On this day, February 2nd 1992, following a leak from Friends of the Earth, Jornal de Brazil breaks the story that a “sarcastic” memo was signed by Laurence Summers, then Chief Economist of the World Bank, about the economic good sense in off-shoring pollution.
“Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]?… The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that… Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City… The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-five mortality is 200 per thousand.”
This just after the negotiations for a climate treaty to be signed in Brazil in 1992 had begun. Oops.
What happened next
It got mentioned during the Senate Hearings for Summers to get the Secretary of the Treasury gig in 1993. That’s about it.
Why this matters
As “satire” it wasn’t exactly Swift, now was it. And in the pre-Basel agreement world, many didn’t see the funny side.
See also – the wikipedia page, natch.