The Geography of Industrial Harm

Industries that produce toxic byproducts face a choice: clean up, or find somewhere to operate where cleanup is not required. The second option has consistently been cheaper, and the history of industrial capitalism is substantially a history of inflicting costs on people and places with the least power to resist. Environmental regulation imposes costs on production, so if firms can move production to pollution havens with weaker regulation without losing access to their markets, they will. The result is that strengthening environmental law in one country tends to relocate production rather than reduce pollution, and the communities that absorb the relocated production are rarely the communities that consume its output. Labor costs, proximity to markets, and political stability often matter more than regulatory standards, but many cases still fit this pattern. The Bhopal disaster of December 1984 is the clearest example of the cost of differential regulatory standards. A Union Carbide…