Fossil Fuel Freed the Slaves

With unapologetic support for socialism growing on the Left, especially among young people, supporters of capitalism would be wise to refresh their knowledge of the period in American history when this ideological battle was first waged.
The Progressive Era of American politics, generally seen as from 1890 to 1920, like today, was a time of widespread social activism and calls for political reform. Nowadays, people tend to associate the positive aspects of the Progressive Movement with historical figures like Teddy Roosevelt who sought to curb the abuses of urban political machines, industrial monopolies and other concentrations of power in American society. But upon closer scrutiny, early 20th Century Progressivism seems like a mixed bag from the perspective of the 21st Century. Cleaning up sweatshops, making a woman’s right to vote universal, and curbing government corruption were all admirable goals, but other attempted social reforms now seem misguided. You don’t hear today’s Progressives championing eugenics, teaching women home economics, or considering racial integration “a problem to be solved” – rather than an end in itself.
Marxist-inspired socialism reached America’s shores during the Progressive Period and found a home among a relatively small number of intellectuals, immigrants, and members of the working class. Although it never gained much traction as a political party, socialism was effective in influencing the policies of both major political parties beginning with FDR’s New Deal and continuing through George W. Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism” and Barack Obama’s “Fundamental Transformation” of the USA. Socialism is front and center again in the form of the Green New Deal and is bound to be a hot topic during the run-up to the 2020 Elections.
Socialism’s siren call is very powerful. Marx, Engels and their successors designed it to appeal to those who believed they were exploited victims of a capitalistic economy. As a political philosophy, it resonates with anyone who places more importance on fairness (equality) than upon freedom (liberty). Applied today, socialism is a balm that soothes the hurt of all people unwilling to accept that the economic success of others who are more intelligent, industrious, or creative may actually be achieved without systemic privilege (whether white, male, heterosexual or otherwise). Socialism promises to equalize such perceived imbalances through guarantees of free health care, free education, minimum monthly income and other ingredients of a better life – using the government to redistribute both income and wealth from those deemed to be “rich” to those who claim to have unmet needs.
At bottom, the contest between socialism and capitalism is a moral one. Adherents of socialism genuinely believe that a utopian society which provides equal economic outcomes regardless of one’s contribution would be fairer and more just than America’s current system. Socialists argue that a pure form of socialism has never been tried and the failed attempts of the past and present can and should be distinguished from what is now being proposed. On the other hand, capitalists as well as those who are more or less happy with the status quo fervently believe that economic opportunity, less government intrusion into their private lives, and a robust free market has always resulted in more prosperity, philanthropy and social progress than any competing economic model since the dawn of human history.
The Green New Deal is an attempt by some Democrats to raise the stakes in this debate. By wrapping socialism’s core principles in a passionate warning about the environmental fate of the planet, the proponents of the Green New Deal say there’s no time left to have a serious debate about which economic model best serves the American people. If anthropogenic climate change is about to send the whole world into a death spiral, the only chance we have left is to put the brakes on the global economy and rebuild it within a “zero carbon footprint”. Details on how that will be done are forthcoming, but the basic message is clear. We must, without delay, radically revamp how we feed, house, transport and generate energy for a population of 8 billion people. Centuries if not millennia of economic growth should come to an abrupt end and be replaced with an imaginary world in which our species occupies its proper place in the biome.
Rather than rant about the idiocy of this proposal, I decided to educate myself on how human development brought us to where we are now. What I learned (particularly about the last 200 years) I wish schools like Boston University still taught. Admittedly, my prior understanding of the Industrial Revolution was quite limited – basically, I knew that innovations like the steam engine had made it possible to produce more goods, which in turn led to economic prosperity, longer and healthier lives, and a better-educated populace.
