We (mostly) ended human slavery, but I don't think its accurate to say we ended slavery in general.
Oil gave us a reason to stop enslaving humans for labor - a single barrel of oil equates to the amount of work a human can do working 8 hours a day for roughly a decade.
We didn't stop slavery all together, we found a more efficient target of our enslavement. We'll do the same with AI (or at least we'll try), should actual artificial intelligence exist.
Ironically for the parent's thesis (cheap energy replacing human slave labor), one of the major objects of modern slavery is... the manufacturing of solar panels,
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/business/economy/solar-xi... ("Solar Supply Chain Grows More Opaque Amid Human Rights Concerns / The global industry is cutting some ties to China, but its exposure to forced labor remains high and companies are less transparent, a new report found")
(Maybe there's some kind of evil Jevons Paradox for slavery, where the automation of human labor counterintuitively increases total slavery; i.e. the technologically-augmented effectiveness of slave labor increases the value of slaves).
It would be interesting if someone could do a deep dive into what solar would cost if forced labour was taken out and all workers were paid a fair wage. Would it still be super competitive?
If someone could show that paying a fair wage to workers would still leave solar compellingly cheap then it might incentivise some parts of the supply chain to clean up their act. That's "if" of course.
Yes. The US Department of Commerce has been litigating this every year for over a decade, with a deep dive into what kinds of "subsidies" the top Chinese solar producers might be receiving, including deeply implausible kinds of subsidies, and as I recall one of the "subsidies" they were supposedly receiving was that their employees assembling solar panels were working for lower wages than electronics assembly employees in Indonesia. These investigations, carried out under a "guilty until proven innocent" standard (called "adverse inference in selecting from the facts otherwise available") end up with a quantitative "countervailing duty" to apply to compensate for the "subsidies" as precisely as possible.
You can be certain that forced labor would be considered a "subsidy", although I don't recall ever having seen it mentioned in these filings, so my inference is that it's not a significant factor.
The last one I examined in any detail was https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14..., which imposed a 10.33% countervailing duty on Jinko panels, a 14.27% countervailing duty on Risen panels, and a 12.61% countervailing duty on all other PRC panels. This was enough to ensure that under 1% of panels sold in the US were Chinese solar panels.
But we're talking about competitiveness with fossil fuels here, which are about 200% more expensive than solar power, not 14.27%.
The source of 27 million slaves today is outdated. More importantly, the source paper referenced by the BBC here doesn't show any source for such a number, the closest it comes is to reference two specific examples of slavery, Sudanese slaves captured by paramilitary or government forces and sex slaves in Mumbai. Both examples are listed with estimates topping 90,000 enslaved.
In no way am I saying slavery is no longer a problem, one slave is too many. I chose not to go after the parent comment's claim that slavery has ended because that wasn't the important to the point I was raising.
You have: 6 gigajoules / 10 years (8 hours/day)
You want: W
* 57.039776
/ 0.017531626
That's at least in the ballpark.
I think that from a moral point of view it's accurate to say that we ended slavery in general, or at least mostly ended it. Energy slaves made of barrels of oil or solar panels don't involve the same suffering and cruelty that human slavery does.
Energy slaves made of barrels of oil come with a lot of external costs that do impact living things though. I lived on the gulf coast when during and after the BP oil spill, countless animals suffered due to that oil spill.
Well that would depend heavily on how you define slavery.
Most people probably consider slavery something that can only be imposed on another human. I'd be in the minority considering animals raised in industrial farms and meat operations to be enslaved. I'd be in an even smaller minority to consider that plants raised in commercial fields may be enslaved, there is at least the possibility that plants may experience the world around them and their existence in it more than we give them credit for.
I don't know that I'd say we enslaved oil, I'd say we enslaved nature more broadly.
We (mostly) ended human slavery, but I don't think its accurate to say we ended slavery in general.
Oil gave us a reason to stop enslaving humans for labor - a single barrel of oil equates to the amount of work a human can do working 8 hours a day for roughly a decade.
We didn't stop slavery all together, we found a more efficient target of our enslavement. We'll do the same with AI (or at least we'll try), should actual artificial intelligence exist.