Overview

What if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not capitalist profiteering from the energy transition, but that saving the planet is not profitable enough? This is Brett Christophers’ claim. The global economy is greening slower than required because the return on green investment is too low. Today’s consensus is that the key to curbing climate change is to green electricity and electrify everything possible. The consensus is also that the main economic barrier to clean electricity has been removed. With the price of solar and wind-power having tumbled, we are poised, say boosterists, for a golden renewables era. But the boosterists are wrong. What drives investment is profit, not price, and operating solar and wind farms remains a marginal business, dependent everywhere on the state’s financial support. Our predicament? We are expecting markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis, yet the profits that are their lifeblood are elusive. The answer is not to continue to cobble together green profit through subsidy. It is 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.

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All aboard this ride through the hidden abode of electricity production - it is not to be missed! With his signature knowledge of the financial and economic systems that dominate our lives, Brett Christophers here takes on a central paradox of the moment. How is it that investment in fossil fuels continues relentlessly, even though renewables have become cheaper? Standard theories of the causes of climate breakdown will not survive this book. Readers will be all the wiser. -- Andreas Malm Have we been looking at the energy transition all wrong? In this vital new perspective on the biggest challenge facing humanity, Brett Christophers turns the conventional wisdom on green energy on its head, with profound consequences for policymakers and the public. -- Ed Conway, Economics Editor of Sky News

"All aboard this ride through the hidden abode of electricity production - it is not to be missed! With his signature knowledge of the financial and economic systems that dominate our lives, Brett Christophers here takes on a central paradox of the moment. How is it that investment in fossil fuels continues relentlessly, even though renewables have become cheaper? Standard theories of the causes of climate breakdown will not survive this book. Readers will be all the wiser. -- Andreas Malm Have we been looking at the energy transition all wrong? In this vital new perspective on the biggest challenge facing humanity, Brett Christophers turns the conventional wisdom on green energy on its head, with profound consequences for policymakers and the public. -- Ed Conway, Economics Editor of Sky News This impressive book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand possible drivers of a green transition. Christophers articulates a theoretically and empirically grounded critique of the dominant paradigm in climate economics that relies on the mantra of ""getting the prices right."" This standard view misses the driving force of capitalism: profits. Firms and financial market actors invest not because of relative prices but because of the anticipated profitability. Green investments are no different in that regard. Recentering from prices to profitability calls for a fundamental reconsideration of climate policy. Should public money be mobilized to create private profitability for green investments? Or should we instead rely on public investments to defy the profitability requirement? -- Isabella Weber, author of <i>How China Escaped Shock Therapy</i> Brett Christophers' argument in The Price is Wrong that capitalism cannot deliver a decarbonised electricity sector based on solar and wind is as incisively made as it is crucially important. This book is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the economic issues around electrification. -- Helen Thompson, University of Cambridge, author of <i>China and the Mortgaging of America</i> (2010) One of the most insightful and clarifying books yet written on the relationship between climate change and capitalism. It's one of the simplest but most urgent questions in climate policy: If renewables are now the cheapest form of electricity production, why aren't we building more of them? Why are we still off track for our climate goals? The answer, Brett Christophers argues, is that the price has never mattered that much in the first place. Profit, not price, is what reshapes the world. Too many climate books rest on easy slogans or simplistic answers. Not this one. This is a sophisticated, entertaining study of a huge problem - one that everyone who cares about stopping climate change should understand. If you're an angry activist, a confused politician, an expert wonk, or a skeptical engineer, you should read this book. You will think about power, clean energy, and the climate challenge in a new way. -- Robinson Meyer, Executive Editor, <i>Heatmap</i> This is a masterful work of political economy that zeroes in on a major obstacle to addressing the climate crisis in the context of capitalism. As Brett Christophers compellingly and painstakingly demonstrates, in renewable energy sectors, expected profits are low. The corollary is the crucial role of the state in de-risking investments to ensure investor returns-and thus the timely buildout of wind and solar. But the public guarantee of private profits raises the question: why shouldn't the public own and control clean energy sectors in the first place? The Price is Wrong is absolutely essential reading for climate experts, public policymakers, and grassroots activists alike. -- Uhea Riofrancos, author of <i>Resource Radicals</i> (Duke University Press, 2020), co-author of <i>A Planet to Win</i> (Verso Books, 2019) and currently writing <i>Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism</i> (W.W. Norton)"

