NOTE: In reading through the following to correct a few typos that were probably made during the transcription of the book to the online version, I constantly found passages that I was tempted to put in bold type. But I shall refrain from doing so, assuming that by now the reader has enough interest in this analysis to read it carefully, as if the entire text were in bold.
But why did the price of Carbide stock go up? The answer is brutally revealing: because the company proved - in this first large-scale industrial accident case affecting a transnational corporation operating in the so-called Third World, or South - that it could get away with murder, now and in the future. Wall Street knew then that business could go forward, and that the orderly extraction of profits from the South had become more secure.
Wall Street (to be more exact, “finance capital”) is the command and control center of the system. The little numbers that flicker by on its tapes are common reductions of the potential for capital expansion as deployed over the manifold energic points of the dominant order. In this way, the individual factories and the managerial decisions affecting them are made in the light of a larger and more comprehensive entity, a gigantic force field that polarizes every event within its range of influence, even as it continually seeks to expand that range. This is how the rules of the game are played out. It also follows that the individual motives of Carbide’s executives are meaningless except as public relations material. Ward Morehouse has written in regard to this event: “Had [Carbide’s management] been genuinely forthcoming and made truly disinterested offers of help on a scale appropriate to the magnitude of the disaster, they would almost certainly have been confronted with suits by shareholders seeking to hold the management accountable for mishandling company funds.”9
Thus, it was capital that constrained Carbide. But there is another side, which makes this an “if pigs had wings they would fly” type of argument. People who are genuinely forthcoming and disinterestly helpful do not become managers of large capitalist firms. The tender-hearted are pushed off the ladder on which one ascends to such positions of power. For capital shapes as well as selects the kinds of people who create these events.
The story of Bhopal and its corporate miscreant continues. Carbide got out of the pesticide business, but on February 7, 2001, merged with the Dow Chemical company, which does make pesticides - it made Agent Orange for use during the Vietnam War. The new chemical colossus operated in 168 countries and pulled in more than $24 billion in revenue. The president and chief executive of Dow stated that the merger should save at least $500 million annually, though regrettably 2,000 jobs would be lost as well. None of the men at individual fault for Bhopal has ever been brought to justice, nor, I think, will be in their lifetime.
The “giant force field” is a metaphor for capital, that ubiquitous, all-powerful, and greatly misunderstood dynamo that drives our society. The established view sees capital as a rational factor of investment, a way of using money to fruitfully bring together the various features of economic activity. For Karl Marx, capital was a “werewolf” and a “vampire,” ravenously consuming labor and mutilating the laborer. Both notions are true; and the second one, applied to nature as well as labor, accounts for the ecological crisis in all essential features. From the standpoint of the ecological crisis, corporations like Union Carbide are the soldiers of capital, and institutions at a higher level in the system, such as stock markets, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Department of the Treasury, etc., its general staff. Once these relationships are appreciated, Bhopal is seen in clearer perspective - as an individual accident, the repetition of which might be avoided if industry is careful enough, and, more essentially, as the manifestation of anti-ecological tendencies inherent to capital, which will have their day one way or another so long as capital comes to organize social production. These latter are threefold:
1. Capital tends to degrade the conditions of its own production.
2. Capital must expand without end in order to exist.
3. Capital leads to a chaotic world-system increasingly polarized between rich and poor, which cannot adequately address the ecological crisis.
The combination makes an ever-growing ecological crisis an iron necessity so long as capital rules, no matter what measures are taken to tidy up one corner or another.
We need to examine why we talk of capital as though it has a life of its own, which rapidly surpasses its rational function and consumes ecosystems in order to grow cancerously. Capital is not in itself a living organism, needless to say. It is, rather, a kind of relationship like that set up by a cancer-causing virus that invades living human beings, forces them to violate ecological integrity, sets up self-replicating structures, and polarizes the giant force field. It is humanity living as capital, people who become capital’s personifications, that destroys ecosystems.
The Faustian bargain that gave rise to this way of being arose through the discovery that fabulous wealth could be achieved by making money first of all, and things through the making of money. Everyone knows that capitalist production is for profit and not use - and if they don’t know this at first, they can learn it right away from watching Wall Street discipline corporations that fail to measure up to standards of profitability. Capitalists celebrate the restless dynamism that these standards enforce, with its drive for innovation, efficiency and new markets. They fail to recognize - because a kind of failure of recognition is built into their being - that what looks like resourcefulness and resilience from one side becomes on the other an addiction and a treadmill to oblivion.
