Bad Takes: It's time to stop making self-serving excuses for not moving away from fossil fuels

Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis. It should surprise no one that people who owned other people as property in the early 19th century passionately argued against banning the transatlantic slave trade. Our Constitution explicitly forbade Congress from imposing such a ban until the year 1808, and even after that date lax enforcement allowed illegal smuggling to persist up until the Civil War.