"All aboard this ride through the hidden abode of electricity production - it is not to be missed! With his signature knowledge of the financial and economic systems that dominate our lives, Brett Christophers here takes on a central paradox of the moment. How is it that investment in fossil fuels continues relentlessly, even though renewables have become cheaper? Standard theories of the causes of climate breakdown will not survive this book. Readers will be all the wiser. -- Andreas Malm Have we been looking at the energy transition all wrong? In this vital new perspective on the biggest challenge facing humanity, Brett Christophers turns the conventional wisdom on green energy on its head, with profound consequences for policymakers and the public. -- Ed Conway, Economics Editor of Sky News This impressive book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand possible drivers of a green transition. Christophers articulates a theoretically and empirically grounded critique of the dominant paradigm in climate economics that relies on the mantra of ""getting the prices right."" This standard view misses the driving force of capitalism: profits. Firms and financial market actors invest not because of relative prices but because of the anticipated profitability. Green investments are no different in that regard. Recentering from prices to profitability calls for a fundamental reconsideration of climate policy. Should public money be mobilized to create private profitability for green investments? Or should we instead rely on public investments to defy the profitability requirement? -- Isabella Weber, author of <i>How China Escaped Shock Therapy</i>"

Praise for Our Lives in Their Portfolios * : * An illuminating interrogation of asset-manager society and its pathologies. -- John Cassidy, author of <i>How Markets Fail: The Rise and Fall of Free Market Economics</i> 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, <i>Financial Times</i> There are few financial topics as deserving of more thorough examination than asset management and its myriad modern manifestations. What insiders often blandly call non-bank financial institutions are in reality the new powerhouses of modern capitalism. Brett Christophers ably shows that their dominion has increasingly extended from financial assets to real assets - the roads we drive, the water we drink, the homes where we live, and sometimes even the hospitals where we die. As Christophers points out, the broader societal consequences are significant. -- Robin Wigglesworth, Editor, <i>FT</i> Alphaville, and author of <i>Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever</i> Praise for Rentier Capitalism * : * Arguably one of this year's most important books. -- Will Hutton * Guardian * Empirically rich and theoretically astute, Rentier Capitalism offers a definitive account of a central feature of neoliberal capitalism: the resurgent power of unproductive assets. Spanning finance, housing, fossil fuels and the public sector out-sourcing racket, this will be a vital resource for anyone seeking to make sense of economic inequality and injustice in the UK and beyond. -- Will Davies Empirically rigorous and theoretically insightful, Rentier Capitalism is a fascinating contribution to the debate on the changing face of British capitalism. Christophers makes a clear and compelling case that the profits of some of the largest British corporations stem not from production itself, but from their ability to exploit their control over critical resources to extract economic rents. -- Grace Blakeley, author of Stolen Our economic present is supposed to be characterised by free markets, unleashed creative entrepreneurship, the free production and flow of knowledge, and the frictionless mobility of capital and production. Yet as Brett Christophers shows in this incisive and vital study, the supposedly long-dead rentier is the characteristic capitalist of our age, not the entrepreneur of neoliberal theory. Thinking beyond the cliches, and the standard statistical summaries of the economy, he shows that instead of entrepreneurs there are exploiters of ownership and control who underinvest in the future. The new rentiers are everywhere, passively piling up the returns accruing from investments, from land, from housing, monopolistic utilities, consumer credit, and the control of platforms, natural resources and long-term contracts. -- David Edgerton In this eye-opening, wide-ranging, and pedagogical book, Brett Christophers reveals the outsized role that rents play in today's economy - from natural resources to intellectual property, from land to finance, from