Climate change and the abolition of slavery

The comparison is often made between the struggle to abolish slavery, and the climate change movement...and other progressive movements, too. The comparison often includes the argument that slavery was once legal and seemed normal, and that the people who successfully fought to abolish it sometimes broke the law, which now seems fine.

But there is another aspect of the history of emancipation which might shed some light on the climate movement, and on one particular aspect of the resistance to climate action. It's not an entirely pleasant lesson from history, though.

It's not well understood that in most countries where slaves were emancipated, the slave owners were compensated by the government. That happened in Britain, where the amounts involved were huge, and where the debts that the government acquired as a result have only just been paid off. It happened in the French empire, the Spanish colonies, in Brazil, and in the little-known Danish Caribbean colonies. It was tried in the United States too, though only actually implemented in the District of Columbia - other states failed to pass the required legislation.

The USA was an outlier as a country that abolished slavery without compensating the slave owners. Instead, emancipation happened as the culmination of a very bloody civil war - the bloodiest war in the country's history.

Perhaps this helps to explain what might be seen as a puzzle; why do the rich and powerful, or at least some of them, fund climate change denial? After all, if failure to act on climate change really does mean that we, and most other life on the planet, are heading for extinction, then their money won't be much good to them. They - or their children - will die like everyone else.

As far as I can see there's only three possible explanations as to why rich people might want to promote delay on climate action:

• They really don't believe climate change is happening
• They think it's happening but it won't affect them
• They are promoting denial and delay as a deliberate strategy aimed at maximising compensation

It's easy to see that the first two of these apply to some extent. Some rich people are aware that climate change is real but promote denial to the masses, but others might actually believe the bullshit that they spread. Despite what they say, the rich aren't cleverer than everybody else, and even clever or educated people can be stupid about particular subjects.

And it's not surprising if rich people think they can escape the consequences of climate disaster. Much of their experience of other disasters teaches them that money can insulate you from the consequences. Some of the fantasies about escape from a dying earth (nicely illustrated in the film Elysium) play to this belief, and as David Wallace Wells points out in The Uninhabitable Earth, belief in this is quite common among wealthy Silicon Valley folk. Even if they don't think that they can escape off-world, there are plenty of rich people preparing, in a survivalist sort of way, to save themselves from climate catastrophe.

But I think the third explanation is the most important. If the political system ever really does deliver on action to prevent runaway climate change then a huge part of the world's capital will become 'stranded assets' - "assets that have suffered from unanticipated or premature write-downs, devaluations or conversion to liabilities". That's not just all the unburnable fossil fuel that is still in the ground, but also all the infrastructure associated with it - pipelines, refineries, tanker fleets, etc. It's possible that the financial system wouldn't survive such a write-down; at the very least it would be a major impact, and would hit some asset-holders much harder than others - though as the 2008 crash showed, the complexity of the financial system may mean that simply everything would crash.

Now, consider that fossil-based assets are not by any means worthless (and read this paper from Schroders if you fancy a chill as to how 'the markets' think about fossil-based assets). That means that 'the markets' don't think we're going to simply leave them in the ground - exactly what we must do if we are to avoid climate catastrophe.

So my hypothesis is that the asset owners expect that at some point they'll be compensated for their holdings, just like the slave owners were. And promoting division and delay on climate action is their way of driving the price up for when the negotiations begin.

The movement for climate justice is partly about making sure that the poorest don't suffer most from climate change, and don't have to pay disproportionately for measures taken to prevent or mitigate it - for example, through fuel or carbon taxes where the burden falls most heavily on the poorest. But what if the price of getting the asset-owners to call off their denial-promoting dogs is that governments have to pay them compensation? Either that compensation is paid for out of austerity-squeezed goverment budgets, or it's paid via some sort of quantitative easing. Either way it's a recipe for more climate injustice.

Recognising this rather concentrates the mind and ought to inform political strategy for the climate action movement. If the asset-owners are playing chicken with the climate, then it's important for them to create the sense that they are prepared to not swerve. If the alternative, and the price of confronting this strategy, is preparing for a conflict on the scale of the American Civil War, then strategies that we have pursued to date will be insufficient. Just saying.