Climate Change Is A Moral Issue Not An Economic Issue

I began a novel about what I felt the impact of global warming would be.  In the first section I deliberately compared the social conflict over global warming to the Abolitionist movement in the 18th Century.  Five years ago I posted here about that:

The most important deniers are the oil and coal companies and their enablers, members of the U.S. Senate. One of the most important oil company activists are the Koch brothers who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars directly or through groups they support financially. This group are the 21st Century analogues of the 19th Century Southern slave owners whose wealth and ways of life were threatened by the anti-slavery Abolitionists. They are prevailing at this point by their ability to create confusion and doubt about global warming.

 I believe that twenty years from people will be looking back on where they were on the issue of climate change in the same way that people in the 18th Century looked back on where they were on the issue of slavery.  It's important, right now, to get on the right side of climate change.  You don't want to look back on this time and find that you were on the wrong side just as those who opposed the Abolitionists were forced to find themselves having been on the wrong side of the slavery issue.

Earlier this year, David Attenborough made the same point.

The attitude of young people towards tackling the environmental crisis is “a source of great hope”, David Attenborough has told MPs, as he predicted that polluting the planet would soon provoke as much abhorrence as slavery 

Asked by the Labour MP Vernon Coaker to expand on how public attitudes were shifting, Attenborough replied: “There was a time in the 19th century when it was perfectly acceptable for civilised human beings to think that it was morally acceptable to actually own another human being for a slave. And somehow or other, in the space of 20 or 30 years, the public perception of that totally transformed." 

He said: “I suspect that we are right now in the beginning of a big change. Young people in particular are the stimulus that’s bringing it about

Eric Beinhocker of the Guardian is a making that point again

Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement. Those who fought against slavery did not agonise over the costs and benefits. Their goal was clear: make it illegal.

[U]ntil recently, climate change has not been argued as a moral issue. Rather, it has been presented as a technocratic problem, a cost-benefit problem, where the costs of action must be weighed against the benefits of avoiding disaster. The debates have been around taxes, jobs, growth and technologies. While such debates are important – there are better and worse ways to tackle the climate crisis – the effect has been decades of inaction, denial and delay. When something is a moral wrong, particularly a deep, systemic moral wrong, we don’t wait around debating the optimal path or policy; we stop it.

Looking back in history, the climate movement can draw inspiration from another effort to right a deep moral wrong: the slavery abolition movement. There are clearly important differences between slavery and climate change, and I’m not drawing a moral equivalence between the two; slavery was a unique moral horror and climate change is immoral in its own terrible way. But the climate community can find inspiration in the 19th-century abolitionist movement’s courageous efforts to make slavery illegal around the world.

Those who fought against slavery did not agonise over the costs and benefits. Their goal was morally righteous and powerfully clear: abolish slavery, make it illegal. It is time to do this for climate change: to make human carbon pollution illegal in every country in the world. It is time for a “carbon abolition” movement, to put an end to emissions.

This is exactly right.  Let us not talk about economic reasons, let us talk about moral reasons.