infrastructure to digital platforms. This is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding modern-day capitalism. -- Gabriel Zucman coauthor of <i>The Triumph of Injustice</i> Brett Christophers' comprehensive study of the dominance of rent will change how we think about inequality. Contemporary capitalism relies more on controlling something valuable than it does on making something valuable. Rentier Capitalism is a brilliant and indispensable book. -- Jodi Dean If you want to understand the complexities of modern capitalism, there is no better place to start than Brett Christophers' ambitious new exploration of rentierism. Unique in examining this phenomenon across its multiple facets, Christophers' insightful analysis reveals the inner workings of rentier capitalism with grit and detail. This is essential reading for all serious students of political economy. -- Greta R. Krippner, University of Michigan At last! For some years the great and the good have been muttering about the rentierisation of the economy, without really defining what they mean. What is rentier capitalism and what do we do about it? How did capitalism go from being all about 'doing' to all about 'having'? These are some of the most important questions we should be pondering in the coming years. And now, finally, we have a book that defines this crucial trend and provides a forensic analysis of it. An insightful, fascinating read. -- Ed Conway, Sky News Economics Editor, <i>Times</i> columnist, and author of <i>The Summit</i> To understand the inequalities of wealth and power that define contemporary capitalism, read this important book. Rentierism shapes every sphere of our shared lives, Christophers shows, from energy to real estate, aerospace to health care, and entertainment to Airbnb. Tracing the different way each sector is organized to compel payments to those who monopolize its key assets, the book explains how rent takes multiple forms. It is this variability that allows capitalism's extraordinary profits-and inequalities-to be generated at every juncture. -- Timothy Mitchell An essential read for anyone thinking about what UK governments might need to do differently as the pandemic upends the economy, and people's jobs, without doubt feeding an appetite for some significant change in the philosophy of public policy. -- Diane Coyle, <i>Enlightened Economist</i> Praise for The New Enclosure * : * If you're interested in Britain, you must read this painstaking survey of land privatisation since the Thatcher era. -- Will Self * The Guardian * The detailed case for an English Land Commission, and the need for so many other new radical ideas not yet even first thought of. Why don't we surround London and fill the Home Counties with National Parks where the landowner has to look after the footpaths and cycle paths and over which we all have a right to roam? The New Enclosure raises, but does not yet answer the question of from where the new commons will arise. -- Danny Dorling This book forcefully explains how land ownership matters today. The New Enclosure combines a systematic analysis of the role of land and landownership in capitalist society with a compelling critique of neoliberalism in Britain. Christophers demonstrates that recent decades have seen a massive transfer of public land into private control. He documents the overwhelmingly negative and unjust consequences of this new process of enclosure and demolishes the ideology of privatization upon which it is based. No one who cares about the politics of land can ignore this powerful argument. -- David Madden British taxpayers have been robbed blind by the recent fire sale of 400 billion pounds of public land. Like Henry VIII's destruction of the monasteries, Thatcher's privatisation frenzy has led to the destruction of public assets unprecedented amongst leading economies, and to the enrichment of landowners and financiers. In this comprehensive and rigorously researched book, Brett Christophers opens up a field of study - public land - largely buried by academia, landowners and no doubt, by financiers. A must-read. -- Ann Pettifor With his carefully crafted and meticulously researched study, he has made an essential contribution to our understanding of politics and government in modern Britain. -- Adam Tooze * Financial Times * Eye-opening. Or perhaps jaw dropping. [The] subject is the privatization of publicly-owned land in Britain since the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher. Christophers, a professor of economic geography at the University of Uppsala is a consistently interesting thinker. -- Diane Coyle, <i>The Enlightened Economist</i>