Commodities appeared at the dawn of economic activity, and commodity production became generalized with the advent of capital. The germ of capital is inserted into each commodity, and can only be released through consumption, and, with this, the conversion of what is desirable into money. To employ a formalism employed by Marx, which we shall find helpful to express our ideas as we proceed, every commodity is a conjunction of a “use-value” and an “exchange-value.”10 Use-value signifies the commodity’s place in the ever-developing manifold of human needs and wants; while exchange-value represents its “commodity-being,” that is, its generalized equivalence, an abstraction that can be expressed only in quantitative terms and as money. Broadly speaking, capital represents that regime in which exchange-value predominates over use-value in the production of commodities - and the problem with capital is that, once installed, the process becomes self-perpetuating and expanding.
If production be for profit, that is, for the expansion of the money-value invested in it, then prices must be kept as high as possible and costs as low as possible. As prices will tend to be held down by the competition endemic to the system, in practice, cutting costs becomes a paramount concern of capitalists. But costs of what? Clearly, of what enters into the production of commodities. Much of this can be expressed in terms of other commodities, for example, fuel, machinery, building materials, etc., and, crucially, the labor-power sold by workers for wages, which is the heart of the capitalist system. However, if the same analysis is done upon the latter, at some point we arrive at entities that are not produced as commodities, yet are treated as such in the great market that defines capitalism. These are the above-mentioned “conditions of production,” and they include publicly produced facilities, i.e. infrastructure, the workers themselves, and, last but certainly not least, nature - even if this nature already contains, as it almost always does, the hand of prior human activity.
The process is a manifestation of the ascendancy of exchange-value over use-value, and entails a twofold degradation. In the first place, we have the commodification of nature, which includes human beings, and their bodies. However, nature, as we shall examine further in Part II, simply does not work this way. No matter what capital’s ideologues say, the actual laws of nature never include monetization; they exist, rather, in the context of ecosystems whose internal relations are violated by conversion to the money-form. The essential argument for environmental economics within the capitalist system is that by privatizing nature people learn to care for it as their property. However, the problem is that, being made property, nature is a priori severed from its ecosystemic ways of being. Thus the ceaseless rendering into commodities, with its monetization and exchange, breaks down the specificity and intricacy of ecosystems. To this is added the devaluation, or basic lack of caring, which attends what is left over and unprofitable. Here arise the so-called “externalities” that become the repositories of pollution. To the extent the capital relation, with its unrelenting competitive drive to realize profit, prevails, it is a certainty that the conditions of production at some point or other will be degraded, which is to say, natural ecosystems will be destabilized and broken apart. As James O’Connor has demonstrated in his pioneering studies of this phenomenon, this degradation will have a contradictory effect on profitability itself (the “Second Contradiction of Capital”), either directly, as by so fouling the natural ground of production that it breaks down, or indirectly, in the case that regulatory measures, being forced to pay for the healthcare of workers, etc, re-internalizes the costs that had been expelled into the environment.11 In a case like Bhopal, numerous insults of this kind interacted and became the matrix of a ghastly “accident.” For Bhopal, degradation was concentrated in one setting; while the ecological crisis as a whole may be regarded as its occurrence in a less concentrated but vastly more extended field, so that the disaster is now played out more slowly and on a planetary scale.
It will surely be rejoined to this that a great many countervailing techniques are continually introduced to blunt or even profit from the degradation of conditions of production, for example, pollution control devices, commodification of pollutants, etc. To some degree these are bound to be effective. Indeed, if the overall system were in equilibrium, then the effects of the Second Contradiction could be contained, and we would not be able to extrapolate from it to the ecological crisis. But this brings us to the second great problem with capital, namely, that equilibrium and confinement of any sort is anathema to it.
In this respect, Marx wrote in his Grundrisse-.
