It seems that Slavery was very important to the U.S economy at the time. It's almost comparable to fossil fuels today. Whole industries depended on it to provide basic things like cotton and sugar that everyone used.
How did they make the transition from a slave market economy into a new economy? Were the abolitionists the biggest reason slavery was brought to an end or was it more of an economic reason due to a change in the mode of production?
I'm wondering because I think there's a large lesson to be learned here on how we can progress into a new type of economy that doesn't depend on production that is destroying the planet.
I've just discussed the systems that actually followed slavery in the United States in my other comment on this thread, which I hope you find interesting and helpful. One thing I want to add though is that your comparison is a little flawed. Fossil fuels are much more essential to modern societies than slavery was to the United States in the 19th Century. We rely on fuels like coal, oil and gas for everything - our food, our transport, our clothing, our light at night, our warmth, our communication networks. All of these things at some point depend on energy generation in the modern world. This is part of the reason why apocalyptic fantasies are so interesting to so many people, I'd wager - it's interesting to imagine how we would cope with the sudden absence of such fundamentals.
Slavery on the other-hand, whilst you could say it was conceptualised as a natural resource by contemporaries in some ways, is a system of labour. You do not need slaves to harvest cotton in the same way that you need energy to power a car, a train or a lightbulb. You can just as easily use free labour. Similarly, you do not need cotton or sugar to fulfil an essential role in the economy. Goods made with cotton and sugar are not nearly as essential to the 19th Century economy as cars or electricity are today; their sudden removal would produce economic shockwaves certainly, but nothing nearly as fundamental as to disrupt the very core of the world economy.
The argument some historians have made - and it's not a view I share - that cotton and sugar were essential to the development of western economies is not that the goods themselves were significant but rather that the profits from them were huge, and those profits may have had a major role to play in financing growth-generating activity and industrialisation in other areas of the economy (again, I would be sceptical that this was the case on a meaningful, decisive scale as some suggest). Whilst cotton and sugar were important goods they just don't compare in the same way, so I'm afraid there isn't really a lot we can take away from the abolition of slavery to contextualise our current energy crisis.