"[Christophers] turns his sceptical gaze on climate change, and the attempts of western governments to nudge consumers away from fossil fuels ... masterly -- Jonathan Ford * Financial Times * The Price Is Wrong rejects the orthodox reasoning that a mix of technological innovation and market wizardry will be enough to save the Earth. -- Randeep Ramesh * Guardian * Christophers's provocative yet persuasive thesis posits that the low profitability of renewables is a feature not a bug of our energy systems ... The problem is not that grubby capitalists are growing fat off the free fruits of the land and sea but that there is not enough profit guaranteed in renewables to satisfy investors and, most significantly, bankers. -- Peter Geoghegan * Times Literary Supplement * All aboard this ride through the hidden abode of electricity production - it is not to be missed! With his signature knowledge of the financial and economic systems that dominate our lives, Brett Christophers here takes on a central paradox of the moment. How is it that investment in fossil fuels continues relentlessly, even though renewables have become cheaper? Standard theories of the causes of climate breakdown will not survive this book. Readers will be all the wiser. -- Andreas Malm Despite its simplicity, Christophers's account is a quietly radical one that contravenes the received wisdom of not only the technocrats, mainstream economists and free marketeers who tout the wonders of the market, but also many on the left, for whom the problem with profits is typically their being far too high. -- Adrienne Buller * New Statesman * [Christophers] turns his sceptical gaze on climate change, and the attempts of western governments to nudge consumers away from fossil fuels ... masterly -- Jonathan Ford * Financial Times * Powerful and intuitive ... The book is as much a plea for economists to show humility as much as it is a rallying cry for market reforms and an expanded role for the state. -- Mehreen Khan * Times * Have we been looking at the energy transition all wrong? In this vital new perspective on the biggest challenge facing humanity, Brett Christophers turns the conventional wisdom on green energy on its head, with profound consequences for policymakers and the public. -- Ed Conway, Economics Editor of Sky News This impressive book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand possible drivers of a green transition. Christophers articulates a theoretically and empirically grounded critique of the dominant paradigm in climate economics that relies on the mantra of ""getting the prices right."" This standard view misses the driving force of capitalism: profits. Firms and financial market actors invest not because of relative prices but because of the anticipated profitability. Green investments are no different in that regard. Recentering from prices to profitability calls for a fundamental reconsideration of climate policy. Should public money be mobilized to create private profitability for green investments? Or should we instead rely on public investments to defy the profitability requirement? -- Isabella Weber, author of <i>How China Escaped Shock Therapy</i> Brett Christophers' argument in The Price is Wrong that capitalism cannot deliver a decarbonised electricity sector based on solar and wind is as incisively made as it is crucially important. This book is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the economic issues around electrification. -- Helen Thompson, University of Cambridge, author of <i>China and the Mortgaging of America</i> (2010) One of the most insightful and clarifying books yet written on the relationship between climate change and capitalism. It's one of the simplest but most urgent questions in climate policy: If renewables are now the cheapest form of electricity production, why aren't we building more of them? Why are we still off track for our climate goals? The answer, Brett Christophers argues, is that the price has never mattered that much in the first place. Profit, not price, is what reshapes the world. Too many climate books rest on easy slogans or simplistic answers. Not this one. This is a sophisticated, entertaining study of a huge problem - one that everyone who cares about stopping climate change should understand. If you're an angry activist, a confused politician, an expert wonk, or a skeptical engineer, you should read this book. You will think about power, clean energy, and the climate challenge in a new way. -- Robinson Meyer, Executive Editor, <i>Heatmap</i> This is a masterful work of political economy that zeroes in on a major obstacle to addressing the climate crisis in the context of capitalism. As Brett Christophers compellingly and painstakingly demonstrates, in renewable energy sectors, expected profits are low. The corollary is the crucial role of the state in de-risking investments to ensure investor returns-and thus the timely buildout of wind and solar. But the public guarantee of private profits raises the question: why shouldn't the public own and control clean energy sectors in the first place? The Price is Wrong is absolutely essential reading for climate experts, public policymakers, and grassroots activists alike. -- Thea Riofrancos, author of <i>Resource Radicals</i> (Duke University Press, 2020), co-author of <i>A Planet to Win</i> (Verso Books, 2019) and currently writing <i>Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism</i> (W.W. Norton) This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why capitalism poses an such an extraordinary obstacle to real progress against climate breakdown. Don't miss it. -- Jason Hickel, author of <i>Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World</i> One of the most persuasive and rigorously analytical thinkers of our present age ... [The Price is Wrong] is a work of profound scholarship and the utmost importance. -- Charlie Baker * Spear's Magazine * Fascinating ... I'd commend The Price is Wrong to anybody interested in energy transition, and more broadly in the dysfunctions of modern capitalism. -- Diane Coyle * Enlightenment Economics * Christophers ... is the rare academic who can weave references to Italian radical Antonio Gramsci into fine-grained analysis of feed-in tariffs or offshore wind contracts. -- Lee Harris * Financial Times *"

