromises to preserve the Union.  Knowing that Britain abolished slavery decades before the US, I was curious this morning about when exactly slavery was abolished by the British empire, and so I looked it up.  I found it interesting how the British crown actually led the world the campaign to abolish slavery and actually forced an end to the transatlantic slave trade by the European powers and the US.  The first step was the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade by both the US and Britain in 1807.  Slavery itself was then completely abolished by Britain in 1838, the US in 1865, and finally Brazil in 1888.

The thought that popped into my head is that there is a parallel between the campaign to abolish slavery and the campaign to end the carbon economy.  This parallel extends to the decision by Britain to gradually phase out slavery rather than end it all at once, and also to the resistance to ending slavery by slave owners and by others for other reasons.

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Likewise the resistance to ending the hydrocarbon economy shares a parallel with the resistance to ending an economy based on forced labor and human bondage.  The same attitudes that prevailed in the Southern states of the US in the 1800s in regards to the issue of slavery can be found today regarding the issue of decarbonization and climate change: skepticism, denial, rationalization, cognitive dissonance, and hatred towards those who insist on disrupting a rich and easy-going lifestyle.  

We can only hope that 100 years from now we will hear the same revision of history that we hear from Southern apologists today - that carbon was on its way out anyway.