> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)

More or less.

Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).

Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization. Southerners would regularly complain about the hustle and bustle of the North, the size of the cities, and how hard regular (white) people had to work. The "Southern way of life" was a thing - a leisurely, agrarian society based on forced labor and land instead of capital.

In this regard it's a doubly fitting metaphor because much of the opposition to abolishing slavery was cultural and not economic.

I've read somewhere how the English people industrialized because they had problems that could not be fixed by human or animal power. Mines became too deep, pumping too hard. The ancient greek knew about steam engines, but had no use for them. The English did, in their mines. Necessity as mother of invention. Then machines freed us from hard labour and gave us free time.

I am quite hopeful. One benchmark that was passed only very recently was Levelized Full System Cost parity in Texas. That is, the total cost of generating electricity via renewables, importantly, including storage and infrastructure costs became equivalent to other options.

I don't think this gets talked about enough because its truly a milestone.

It's still more expensive in colder places, but the math is changing very fast.

> With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry

Taking Europe versus China, California versus Texas, it seems like social pressure is less effective than markets. Let markets build the power source they want to build and lo and behold you get lots of solar and wind and batteries.

My impression is that slavery was economically disadvantageous the whole time, but persisted in the South because of the relative power of the slaveholders.

Why though? For a business owner I can’t imagine a better situation than his workers working for free and having to do 16 hours a day under pain of death. This probably wouldn’t work with 80% of the populace enslaved but would work very well with 10-15% enslaved.

Even if global greenhouse gas emissions immediately and permanently stop, climate change won’t. We have many years of further warming ahead of us due to the greenhouse gases already dumped into the atmosphere.

It was a socially-driven movement, but economics made it feasible for social concerns to win. The lesson is that you need both, and this is especially true when time is short.

> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)

I also never found the economic argument entirely convincing. If slavery were so economically disadvantageous in an industrialized society, why are there still slave labor in industrialized countries around the world today?

What will come with the approaching boom of guilt-free energy is public support for doing more things with more energy, and instead of stagnated per-capita energy use a return to more-than-linear energy usage growth.

With that you get flying cars, space tourism, AI, cities in deserts with free water through desalination, better indoor climates with freer ventilation with the outside, cities skies free of ICE smog and probably a whole lot of things which are hard to imagine.

There’s an effort to whitewash the horrors of chattel slavery that is really disgusting.

Estimated on the economics of slavery (that I’ve read anyway) seemingly ignore that slaves can make new slaves.

This is the dark side of slavery that seems to be rarely discussed. That is, the mass rape of slaves over centuries by their owners.

There was even an economic incentive for this because lighter skinned slaves were more desirable for domestic labor. By the 19th century this had gotten so absurd that some slaves were almost indistinguishable from white people due to generations of repeated rape, basically.

There was a book whose name escapes me that analyzed the records of one of the largest slave markets and it found that the price of girl slaves went way once they started menstruating. This was advertised. Why do you think that was?

We would line in a very different country if, after the civil war, every slave owner was strung up from a tree and their estates were redistributed to the formerly enclaved.

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Is this a joke comment or do you not realize that people were treated like chattel slaves while working in the first factories?