An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological, or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency, and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines. Our common addiction to dirty, non-renewable energy sources keeps other kinds of emergencies coming: natural disasters and wars waged for control over scarce resources, which in turn create terrorist blowback.
Given the boiling temperatures, both climatic and political, future disasters need not be cooked up in dark conspiracies. All indications are that simply by staying the current course, they will keep coming with ever more ferocious intensity. Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market's invisible hand. This is one area in which it actually delivers.
—Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p. 513.
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