BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet
By Brett Christophers
Published by Verso, rrp £22
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
In his memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, author Bill Bryson waxes lyrical about the US consumer boom of the 1950s. ‘I can’t imagine there has been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s’, he says. By 1951 ‘Americans owned 80% of the world’s electrical goods’. As a young kid born in that decade, he could open a comic or magazine and see adverts for hundreds of wee gimmicks, and could imagine a future full of flying cars and trips to Mars.
The UK was a decade or so behind the US, and I am 13 years younger than Bill, so I partook of a similarly groovy childhood – I could buy ‘sea monkeys’, action figures, gonks, ‘space dust’, and a million other dubious ‘gifts’. No thought was given to where these came from, who made them, what resources were used to gird our instant gratification culture. Parents acquired fondue sets, Bill’s mom got an ‘ice shaver’: like many of these consumer products, they did a job a more general tool did as well, or better, or were simply pointless, used once and bunged in the cupboard to be rediscovered in a decade or so and sent to a bric-a-brac sale, or, as likely, the bin. My mum had dozens of kitchen toys, most of which could be replaced by a small knife set and a spare tablespoon. Then the Cabbage Patch Dolls and Hello Kitty arrived, annually upgraded mobile phones, and even more built-in obsolescence.
My point is, the actual ‘use value’ of the majority of the environmentally dubious products of industrial consumer capitalism is effectively zero. Brett Christophers is concerned with how little regard the market has for ‘use value’, a measure that should massively favour ‘green energy’ over ‘brown energy’ (fossil-fuel). He notes that the ‘price’ for electricity, which he shows to be the most ecologically expensive and damaging element in our energy intensive economy, is not, as many assume, the correct measure of how achievable a ‘green economy’ is. What we pay for our electricity is not the driver for investment that many economists suggest. He describes how far behind all the corporate and capitalist nations’ agreed targets the greening of the energy economy is, and how investment is slowing, even when the unit price is dropping fast.
GREEN CAPITALISM IS A NON-STARTER
Profit, he argues, is a better measure than price in predicting how the green economy works, or, rather fails. He also shows how price can remain high compared with the fossil fuel economy simply because the latter has already paid for a global infrastructure. Even with subsidy, price fluctuations for green tech make investors nervous, whereas profits are baked in more steadily for fossil fuels. Thus, the drive for profit, under capitalism, generally rides rough-shod over technologies that are clearly better, often cheaper, and urgently needed, but less of a safe bet for profiteers.
Naturally, exceptions exist, where some investors are motivated to invest, based on the actual ‘use value’, for planetary survival, to shift as fast as possible to a greener and less energy intensive economy. There are capitalist mechanisms for this, such as ‘power purchase agreements’ (PPA). But, even for those few, facing actual losses leads profit to ultimately trump ‘greening’ measures, as does increasing demand for energy to run all those consumer toys we are so in love with. Even conceptually, ‘green capitalism’ is a non-starter.
‘Helpful’ mechanisms such as ‘feed-in tariffs’, which help stabilise price via interventionist measures, are also in no way guaranteed to shift the green economy fast enough, and are, as in the UK, subject to political and ideological vacillations – thus, here our government abolished the feed-in tariff in 2018, effectively suffocating much ‘green growth’. Add to this the media hype about subsidy levels for green tech, which rarely honestly show the context, such as what subsidies un-green tech and nuclear get, or the degree to which ‘externalities’ such as waste management might add to the ‘cost’ of traditional energy supply if factored in; and, add to that, the insanity of closing our steel mills and shipping wind-turbine blades from Vietnamese manufactories, owned by Indonesian companies, across the planet to the UK… no, capitalist models are not going to save anyone, not even the super-rich, who seem to think their expensive bunkers will save them.
BATTLE-LINES ARE DRAWN
As his subtitle suggests, his argument, which is very detailed and hard to deny, ‘capitalism won’t save the planet’, regardless of the claptrap the public is fed by politicians, energy companies, fast-food and supermarket owners, and the internet trolls paid to run denialist propaganda while their cash-cow corporate backers give public lip-service to ecological concerns. This nefarious and dangerous culture is not contingent, but fully baked in to capitalism.
As Edward Abbey said in his book The Home Journey, ‘Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell’, and I would go further and say capitalism is the ideology of an aggressively metastasising cancer, one that kills the host (in this case our civilisation and our biosphere) unless equally aggressively removed. Under Gove’s new ‘extremism’ legislation, we can’t expand on what that must mean without coming a cropper, legislation which environmental activists know full well is aimed at anyone that questions the capitalist doctrine of infinite growth in profit at the expense of the very matrix life depends upon. So, we are morally obliged to cross this government’s red lines.
In energy terms Brett’s suggested necessary course of action is also imperilled by the ludicrous new laws proposed: which is, to take energy out of the private sector’s hands. When Rishi Sunak, in 2022, ‘pledged to accelerate the UK’s switch to renewable energy, he did so explicitly on the ground of energy security and environmental benefits – not cost benefits’. As we all know, this was hypocritical hogwash, and has already been sold down the river. It is clear that any neoliberal pro-capitalist party is not ‘safe hands’ if we are to transition to a greener economy, regardless of whether those producing our energy are in private or public hands. Yet, the fact he felt the need to pander to a growing cry for energy security is important. However, without explicitly and urgently requiring a much less energy intensive economy, and globally, we are on a hiding to nothing. Battle-lines are drawn, a war is beginning, one that in all probability we have already lost whatever side you’re on.
The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet is available for £20 at Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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