However, as representative of the general form of wealth - money - capital is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier. Every boundary is and has to be a barrier for it. Else it would cease to be capital - money as self-reproductive. If ever it perceived a certain boundary not as a barrier, but became comfortable within it as a boundary, it would have declined from exchange value to use value, from the general form of wealth to the specific, substantial mode of the same. Capital as such creates a specific surplus value because it cannot create an infinite one all at once; but it is the constant movement to create more of the same. The quantitative boundary of the surplus value appears to it as a mere natural barrier, as a necessity which it constantly tries to violate and beyond which it constantly seeks to go.12
The depth of Marx’s insight should be appreciated: capital is quantitative in its core, and imposes the regime of quantity upon the world: this is a “necessity” for capital. But capital is equivalently intolerant of necessity; it constantly seeks to go beyond the limits that it itself has imposed, and so can neither rest nor find equilibrium: it is irremediably self-contradictory. Every quantitative increase becomes a new boundary, which is immediately transformed into a new barrier. The boundary/barrier ensemble then becomes the site of new value and the potential for new capital formation, which then becomes another boundary/barrier, and so forth and on into infinity - at least in the logical schemata of capital. Small wonder that the society formed on the basis of producing for the sake of capital before all else is restlessly dynamic, that it introduces new forms of wealth, and continually makes the past forms obsolete, that it is obsessed with change and acquisition - and that it is a disaster for ecologies.
Since each boundary/barrier is a site for commodity formation, this becomes the prescription for the “generalized commodity production” that is one of capital’s hallmarks. Needless to say, the process does not occur neatly, as though capitalists sat around and selected their spots for new commodities. To some degree, of course, they do - imagine network executives trying to develop new sitcoms, or the auto manufacturers a new line of SUVs. But the more interesting examples are those where the unplanned and more or less spontaneous actions of the system create novel conjunctures, which are then seized upon as new places for profitable activity. The prospect dear to capitalists, of making businesses out of trading pollution credits, or the pharmaceutical industry’s search for new antibiotics to meet the new diseases set forward by ecological destabilization itself, are examples of this kind. The constant creation of anxieties and needs by the restless movement of the system is constantly funneled into the circuits of new commodity activity. Does capitalism create an isolated, anxiety-ridden self whose survival requires being placed upon a market? Well, then, capital will also step in to create commodities to service this tensely narcissistic state of being - articles of fashion and image, with technologies to service these and a cultural apparatus to go along - in the case of fashion, say, a whole range of magazines, cosmetics, sexual aids, photographic studios, advertising agencies, public relations firms, psychotherapies, and so on.
Capital’s regime of profitability is one of permanent instability and restlessness. Even in the ruling class, no one “rules” without perpetually proving himself, and the CEO who does not increase the rate of profit will be swiftly tossed aside. Nor can anyone rest content with the given, but must constantly try to expand it. Growth is simply equated with survival as a capitalist, for anyone who fails to grow will simply disappear, his assets acquired by another. No matter how much one has, one never really has anything; everything must be proved to exist anew the next day. Hence that well-known trait of the bourgeoisie: no matter how rich they become, they always need to become richer: notice the behavior of Wal-Mart or Microsoft. All of the fabulous “growth” of the last decades has not by one iota reduced the drive to accumulate still more, nor can it ever so long as capital reigns. The sense of having and possessing dominates all others precisely because its reality can never be secured. Strictly speaking, individuals can step off this wheel - make their fortune and retire to raise polo ponies or cabbages, or become an environmental guru. But they cease thereby being personifications of capital; and others immediately step forward to take their role.
Money - the form of capitalist value - abstracts and dissolves all relationships, replacing- them with the cash nexus. This sets going the ruthless competitiveness inherent to capital, since if money is the only true bond, then there are no true bonds at all, and universal envy, suspicion, and mistrust reign. The “system works,” for the competition so induced becomes the motor forcing eternal growth as the price of survival. And because money can effortlessly expand even as its material substrate is bound by the laws of nature, the great pools of capital emerging from the ceaseless transactions provide the benchmark of growth, and, as they gather, press yet further for expansion. The pressure of capitalist growth is therefore exponential, that is, it becomes proportional to the total magnitude of the accumulated capital pressing for discharge. As Marx put it in another passage from the same work:
“The barrier appears as an accident which has to be conquered. This is apparent on even the most superficial inspection. If capital increases from 1oo to 1,000, then 1,000 is now the point of departure, from which the increase has to begin; the tenfold multiplication; profit and interest themselves become capital in turn. What appeared as surplus value now appears as simple presupposition, etc, as included in its simple composition.13
If we unpack this highly compressed passage (the Grundrisse was written as a notebook for Marx’s own study, and not for an outside reader), Marx is saying that in the regime of capital any original profit is only a starting point. If the same process is carried forward through a second cycle, the same expansionary force will be observed, operating, however, from the higher level. If 10 of some monetary unit goes to 100 the first time around, there will be a tendency for it to go to 1,000 the second time around. Therefore capitalist production is not only expansionary (since money has to be thrown into circulation for it to become capital, and a surplus value needs to be gained), but exponentially so. As Marx commented in Capital:
“The repetition or renewal of the act of selling in order to buy (i.e., C-M-C’)14 finds its measure and its goal... in a final purpose which lies outside it, namely consumption, the satisfaction of definite needs. But in buying in order to sell (i.e. M-C-M’), on the contrary, the end and the beginning are the same, money or exchange-value, and this very fact makes the movement an endless one.
