Methyl Isocyanate - Part 2
An excerpt from Joel Kovel's The Enemy of Nature
As I mentioned in part 1,
the following is quite long and some readers might be be a bit bored at first, thinking the discussion unnecessarily tedious. But, read on MacDuff1 and all will become clear.
The Enemy of Nature - Joel Kovel
Chapter 3 | Capital
A case study
There is a substance called methyl isocyanate (MIC), which does not exist in nature but was introduced into the ecosphere by industry in the last century. A simple but very potent molecule (CH3NCO), MIC is widely used in the manufacture of pesticides and herbicides because of its reactivity and deadly effects on living organisms. According to the website of the US Environmental Protection Agency:
MIC ... is an ester of isocyanic acid (HNCO). The parent isocyanic acid is a weak acid and exists in equilibrium with cyanic (HCNO) acid [the differences between the two HNCOs being in the spatial configuration of the atoms], MIC’s boiling point is yet to be clearly established. It is a highly volatile and inflammable gas; its vapors are denser than air; it is stable under dry and neutral conditions at room temperature but can violently react in the presence of acids, alkali, and the like. The carbon center in the isocyanate group is electron deficient (electrophilic) and therefore will react with electron-rich (nucleophiles), e.g.: water, alcohol, phenol, alkali, and the like.
Being denser than air, MIC vapor does not dissipate but settles on whatever is nearby. If exposed to water-bearing bodily tissues, it reacts violently, leading to changes that cannot be contained by the normal protective devices of the affected organism. The amount of energy released by the ensuing reaction swiftly exceeds the heat-buffering capabilities of the body. As a result, many molecules of service to the organism are degraded and/or thrown into disarray, while others that are toxic are formed. Put simply, the body suffers severe burns, especially of exposed tissues rich in water, such as lungs and eyes. Chest pain, breathlessness and severe asthma result immediately. If the exposure is high, blindness, severe bacterial and eosinophilic pneumonia, or laryngeal edema and cardiac arrest follow.
What has been said so far would explain at the physiological level why a person who inhaled MIC, say, as she slept, could become deathly ill. Within this framework, we can say that MIC “causes” the illness and death. Needless to say, such an explanation would tell us nothing about another set of questions, namely, why was the sleeper in such proximity to MIC, and more, what is methyl isocyanate doing in the environment in the first place, at so close a distance that it interacted with bodies? To repeat, MIC does not exist in nature; and were it by chance to issue from some natural source like a volcano, its fabulous reactivity would ensure it a very transient existence. How, then, does MIC happen to be present so that bodies are affected by its violent chemical proclivities? In other words, MIC can cause the illness, but not itself. There needs be a cause at a higher level of generality that brings MIC into existence and deploys it in certain ways. This property of being able to set other causes into motion is what we mean by the “efficiency” of a cause.
What “causes” MIC is the fact of being produced, through the conscious alteration of nature to serve human ends, in this case, industrial ones relevant to the development of agriculture. Industry, however, does far more than produce large amounts of strange substances; it also alters the human ecology, putting some people in its way, and serving others. Chemical science will be necessary to understand how MIC affects living tissue. Industrial production, however, understands science and nature in order to bring substances like MIC into the world, and to gather them for its uses, in this case, the manufacture of pesticides for the purposes of modern agriculture. To understand the full event, then, and not just the pathological effects on the organism, requires a grasp of the history and social relations of production, of its industrial turn, of the peculiarities of pesticide manufacture - and in this instance, of the reasons why so deadly a substance escaped sequestration and found its way into human bodies. And if the poisoning took place in many lungs all at once, why they all happened to be there together to receive MIC’s deadly embrace.
