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 hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna. With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry in my opinion.

> 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 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.

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.

> belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous

On the contrary, historians broadly agree that industrialization (particularly the advent of the cotton gin) actually turbocharged the human trafficking industry in the US. The cotton gin moved the bottleneck for textile production onto enslaved people, since there was no automation available for planting, cultivating, or harvesting the cotton.

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

> still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically...

not crazy especially as slavery was supplanted by debt, which is in a way fractional slavery (minus the chattel part ofc)

So solar energy falls from the sky, but what about the resources it takes to make the panels?

Re: slavery: I've wondered before if the arrow of causation might go both ways. Slavery has existed throughout history. With slaves, what's the incentive to industrialize? You have "free" and captive human labor. But take that away, and suddenly the idea of machines doing stuff for you seems a lot more compelling.

Slavery also displaces industry in the economy. Slave-driven industries compete with industrial development for investment funds and production driven by slave labor can compete with mechanized production. But if labor is suddenly expensive, mechanized production has an advantage, and if former slaves are now getting paid there are also more customers for the output of that production.

So industrialization may have played some role in abolition, but did abolition also drive industrialization? Slavery was abolished in Britain in the early 19th century and Britain was also the cradle of the industrial revolution, which started to hit very shortly after. America did not explode industrially until after it abolished slavery.

If we'd abolished slavery in Roman times we might have terraformed Mars by now.

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.

Slavery was ended in the USA by the Civil War veterans.

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.

It depends how you look at it

> Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna

China has solar panel production on lock. Nobody is going to make money there.

So from a western point of view, there is only a LOT of money to be lost by going solar. Anyone that invested in oil and gas, coal and even to a lesser degree nuclear is NOT going to go quietly.

Hence all the climate change denial and anti-renewable rhetoric from the current US regime

(To be clear I personally have my roof covered in panels and also hope like mad we can get everyone on board)

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.

Which is funny because we've had an environmentally and economically optimal source of power since the 50s (nuclear) which we deliberately phased out due to panic cycles.

> 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?

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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> 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.

I really don't understand why you're bringing slavery in a discussion about hydro. Why not bring Gaza? And Iran? This is a tech site after all: so, sure, bringing slavery in a talk about solar energy makes sense.

Note that the abolition of slavery is unrelated to industrialization: the islamic republic of Mauritania was the last country to officially abolish slavery and they did it in the 1980s. And it's very well known that slavery still persisted long after that and there are still people owning slaves today (not too sure why the other comment mentioning it was downvoted).

At this point I think people are just insane: they'll use any excuse, on any unrelated subject, to bring it the issues of slavery, patriarchy, Gaza (but not Iran), etc. But as soon as you point out actual patriarchal societies operating today or actual slavery still happening today or people having actual sex slaves in western countries (e.g. several members of the UK parliament are now running an enquiry into a gigantic gang-rapes operation with thousands of victims and an attempted cover-up by the authorities and the findings are beyond belief).

"Won't hear, won't see, won't speak -- shall only mention slavery, the patriarchy, Gaza and shall downvote".

HN is truly lost.

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

> I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change.

I'm struggling to understand the level of completely irrational rejection of reality in all these comments.

Emissions continue rise every year, we are already locked into extreme climate change, multiple nations are engaged in military conflicts to capture oil, we globally use more fossil fuels every year.

Companies are starting to convert jet engines into natural gas powered generator for AI data centers [0]

So far we've continually used 'green' energy to supplement the use of non-renewable fossil fuels. We have far more EVs on the road than we did a few years ago and are using more oil than before in the US (and producing more than we ever have).

We are already out of the standard IPC scenarios and potentially on track for a 'hot house earth' future [1].

It is quite clear that we are ramping up for global war over natural resources (largely fossil fuels) and we will burn the planet to the ground chasing the last drop of oil.

0. https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/how-jet-engines-are-...

1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/11/point-of...