“For more money is just money with a larger number written upon it, and so:
“At the end of the movement, money emerges once again as the starting point. Therefore the final result of each separate cycle, in which a purchase and consequent sale are completed, forms of itself the starting point for a new cycle. The simple circulation of commodities - selling in order to buy - is a means to a goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs. As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value only takes place within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless.”15
Capital’s disregard for boundaries except as barriers to be surpassed arises from this fundamental property. Every boundary in the real world is useless to capital unless it can be monetized and placed into an M-C-M’ circuit, at the end of which another circuit must begin. Any delay or retardation in the flow is registered as a mortal threat. If a boundary, or a feedback process, or an ecological warning signal, is produced by one investment cycle, this becomes the starting point for another. It is even a bit misleading to talk of boundaries as merely barriers. That they are, inasmuch as capital needs to keep in motion and so must refuse all boundedness. But the barrier-boundary is also the point of investment, commodification and exchange. Therefore capital needs and seeks barrier-boundaries as sites of growth. It is like the oyster’s building of a pearl about a grain of sand, but where the life-activity of mollusks and other creatures who live in ecosystems is defined by exquisite internal regulation, capital’s growing is like a reckless addiction, which tends to possess individuals in direct proportion to their position in the capitalist command structure. Of course, a degree of prudent calculation is de rigueur as well (see next chapter). But this is not internal to the process of accumulation; it is rather applied from without, as a way of enabling the passion. Thus all reforms are installed to permit growth to proceed unchecked.
In case anyone should doubt this enthrallment, consider the following, drawn from the early part of 1997, a moment of heady expansion for the world-system. This news was greeted as though a sign of the Second Coming. In a major article in the Wall Street Journal of March 13, 1997, the author, G. Pascal Zachary, sampled the opinion of experts from the highest levels of the economic system, and found them unanimous in declaring permanent victory for capital on a global scale (the only exception was the doubting George Soros, who thought the boom only “may last a century”). “The positive side is spectacular,” said Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs; while Domingo Cavallo, architect of Argentina’s neoliberal restructuring (soon to collapse and nearly destroy its economy) added, “We’ve entered a golden age.” The phrase, “golden age,” also expressed the sentiments of the new UN General Secretary Kofi Annan;16 while Joseph Stiglitz, at the time the World Bank’s chief economist - though soon to resign, and widely considered these days a voice of reason among economists - added that with a “reproducible” world growth rate of 4 percent predicted over the next twenty years, “economic growth will reach historic levels that will, in turn, open up a new frontier for industrialized countries.”
In the same newspaper of April 28, Renato Ruggiero, then director of the World Trade Organization, gave his perspective to the good news. World trade is what has brought us this blessing, increasing by a factor of fifteen in the last four decades (and up to twenty at this writing, a decade later). Simple algebra gives a clearer notion of the wonder of 4 percent growth over two decades, by translating it into a doubling of the production of goods and services. Around 2020, then, roughly two of everything produced in 2000 will be produced: twice as many cars, twice as many jet planes, twice as much insecticide, twice as much material wealth in China and India. All this, according to the WTO leader, because of trade (the “open economies” grew annually by an average of 4.5 percent between 1970 and 1989; the “closed” ones, only by 0.7 percent - and now there are scarcely any closed economies remaining), and open markets for capital; and it makes the US multinational corporations “almost giddy.” Boeing, for example, looked forward to $1.1 trillion being spent to double the size of the jet fleet in the next twenty years, three-quarters of this coming from abroad. Four times as many escalators were being built in China as in the US; meanwhile the world was experiencing such an expansion of consumerism that, to take but one example, Citicorp, starting from scratch in 1990, had 7 million credit card holders in Asia and 2 million in Latin America by 1997. “The potential exists for positive surprises that would drive growth even faster, such as massive sales of government assets. ‘On privatization, we’ve just scratched the surface,’ said Shaukat Aziz, Citicorp’s chief planning officer.”