The reader will have doubtless gathered by now that I am referring to a very specific ecocatastrophic event: the release, on December 4, 1984, of 46.3 tons of methyl isocyanate from the factory run by the Union Carbide corporation, an American transnational with a pesticide-manufacturing facility in Bhopal, India. The gas escaped around midnight, and so it found the inhabitants of Bhopal, great numbers of whom lived close to the factory, sleeping. It is impossible to convey in words the suffering this caused. But some results can be enumerated: an estimated 8,000 people died on the spot and as many afterward, with over 500,000 injured, some 50,000 to 70,000 of those injuries permanent.1 People were still dying, fifteen years later, at a rate of between ten and fifteen a month, and today, more than twenty years on, the dying and disability continue, and the ruins of the factory still deface the city and leach toxic materials into the environment.2
The worst industrial accident in history, Bhopal has become synonymous for the hazards posed to human beings by the industrial process, and an emblem for the ecological crisis itself. To understand the cause of Bhopal may give a window on the cause of the crisis, not in the sense that this is to be composed of horrendous accidents such as this, but because in Bhopal’s magnitude all the elements of the crisis as a whole are concentrated. To comprehend Bhopal, however, we need to expand our thinking from the physiological dimension to include the role played by human agency, along with its ideological implications. Understanding this event, where not one but thousands of lives were mutilated, involves the judgment of competing claims and differing views of reality. Methyl isocyanate, as the active cause of bodily damage, is a mute killer without motive or interest in the outcome of its chemistry. When, however, we attempt to understand the causes of the accident at Bhopal, we need to think beyond the molecular level. For example, the element of money now enters the picture. It is not just the vast amounts at stake as a result of the disaster - some $3 billion in damages originally asked by the Indian government, with $470 million finally agreed to by Carbide (plus $50 million in legal fees, and $20 million offered for construction of a local hospital)3 - but money’s full power in human existence: in short, a whole social order is entailed, of power, and meaning, and the relationships between the actors of society. And now, too, we look for a kind of causation that would best comprehend these specifically human-ecological issues. But let us be concrete, and consider what happened at Bhopal that deadly night in 1984. Essentially, the questions come down to this: what was MIC doing in Bhopal in the first place? Why was it released in such a manner? Why were the people so exposed, and why so shabbily treated? And as for the responsible agents, what were the driving forces acting on them?
To the first question the answer is that Union Carbide put it there for its purposes, that is, the corporation caused the factory to be built where and when it pleased. In a literal sense, this is an absurd statement. Union Carbide is not a person who can put anything anywhere; and the actual people who immediately caused the MIC plant to arise in Bhopal were a great mass of laborers, architects, suppliers, etc., most of whom had no direct relation to the company but were hired by subcontractors. Yet we cannot claim that these workers built the factory except as the necessary but partial final human instrument, just as the tools in their hands were necessary but partial technological instruments. Therefore the answer to the question of what caused a factory, or any other social product, to be built would be: that which effectively organizes the social labor that went into it. And, since labor is the human faculty of making events happen, said cause, which organizes all the others, becomes efficient.
In a different kind of society, where workers controlled their productive life activity, or where, as in aboriginal society, the whole community did the same, we would be entitled to end our account of what caused the factory to arise with citation of the people who actually constructed it. But in our kind of society that statement would be false, since under the regime of capital workers do not self-determine their activity. For an understanding, therefore, of the social organization of a vast number of individual activities we would have to turn to that which commands and controls them all in production, and in this case such an agent would have to be the Union Carbide corporation, despite the fact that it is headquartered thousands of miles away and served to express the interests of individuals who need never have set foot inside India, much less Bhopal.
