Climate Change is the Slavery Issue of the Twenty-first Century

By Marcia Cleveland on 01/18/2011 @ 09:30 AM

Tags: energy, epa, environment

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which was adopted during the Civil War, abolished slavery. Riding on the Metro this morning, I learned a startling historical factoid from an ad for the National Archives. Congress considered two very different versions of the famous slavery amendment: one would have prohibited the federal government from interfering with slavery in any way; the other abolished slavery. The second was adopted by two-thirds of the Senate, two-thirds of the House of Representatives and three-quarters of the states, before the states of the Confederacy rejoined the Union.

On Martin Luther King’s birthday in 2011, it seems incomprehensible that Congress once thought that our country could reasonably choose between supporting and abolishing slavery. It is unnerving to realize that slavery was abolished only because slave states were not voting. It is difficult to believe that this country could have prospered if it had not abolished slavery, the moral contradiction that was at the heart of our democracy.

Climate Change is the central moral issue of the twenty-first century. It is a peace and social justice issue of global proportions. It is a life and death issue for nations like the Maldives and Bangladesh, which are literally at risk of disappearing beneath the waves. It is a question of whether the poorest people in the world will have food and fresh water to drink.

There are eerie similarities to the debate about the Thirteenth Amendment. At the current moment, Congress thinks it is entirely reasonable to consider prohibiting the Environmental Protection Agency from doing anything about climate change. HR 97, which has 95 cosponsors in the House, would do exactly that. There are tamer bills – HR 153 which would deny EPA funding and HR 199 which would require EPA to stop work on climate change for two years – but there are no proposals to require EPA to regulate vigorously. Nor is Congress moving forward on proposals like the CLEAR Act that would move our economy to a low carbon future.

Last summer Russia suffered catastrophic fires that devastated its agriculture. While the world literally burns, we are debating the cost to industry of reducing its pollution and the assertions of climate deniers, whose positions are grounded in political rhetoric not science. The echoes from the nineteenth century are disturbing. Then, some asserted that Africans were inferior, as though it were scientific fact, and wealthy slave owners fought to preserve their comfortable life style. Now, false climate “science” is rampant and wealthy countries expect to maintain their traditional level of comfort, which depends on unsustainable consumption of resources, especially fossil fuels. Congress is considering proposals that prohibit our nation from addressing the crisis and many consider the proposals reasonable.

Climate Change is a profoundly moral issue, but the press defines it as anything but; it is an environmental issue, a scientific issue, an economic issue. FCNL and other faith groups have an essential role to play. We must assert loudly and often that climate change is a moral issue. It is a global issue of peace and social justice; it is about saving lives and God’s creation. Until the moral issue is heard, it will seem reasonable for wealthy countries to remain comfortable while the poor of the world starve, die in floods, droughts and famines and are driven from their homes.

One hundred and fifty years ago, some considered it reasonable to keep four million people in slavery so that a handful of wealthy people could remain comfortable. In this century, maintaining our comfort at the expense of the rest of the world is just as morally reprehensible.