Recall: in 1970, only three decades in the span of time, but an eternity so far as capital is concerned, the notion of “limits to growth” seized the world elites, or at least the significant fraction of them who put forth the report of the same name under the authorship of the “Club of Rome.” In little more than a generation, then, the notion of containing “growth,” which is to say, reining in capital, had been effectively driven from the collective mind of the ruling class.
With respect to global warming, arguably the supreme instance of the ecological crisis, we now find a gathering realization of just how deadly the prospects are, and correspondingly, a flurry of concern from ruling quarters. But the chaotic world-system keeps the response lagging far behind the pace of events, while the system-logic of capital makes even those proposals that see the light of day guaranteed to fail. This is, unfortunately, as it has to be, since global warming is an objective reminder that it is either the end of capitalism or the end of the world. For it is “growth” itself, that is, the capital-driven expansion of economic product, that effectively drives this process with its dire and growing implications.17 Thus during the stewardship of Al Gore as Vice-President, from 1992 to 2001, annual emissions of carbon in the US steadily rose by 13 percent, from 1,388 to 1,569 million metric tons, for the elementary reason that these were years of strong economic growth. By contrast, during the stagnant years of 1970 to 1982, carbon emissions levels were flat. Roughly 1,160 million metric tons marked the beginning as well as the end of this period, which witnessed the turning point of capital into its neoliberal mode of maximized exploitation.18 Capital got what it wanted, and the planet got intractable global warming. Now that is a truly inconvenient truth.
Set aside for the moment the efforts by key corporations to obfuscate or delay the inevitable findings.19 Or the crude efforts by the greatest offender, the United States under Bush the Lesser, to drag its heels, or those of China and India, seized by the tigers of accumulation, to stand outside the agreements. Look only at what is considered the ultima Thule of climate regulation, the Kyoto Protocols, passed later in 1997 in the wake of the foolishness described above about the sanctity of growth; and ponder the fact that it is the purpose of this regime to turn over the control of global warming to none other than the capitalist class.
Fantastically complex in design and virtually impossible to implement, Kyoto proceeds on a two-tiered front: to create new markets for trading credits to pollute among the industrial powers, and to create schemes - the “Clean Development Mechanisms” - in the South that would offset carbon emissions by building projects, like tree farms, whose goal is the sequestration of carbon. This immense superstructure, with its ramifications all over the world, rests on two guiding assumptions: give the corporate sector and the capitalist state the leading role in containing global warming; and do so by making the control of atmospheric carbon the site of new markets and new nodes of accumulation. These are two sides of the same coin: to keep capital in control of a process that would otherwise by its inherent logic bring it down; and in so doing, make money out of reducing emissions.
The defects of this mammoth blunder are myriad. The scheme is inherently incoherent, for it entails innumerable points that simply cannot be measured or compared. This is essentially because it tries to evade the point of a rational policy, which would be to keep the carbon in the ground in the first place - in other words, one that would put limits on capital. In so doing, Kyoto offers opportunities for swindling of all kinds. It is intrinsically disruptive of the periphery and the South as a whole, and of course all the people within it, especially the women who stand to be displaced by the various crackpot schemes for sequestration. Already this latest version of imperial extension has forced substantial numbers of peasants into the teeming metropolises that blight the world, providing a great many unwilling recruits for the sex industries.
