The Price is Wrong

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

  • Hardback

    + free ebook

    Forthcoming

  • Ebook

    Forthcoming

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.

Reviews

  • Praise for Our Lives in Their Portfolios

    :
  • An illuminating interrogation of asset-manager society and its pathologies.

    John Cassidy, author of How Markets Fail: The Rise and Fall of Free Market Economics
  • If big banks were the villains of the 2008 financial crisis, big asset managers may well be at the heart of the next global economic trauma. In this must read book, Brett Christophers outlines how the world's top fund managers and private equity titans have taken over not only our portfolios, but the homes in which we live, the hospitals we go to when we are sick, the food we eat and the water we drink. Our very lives are now financialized - with disturbing consequences that have yet to be understood, or grappled with.

    Rana Foroohar, Global Business Columnist and Associate Editor, Financial Times