We may say, then, that the workers, etc., were the instrumental causes of the factory at Bhopal, while the Union Carbide corporation was the efficient cause. That is, Carbide was the agent capable of organizing and fruitfully combining all the factors required for the production of the factory, and, once it had been built, for the manufacture, distribution, and sale of the products, including MIC as an intermediary product. In any complex phenomenon, many causal processes are at work. But insofar as the phenomenon functions as a whole, we may identify an overarching, integrating kind of cause that sets the instrumental causes into motion, regulates them, and directs them toward an end - and the alteration of which would be necessary to change the phenonenon as a whole. Such is what is meant by the efficient cause.4
Each cause is specific for the level of effect it sets into motion. Methyl isocyanate is the efficient cause of the bodily devastation which ensues upon its inhalation, just as Union Carbide was of the factory at Bhopal. But what drives Carbide? And what of the incident of December 1984 and its social sequelae? What caused that, and how does this relate to the question of an “efficient cause”? Here is where conflicting views of reality enter most forcefully, because so much is at stake. Carbide has not denied that Bhopal is the site of its factory or that MIC is its product - in fact it is quite proud of the fact and the role it has played in the so-called “Green Revolution,” which has augmented food production in nations of the South. As the company laid out in its website, “Ironically, the plant at Bhopal had its origin in a humane goal: supplying pesticides to protect Indian agricultural production,” and more generally, to enhance the ‘Indianization’ of industry in that country” through its “willingness to offer expertise, readiness to comply with Indian laws, and acceptance of a gradual approach to developing Indian consumer markets. Union Carbide’s investment had gained us widespread good will - or so we thought.” Insisting on the integrity of its safety standards and quality controls (“a deeply ingrained commitment ... [with] stringent internal standards dating back to the 1930s”), the company is deeply distressed by having been “recast... as an archetypal multinational villain, exploiting India’s people and resources,” a “caricature [no doubt] designed to gain access to Union Carbide’s financial resources.” As for the tragic incident, with respect to which “from the first day, we had been moved by compassion and sympathy,” the company had done its own investigation proving that the cause of the disaster “was undeniably sabotage. The evidence showed that an employee at the Bhopal plant had deliberately introduced water into a methyl isocyanate storage tank. The result was the cloud of poisonous gas.” Alas, this truth has not caught on, apparently due to the Indian government’s “apparent indifference to the plight of the Bhopal victims.”
It is a coherent explanation: the disaster at Bhopal was not Union Carbide’s fault, but that of a disgruntled employee, compounded by the callousness and fecklessness of the Indian government. In this universe of meaning, configured by the ever-present specter of legal action and major financial consequences (remember the $50 million spent by the corporation to defend itself), causality equals blame, to be determined legally. A similar discourse prevails throughout the ecological crisis, which tends to get reduced to a series of individual acts for which blame - and financial allocations on the basis of blame - become the relevant criteria.
The discourse of blame, or fault, or legal responsibility, is essential when it comes to parceling out a degree of justice and restitution for victims. Nor, in this instance, is it difficult to ascertain, given the fact that patient investigation has disclosed a mountain of evidence relevant to understanding the fatal night. Let me summarize, to indicate the particular dissection of this one horrific eco-disaster, and to point a way toward a wider understanding.
• Carbide never named the saboteur, nor submitted its claims to a court of law under judicial rules of evidence. It rather deduced his agency from an analysis of the structure of its plant and let the matter rest at that.5
• The company failed to notify the authorities of the large amounts of MIC stored at the plant. More, they had designed the plant in a way that made accidents more or less inevitable, as by using carbon steel valves that corroded when exposed to acid.
• Prior to 1978, Carbide produced its pesticide, Sevin, without directly using MIC. It switched to the use of the deadly intermediate in order to produce more cheaply, and began manufacturing it in Bhopal in 1980. In fact, the German corporation Bayer made Sevin without MIC, in a safer but more expensive way.
• Local authorities urged the plant to be built in another part of Bhopal, in an industrial zone out of range of the population. Carbide refused, saying this was too expensive.
• The plant was losing money, because the demand for pesticides was down, and hence chronically overproduced MIC, which Carbide couldn’t unload.
• This led to an effort to cut costs, beginning in 1982. To quote Kurzman, “such cuts ... meant less stringent quality control and thus looser safety rules. A pipe leaked? Don’t replace it, employees said they were told. Just patch it up. MIC workers needed more training? They could do with less (including using instruction manuals in English, which few could read). Promotions were halted, seriously affecting employee morale and driving some of the most skilled to seek work elsewhere.”6 By late 1984, only six operators, rather than the original twelve,were working with MIC. The numbers of supervisory personnel also had been halved; while there was no maintenance supervisor on the night shift. Thus, indicator readings were checked every two hours rather than hourly, as required.
• In late 1981, inhalation accidents began appearing at the plant. Experts from the US appeared and warned of a “runaway reaction” inside an MIC storage tank. This followed other warnings from 1979 and 1980. Warnings from the Indian authorities went unheeded. In October 1982, a leak of MIC caused five workers to be hospitalized.