"Praise for Our Lives in Their Portfolios * : * An illuminating interrogation of asset-manager society and its pathologies. -- John Cassidy, author of <i>How Markets Fail: The Rise and Fall of Free Market Economics</i> 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, <i>Financial Times</i> There are few financial topics as deserving of more thorough examination than asset management and its myriad modern manifestations. What insiders often blandly call ""non-bank financial institutions"" are in reality the new powerhouses of modern capitalism. Brett Christophers ably shows that their dominion has increasingly extended from financial assets to ""real"" assets - the roads we drive, the water we drink, the homes where we live, and sometimes even the hospitals where we die. As Christophers points out, the broader societal consequences are significant. -- Robin Wigglesworth, Editor, <i>FT</i> Alphaville, and author of <i>Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever</i> Praise for Rentier Capitalism * : * Arguably one of this year's most important books. -- Will Hutton * Guardian * Empirically rich and theoretically astute, Rentier Capitalism offers a definitive account of a central feature of neoliberal capitalism: the resurgent power of unproductive assets. Spanning finance, housing, fossil fuels and the public sector out-sourcing racket, this will be a vital resource for anyone seeking to make sense of economic inequality and injustice in the UK and beyond. -- Will Davies Empirically rigorous and theoretically insightful, Rentier Capitalism is a fascinating contribution to the debate on the changing face of British capitalism. Christophers makes a clear and compelling case that the profits of some of the largest British corporations stem not from production itself, but from their ability to exploit their control over critical resources to extract economic rents. -- Grace Blakeley, author of Stolen Our economic present is supposed to be characterised by free markets, unleashed creative entrepreneurship, the free production and flow of knowledge, and the frictionless mobility of capital and production. Yet as Brett Christophers shows in this incisive and vital study, the supposedly long-dead rentier is the characteristic capitalist of our age, not the entrepreneur of neoliberal theory. Thinking beyond the clichés, and the standard statistical summaries of the economy, he shows that instead of entrepreneurs there are exploiters of ownership and control who underinvest in the future. The new rentiers are everywhere, passively piling up the returns accruing from investments, from land, from housing, monopolistic utilities, consumer credit, and the control of platforms, natural resources and long-term contracts. -- David Edgerton In this eye-opening, wide-ranging, and pedagogical book, Brett Christophers reveals the outsized role that rents play in today's economy - from natural resources to intellectual property, from land to finance, from infrastructure to digital platforms. This is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding modern-day capitalism. -- Gabriel Zucman coauthor of <i>The Triumph of Injustice</i> Brett Christophers' comprehensive study of the dominance of rent will change how we think about inequality. Contemporary capitalism relies more on controlling something valuable than it does on making something valuable. Rentier Capitalism is a brilliant and indispensable book. -- Jodi Dean If you want to understand the complexities of modern capitalism, there is no better place to start than Brett Christophers' ambitious new exploration of rentierism. Unique in examining this phenomenon across its multiple facets, Christophers' insightful analysis reveals the inner workings of rentier capitalism with grit and detail. This is essential reading for all serious students of political economy. -- Greta R. Krippner, University of Michigan At last! For some years the great and the good have been muttering about the rentierisation of the economy, without really defining what they mean. What is rentier capitalism and what do we do about it? How did capitalism go from being all about 'doing' to all about 'having'? These are some of the most important questions we should be pondering in the coming years. And now, finally, we have a book that defines this crucial trend and provides a forensic analysis of it. An insightful, fascinating read. -- Ed Conway, Sky News Economics Editor, <i>Times</i> columnist, and author of <i>The Summit</i> To understand the inequalities of wealth and power that define contemporary capitalism, read this important book. Rentierism shapes every sphere of our shared lives, Christophers shows, from energy to real estate, aerospace to health care, and entertainment to Airbnb. Tracing the different way each sector is organized to compel payments to those who monopolize its key assets, the book explains how rent takes multiple forms. It is this variability that allows capitalism's extraordinary profits-and inequalities-to be generated at every juncture. -- Timothy Mitchell An essential read for anyone thinking about what UK governments might need to do differently as the pandemic upends the economy, and people's jobs, without doubt feeding an appetite for some significant change in the philosophy of public policy. -- Diane Coyle, <i>Enlightened Economist</i> Praise for The New Enclosure * : * If you're interested in Britain, you must read this painstaking survey of land privatisation since the Thatcher era. -- Will Self * The Guardian * The detailed case for an English Land Commission, and the need for so many other new radical ideas not yet even first thought of. Why don't we surround London and fill the Home Counties with National Parks where the landowner has to look after the footpaths and cycle paths and over which we all have a right to roam? The New Enclosure raises, but does not yet answer the question of from where the new commons will arise. -- Danny Dorling This book forcefully explains how land ownership matters today. The New Enclosure combines a systematic analysis of the role of land and landownership in capitalist society with a compelling critique of neoliberalism in Britain. Christophers demonstrates that recent decades have seen a massive transfer of public land into private control. He documents the overwhelmingly negative and unjust consequences of this new process of enclosure and demolishes the ideology of privatization upon which it is based. No one who cares about the politics of land can ignore this powerful argument. -- David Madden British taxpayers have been robbed blind by the recent fire sale of 400 billion pounds of public land. Like Henry VIII's destruction of the monasteries, Thatcher's privatisation frenzy has led to the destruction of public assets unprecedented amongst leading economies, and to the enrichment of landowners and financiers. In this comprehensive and rigorously researched book, Brett Christophers opens up a field of study - public land - largely buried by academia, landowners and no doubt, by financiers. A must-read. -- Ann Pettifor With his carefully crafted and meticulously researched study, he has made an essential contribution to our understanding of politics and government in modern Britain. -- Adam Tooze * Financial Times * Eye-opening. Or perhaps jaw dropping. [The] subject is the privatization of publicly-owned land in Britain since the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher. Christophers, a professor of economic geography at the University of Uppsala is a consistently interesting thinker. -- Diane Coyle, <i>The Enlightened Economist</i>"

Author Information

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

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