Finally, and most revealing, the scheme will fail precisely insofar as it succeeds - for the money that is to be made as a bribe to get corporate cooperation, will of course not be placed in anybody’s mattress. It will enter the great circuits of capital and because it cannot sit still lest it become what Marx called a mere hoard, press for discharge through the route of investment. The wealth that will be created through such measures enters hands that know only how to use it to make more money. Will it be the development of new golf courses? Will it be the expansion of air travel? (In the fall of 2006, the UK heard both the necessity of bringing carbon emissions down and the necessity of tripling the already obscene amount of air traffic by 2025.) Who knows? Nor is that the point, since there is no immediate connection between capital accumulation and ecological breakdown. The mediation is given rather through the never-ending pressure for “growth” at all costs, that is, growth which is cancerous and intrinsically ecodestructive through means we have begun to outline, and which inevitably drags greater swathes of the global ecology into its maw.20
Global warming really puts capital in the dock, therefore, and it is here that those committed to the survival of a worthwhile life and not to accumulation must take their stand. It is the point where those with eyes to see can tell that unless the entire system built on ceaseless expansion of economic product is transformed - and with it, the fatal addiction to hydrocarbon energy deposited eons ago in the earth - we have no decent chances of survival. A major complication, however, is that the perception of this necessity must be carried out within the precincts of capitalist society itself - the form of social existence built for the accumulation of capital. That is indeed quite a rub.
Capitalism - Trapped While We Slept!
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Jul 20
A joke I remember from many years ago has the star of the tale, traveling in his automobile to a destination in a distant town in search of a certain attraction he has heard word of. Call it Shangri-La. Arriving on the outskirts of the town but not knowing exactly where in the town the place is located…
9 Morehouse 1993: 487. Quoted in Montague 1996.
10 These terms appear on the first page of Volume I of Marx’s Capital, an indication of how important he thought them.
11 Drawn together in O’Connor 1998. The “First Contradiction” is that of the classical “realization crisis,” where cutting workers’ wages makes it more difficult for them to purchase the commodities they produce.
12 Marx 1973: 334. Martin Nicolaus, translator and editor, draws a conection between this passage and Hegel’s Science of Logic (Hegel 1969).
13 Marx 1973: 335, italics in text.
14 In the first cycle, the simple circulation of commodities, C is a commodity sold for a given sum of money, M, which is then exchanged for another commodity of equivalent value, C’. In the second cycle, which is of capital, a sum of money, M, is advanced into circulation to pay for a commodity, C, which is then sold for a different sum of money, M’. If M’ is greater than M, the prime desideratum of the capitalist, we have M’–M, or ∆M, as the “surplus value.” Marx uses the term, “value,” as synonymous with exchange-value.
15 Capital, Vol. I (Marx 1967a: 252–3).
16 In an end-of-the-millennium survey by the BBC of who was the greatest man of the last 1,000 years, the Secretary General offered Adam Smith as his first choice. Can we imagine Dag Hammerskjold or U Thant doing the same? Annan, whose behavior during the Rwandan genocide should have at least gotten him sacked, was instead rewarded for his unquestioning loyalty to transnational capital.
Happily, the British people voted Karl Marx the honor.
17 Courtesy of José Tapia, economist, University of Michi-gan, “More Inconvenient Truths. Tapia. Pdf.”
18 Personal communication, José Tapia.
19 Here is the latest in a long series of shenanigans. The American Enterprise Institute, heavily funded and controlled by Exxon Mobil, has offered cash bribes and other emoluments to climate scientists to counter the unceasing findings of global climate agencies that sound the alarm about warming (Sample 2007)
20 Lohmann 2006 best summarizes the issues. For particular studies, see Bachram 2004 and Isla 2007. The ecocatastrophe is even to be celebrated by those whose life is oriented toward accumulation. In France, for example, the terrible storms of 1999 not only turned out to have little macroeconomic impact; they were said to be, according to Denis Kessler, president of the French Insurance Companies’ Federation, “a rather good thing for GDP.” This is because the damages caused by such events for a highly developed country are relatively low – no shanty-towns in France, plenty of emergency equipment, etc. – and exceeded in monetary value by the funds spent on repairs, which tends to renovate damaged property in a more modern manner. As Hervé Kempf commented: “It looks as though the world’s economic decision-makers have decided to do nothing about climate change on the basis that if no change happens, we shall take advantage of a form of growth that continues to intensify the greenhouse effect; and if it does happen, we shall be able to protect ourselves from it – and it may even have a favourable effect on the global economy.” Describing the loss in Hurricane Mitch of 20,000 people who perished because their shacks were hastily assembled on hillsides and in the path of mudslides, Kempf went on to say: “Venezuela’s flood victims counted for little economically in so far as the country’s oil output remained unaffected” (Kempf 2000: 30).
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