• The local authorities had no instruments to monitor air pollution near the plant.
• When the workers at the plant, through their union, protested the safety hazards, they were ignored. One worker who went on a fifteen-day hunger strike was fired.
• Although workers originally wore safety equipment, the growing slackness caused this to be jettisoned. More than 70 percent of workers were docked pay for refusing to deviate from the prescribed safety routines. All the while, pressure to keep making MIC as swiftly and cheaply as possible was sustained.
• The night of the accident, a leaking carbon-steel valve was discovered, which allowed water to slip into the MIC tanks. This was not repaired, as it would have taken too much time; in other words, would have been expensive.
• In addition, the alarm on the tank had not worked for four years, and there was only one manual backup system instead of the four-stage system used in the US. The flare tower that burned escaping gas had been out of service for more than five months, as was the vent gas scrubber. The refrigeration system installed to inhibit the volatilization of MIC was also idle, to save power costs. Nor was the steam boiler designed to help clean the pipes in active operation, for the same reason. Virtually every relevant safety instrument, from shutdown devices, to monitoring tools, to temperature gauges, was either in short supply, or malfunctioning, or designed improperly.
The maintenance temperature of the MIC was kept at 20°c, though the manual called for a temperature of 4.50 (this lower figure, needless to say, being much cooler than the average temperature of Bhopal, hence more expensive to maintain). In addition, “Carbide’s Bhopal plant was designed in such away that, after the deadly gas leak began, the main safety system - water sprays intended to ‘knock down’ such a leak - could not spray water high enough to reach the escaping stream of gas. In sum, the plant’s safety systems had been designed negligently. Internal documents show that the company knew this prior to the disaster, but did nothing about it.”7
• Finally, the tank that exploded had been malfunctioning for a week. Instead of dealing with it, the plant authorities used other tanks, and let this one sit, and, in effect, stew. One outcome of “stewing,” as any cook knows, is the build-up of pressure and temperature, both of which can trigger further reactions in suitable substances.
So there is no question as to who was to blame for the horror at Bhopal. Despite the crocodile tears and bleating protestations, Union Carbide stands revealed as precisely the “archetypal multinational villain” it tries to deny being. Indeed, the only question remaining at this level is why the firm was not held fully accountable for its criminal negligence. However, the issue of blame, while necessary, is by no means sufficient to grasp the meaning of Bhopal, nor does it clear up the question of causation.
MIC can be held to be the efficient cause of bodily harm, as its molecular bonds provide the destabilizing force to tear up the delicate balance of a living ecosystem. Just so is Carbide the efficient cause of the building of the factory at Bhopal. However, when it comes down to this incident, we see that Carbide is itself subjected to other forces, and that the notion of efficient causation requires that these forces be given their due. There is no mystery here: at virtually every point listed above we find that Carbide did this or that to lower its costs, further, that the “this and that” had the effect of summating the risks that the monstrously dangerous MIC (itself chosen as a product in order to lower costs) would escape; and that, further, Carbide’s blameworthiness consisted precisely in the callous and self-serving way it was prepared to put Bhopal in harm’s way in order to lower costs. Its evasion of legal responsibility needs to be understood within the universe of meanings that cluster about this prime necessity, from particular legal and public relations maneuvers to the whole international setup that makes an ancient and proud country like India so unable to stand up for the rights of its own people.
The efficient cause here, then, would have to comprise not just the particular greed of this corporation, but the system imposing upon it the never-ending pressure to cut costs - or, from the other side - to make profits. Carbide says it was in India to make pesticides. But it makes pesticides in order to make money. Being a quintessential capitalist corporation of the modern type, Union Carbide has to make money - and has to keep making it faster and faster - in order to survive in the world configured by its master, capital.