What I didn’t recall from my earlier schooling was why the machines which drove the Industrial Revolution were so transformative. Not only were they faster and better at producing the material things people wanted, they provided a way to replace human and animal labor with a supply of energy from inanimate sources. At first, burning wood and using wind and water to power mills were the only known ways to make that happen. But once Europeans exhausted their continent’s supply of timber, they learned to tap other inanimate sources of energy in the form of peat and coal. All of these resources did the same thing – convert the sun’s energy to usable power or heat and later electricity.
Over time, we learned from experience that humans, oxen and horses were not particularly efficient converters of the sun’s energy into what we really needed. All animate sources of energy required food and water, the supply of which had been unpredictable throughout history. Certainly, no one started to burn coal or oil in order to put people out of work or to turn oxen into barbecue steaks. All they really wanted was a cheaper, more dependable supply of energy. Fossil fuel happened to be the 19th Century’s answer to that problem and, despite the subsequent introduction of nuclear, solar, and other alternative forms of energy, it remains the primary means by which the world is powered today.
Let’s illustrate this with a personal example. I keep an exercise bike in my basement. When I pedal it for about 30 minutes, as I do most mornings, I generate an output of approximately 50 watts. In order to produce the energy an average American uses in a day, I would need about 660 pedal-pushers working 8 hours shifts every day of the year to maintain my current standard of living. As ludicrous as that sounds, it reasonably depicts how much of the civilized world was powered before 1800. Actually, both before and afterwards, that ratio had at times been much worse. In places where human labor was considered cheap, such as in Asia, people continued to do the work being done by animals in Europe and the Americas well into the 20th Century. Archaeologists have also discovered that Bronze Age cultures often enslaved 99 per cent of their populations so that the privileged one percent would have a decent standard of living. Apart from the enormous social and economic inequity of such an arrangement, slaves were a difficult source of energy to manage. They needed to be fed, they got sick and died, or otherwise had to be replaced, and some of them weren’t the best workers. All that misery and injustice likely would have continued – and in parts of the world did continue – until a more dependable, cost-efficient way of harvesting energy came along.
Thomas Newcomen and James Watt, the inventors of the steam engine, had no way of knowing that the earth receives approximately 174 million-billion watts of sunlight every day. At peak usage, global fossil-fuel consumption is about 1/10,000th of that amount of energy. Certainly, human ingenuity has a proven track-record of finding other sources of trapped energy waiting to be used. We’ve only begun to understand a handful of those resources, much less put them to use. The bleak picture painted by advocates of the Green New Deal is premised on the assumption there isn’t another transformative event like the Industrial Revolution on the horizon.
To those who claim “our supply of fossil fuel is limited”, I say “you’re right”, but the free-market system that brought us into the Digital Age can without question find new ways to replace fossil fuel with more efficient, environmentally friendly energy sources before all of the known reserves of fossil fuel run out centuries from now. Other than political alarmism, there is no plausible reason why that substitution must happen in the next 11 years.
Great Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, well before fossil-fuel fired machines made slave labor a poor source of energy production. By 1870, when Britain’s population was only 21 million, its coal-powered industries were doing the work of 850 million laborers – whether enslaved or free. Sadly, it took a civil war in the United States (1861-1865) to usher in a post-slavery economy. But to those who want to give Abraham Lincoln most of the credit for freeing the slaves, I only point out that our 16th president based his decision on what most in his generation already knew: because of the Industrial Revolution’s market-based preference for fossil-fuel energy, slavery in the South had already become an anachronism and was ready to collapse on its own.
Without repeating my personal doubts about the purported adverse effects of anthropogenic climate change (see my earlier column “Comfort for Those Concerned About Global Warming a/k/a Climate Change”), I’m write this to stand with those many Americans who have already said the Green New Deal is not the answer. So much of the social injustice which the Green New Deal pretends to address was in fact reduced during the past two centuries by substituting fossil fuels for dehumanizing, coerced labor. It’s hard to believe any truly “progressive” person would be willing to enslave our society in a socialistic system in order to avert a hypothetical apocalypse.