/life/Global Warming: The New Slavery
I've passively passed around this IHT essay on global warming, and had a couple of conversations with people about it. It has lead me to try to write down an idea that's been rolling around in my head for at least a year. It's also worth noting that my knowledge of the American emancipation of slaves is mostly gained through pop culture and basic education, so could be riddled with misconceptions.
I believe global warming is my generation's slavery. I do not suggest that they are morally of equal weight — that's an impossible thing to measure — but that there are important parallels between them: it's something embedded in our lifestyle, it's something people on the margins have been complaining about for about three decades, and it's slowly, despite all manner of resistance from those who benefit from the status quo (which includes anyone reading this, of course), entering the popular conscience as a real problem. Unlike slavery, it's got a deadline. We don't know what it is, but I share in a growing awareness that it's "soon, possibly too late."
Like slavery, it will be solved (if we manage) in part by innovation and economics — the cotton ginny was, as I understand it, instrumental in having people cope with the loss of slave labour. However, it is profoundly and inherently a moral problem, though people mostly fail to acknowledge that, and many resist solving it on moral grounds. It is also profoundly divisive, and deeply embedded in American politics.
And mostly, I believe that, if we succeed in coping with global warming, atmospheric carbon dioxide increases, water waste and pollution, oil consumption, and the other problems that are bundled with global warming, we will look back on this time — my life — as a profoundly immoral one.
The people who took the first steps to defeat slavery, the earliest people to emancipate their slaves, are looked back upon as having a strong moral disposition. And so will it be seen with those who make real sacrifices to reduce their footprint on the world.
It must be said at this point that I am not, thus far and by far, one of those people. On New Year's Day, I spent 12 hours in an airplane. Flying is utterly dominant in my personal footprint; in fact, according to the Ecological Footprint Quiz it makes up a stunning 76% (5.9 vs 1.4) of my carbon footprint. This is both heartening (my "base" footprint is a plausible-sounding 1.4) and utterly disheartening, since flying a keystone in the life that I set up before I realized all this. I finally bit the bullet and bought some carbon credits in the form of a TerraPass, but I see it as an insignificant gesture, both morally and practically. Personal carbon credits are probably not the answer, though widespread and aggressive cap-trade-and-reduce markets are probably a good start. There's no reason for any country (including my own) to not be doing this right now, and it's despicable that more aren't. But boy I love flying.