An “accident” is merely the statistically unpredictable end of a chain of circumstances. Therefore, accidents are continuous with a range of less spectacular but equivalently disruptive destabilizations. Where a sufficient number of “cost-cuttings-in-the-name-of profit” occur, there is an accident waiting to happen. At times, this may be facilitated or triggered by human error - possibly itself a product of the same complex (an under-trained, demoralized, alienated staff, for example). However, the “human factor” fades as an independent cause to the extent people are shaped and distorted by the profit complex. If we take Carbide’s own explanation to be true for present purposes, as phony as it actually is: suppose it was more than mere error that destroyed the plant, but a saboteur who maliciously set the gas loose that night. What shaped him, then? Was it inscrutable evil or the product of a chain of determinants within the force field of profit-seeking? Was he one of the workers who had been “disciplined” for refusing to cut corners, or fired for going on strike, or was he simply brutalized by a concatenation of causal factors descending upon him from a hellish human ecology? Was he psychotic - and if so, was this some kind of genetic programming, or did it, too, descend from the mass of alienations that comprised his life world, alienations in whose composition the dominant social system will be found to occupy a place at the end of every line?
It is not that other factors are missing from the network of causal processes that summate to cause an accident, or, beyond that, the ecological crisis itself. To the contrary, they must be present, inasmuch as complex events are overdetermined. But they are present as scattered individualities, while through and around them, a great force field shapes and combines them into the effective events that move the world. The more globally and in terms of the whole we regard these things, the less we think in terms of individual blame or look for the “accidents” that disrupt what is otherwise to be construed as a rational process. Now we inquire whether the process is rational in the first place, and whether or not in this light, “accidents are waiting to happen.” We also come to ask the larger question of whether the normal and non-accidental functioning of the system is in itself ecodestructive - in which case it is the system that continually generates insults to ecologies of one kind or another and has to be transformed. An attention limited to the particular contours of the individual event loses track of that larger pattern, of the merits of pesticides themselves, and more generally, the “Green Revolution” of which they comprise an essential part,8 along with the never-ending ordeal to which the nations of the South, like India, are subjected in the world system.
Then there was the payoff. On the very day that the Indian government backed away and agreed not to prosecute Carbide any further, as if by a miracle the company’s stock went up by $2 a share on the New York stock exchange. This seemingly small figure takes its significance from the fact that the settlement of $470 million cost Carbide’s shareholders only $0.43 a share. Therefore those who held Carbide stocks were, so to speak, richer by $1.57 a share after the company “suffered” the consequences of causing a nightmare to descend upon the people of Bhopal.
Footnotes to the original text:
1 Estimated deaths range from 2,000 to 20,000. This figure is drawn from Kurzman 1987: 130–3. For further summaries of evidence, see Montague 1996; also the website: www.corporatewatch. org/bhopal/.
2 Hanna 2006 et al. has the most recent summary of the damages and the resistance.
3 From Montague 1996: “After all the lawyers and Indian government officials had taken their fees and bribes, the average claimant received about $300, which, for most victims, was not enough to pay their medical bills.”
4 The notion derives from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where the efficient cause is one of four elemental causes, the others being the formal essence (in Plato’s meaning) of a thing, the ultimate material nature of that thing, and thirdly, the final cause, or goal, toward which a thing is headed.
The efficient cause is, by contrast, the source of a thing’s motion, which may or may not be external to the thing in question. Much of this exceedingly difficult text (actually a series of lecture notes) is given over to critique of Plato and other philosophers for not taking the efficient cause into account (Aristotle 1947: 238–96).
5 This passage, and most of the evidence in this section is drawn from Kurzman 1987. Kurzman, it may be added, approached his work as a journalist with no ax to grind, as revealed in a number of sympathetic passages about Carbide’s executive leadership.
However, the next item is taken from testimony given at the end of 1999, in the ongoing civil action suits in India.
6 Kurzman 1987: 25.
7 Montague 1996, citing Lepkowski 1994.
8 Shiva 1991. A great many people now reject the view of Carbide as to the merits of this transformation, which among other things has driven many rural Indians to choose pesticides as a means of suicide, usually because of their intolerable debts.
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The phrase “lead on, Macduff” is a humorous misquotation of Shakespeare’s line “Lay on, Macduff” from Macbeth; the original is Macbeth’s challenge to Macduff in Act 5, Scene 8, and the altered form later became an idiom meaning “let’s get going” or “after you.