The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet

Christophers, Brett

ISBN 10: 1804292303 / ISBN 13: 9781804292303

Published by Verso, 2024

About this Item

Bruise/tear to cover.

Seller Inventory # mon0000053719

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
• Publisher: Verso
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1804292303
• ISBN 13: 9781804292303
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

"Standard theories of the causes of climate breakdown will not survive this book. Readers will be all the wiser."
—Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Why the market will never solve the climate crisis

What if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not that transitioning to renewables is too expensive, but that saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable?

This is Brett Christophers' claim. The global economy is moving too slowly toward sustainability because the return on green investment is too low.

Today's consensus is that the key to curbing climate change is to produce green electricity and electrify everything possible. The main economic barrier in that project has seemingly been removed. But while prices of solar and wind power have tumbled, the golden era of renewables has yet to materialize.

The problem is that investment is driven by profit, not price, and operating solar and wind farms remains a marginal business, dependent everywhere on the state's financial support.

We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing. But there is an alternative to providing surrogate green profits through subsidies: to take energy out of the private sector's hands.

An essential intervention, The Price Is Wrong is as politically far-reaching as it is factually illuminating.

About the Author

Brett Christophers is a political economist and economic geographer, and the author of Our Lives in Their Portfolios, Rentier Capitalism and The New Enclosure, which won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.