This article is sourced from an important new book by economic geographer Brett Christophers. One reviewer rightly described it as "a bomb", blowing away everything he understood about current solutions to climate change. This is what economics should look like - taking a close look at a problem, providing a thorough explanation, ending with a convincing solution. In case you're time-poor, here's the key points up front. Everyone needs to understand these, because this looming failure to limit climate change will make all our lives much more difficult:

• Neoliberalism prioritised privatised solutions to the threat of climate change.
• Economists told us Government subsidies would drive down the cost of renewable energy, enabling us to phase out fossil fuel generation of electricity.
• Renewable costs did come down, but investment in new renewables stalled in 2022, because:
• Renewable supply is more intermittent and often located far from urban demand;
• Competition among the many suppliers is high, reducing expected profits for new renewables projects, which killed investors' interest in funding them;
• Electricity "markets" are complex regulatory constructs, attempts to create artificial markets when the distribution of electricity is a natural monopoly (one expensive national grid;
• The artificial "market" rules which prioritise electricity suppliers and set payment rates for the grid create extreme price volatility, and incentivise providers to rort the pricing system;
• The net result is a clear failure to develop enough renewable energy at the pace and scale required to avoid extremes of climate change, so fossil fuel use continues to grow.
• The only credible alternative is State ownership and control of climate-relevant infrastructure, including but not limited to renewable electricity generation.

Christophers' conclusion that we will need a return to large-scale State-led projects to avoid climate disaster is a positive note in a dark world, because it will contribute to building a new political and economic consensus. These policies are often called the Green New Deal, a reference to the earlier public works and welfare programmes created by the US government under Roosevelt in the 1930s' Depression.

Real Economics Is Driven By Profit Not Prices

Christophers is able to provide his clear-eyed explanation of how modern electricity supply works because he has a fundamentally different take on economics to the modern neoliberal orthodoxy. Instead of promoting an optimal ideal of free markets, he investigates where the profit comes from, since reliably high profits are the prerequisite to draw in the major new investment required to prevent a climate crisis.

Instead of accepting the oversimplified economic models and promoting the self-interest of the First World, he looks carefully at the structure and results achieved by varying approaches in use around the world. Lower production prices, like today's lower cost of renewable energy, turn out to be just one small factor in the wider considerations of the giant asset management funds like Blackstone which coordinate funding for large new energy projects. It's a real pleasure to read this quality of analysis. The depth of research, the wide range of industry connections met and well interviewed, the clear writing on a complex subject; all contribute to make this an outstanding book.

And he's so refreshingly down to earth in person, keeping his language simple and typically interviewed in a t-shirt. I particularly liked his answer to a question about his last book* on global asset management companies and whether they were pushing up rents after buying into rental property. "Well, their answer depends on who they're talking to. *Linda Hill's review of Brett Christophers' "Our Lives In Their Portfolios. Why Asset Managers Own The World" is in Watchdog 164, December 2023. Ed.

If you read their investor prospectuses then yes, they're very clear that they're buying into specific areas where there's higher potential to increase rents, with little new construction. But if they're talking to Government, they'll say that they have no market power, they're just following the market". Deliberate deception has become a core attribute of modern capitalism.

Returning to Christophers' approach as an economist investigating where profit comes from, he signals the potential for a whole new type of economics, a modern update on Marxism. Instead of economists debating the merits of monetarist wealth inflation versus Keynesian fiscal stimulus, economic analysis can focus on where profit comes and how wealth is transferred across classes. It is so clear today that the search for higher profits at the expense of traditional competition and reinvestment is the driving force behind the big changes in our global economy.

The Neoliberal Electricity Experiment

Christophers takes the reader on a fascinating deep dive into the world of electricity, so if you have the time, here's the gritty detail. Please note, this book is about global systems but the general points also apply to New Zealand, which zealously followed the US neoliberal model of privatisation, marketisation, and competition.

And to clarify first, though this is a book about climate change, the focus is only on electricity - but increasing electrification is critical, because it is the largest single contributor to reducing fossil fuel burning and carbon dioxide's contribution to warming. Still, this emphasis on electrification meant we chose a single, market-driven solution to a complex problem, and other options like reducing car use by investment in public transport were discarded.

The book's title "The Price Is Wrong" hints at the starting point for Christophers' investigation. We live at a time when nearly all Governments around the world have supported private companies to improve renewable energy technologies in the belief that this will lower their cost, allowing them to outcompete and replace legacy fossil fuel powered electricity generation.

That price is the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE), the average cost in present dollars of each unit of electricity produced during the lifetime of a generating plant. As you'll see, price is a small consideration in the complexities of assessing viability for renewables projects. Why then was price - specifically, the relative price to deliver renewable vs fossil fuel electricity - the overwhelming metric in public discussions about our response to climate change?

First and foremost, it reflected key elements of the prevailing neoliberal economics. Privatisation, markets - and oversimplified models which don't capture real-world complexity and dynamics. And that oversimplification served the usual neoliberal purpose - justifying Government support to create new opportunities for above-average private profits.

Gone were the early days of the green movement, where respect for nature and ecological sustainability were the goals. The new economic orthodoxy presented environmental problems as the result of unpriced externalities like pollution, so the solution was to put prices on everything, especially on carbon release into the atmosphere.

China's Alternatives Succeed, Those Of US And Europe Don't

But it was not these private incentives which created our biggest breakthrough, it was the power of the Chinese government to direct private companies and direct finance to research which lowered the cost of solar panels. Today, a staggering 96% of wafers for solar panels and 83% of offshore wind blades are produced in China, with prices in the US dropping some 85% between 2010 and 2020.

In terms of global renewable energy capacity, in the five years since 2017 China added more net solar and wind capacity than all of Europe's entire history. And in terms of keeping renewables profitable, China takes steps which are currently inconceivable in the West. Full utilisation of renewable energy suppliers is mandatory, inspection teams travelled the country to check compliance, mandated compensation for renewable operators where service was curtailed.

Revenue subsidies have now been removed, but revenue stabilisation continues. It's worth noting too that Chinese State support predated the Government's recent backing of greener energy; it was aimed at ensuring national energy security and creating industries where China could earn higher margins by being a technology leader.

The US, in contrast, does not have price stabilisation and has been content to rely on corporate power purchase agreements (PPAs), generating lower, short-term growth in renewables. Volatility continues to be high, financial hedging adds to consumer costs. Texas in 2021, as an example, saw prices rise from $US50 per mega-watt hour (MWh) to $US9,000 after an extreme weather event left many wind turbines frozen and inoperable. And why did Texas not simply import power from outside the state? Because in the richest (neoliberal) nation in the world, they have very limited links to the country's other two main grids.

And in Europe, when war in Ukraine lifted gas prices in 2022 to more than five times their 2016-21 average, the Governments responded with limited protection for consumers: tax deductions, price controls and transfers to vulnerable groups. Electricity markets remained unchanged, faith in markets was maintained. Coal-fired power generation increased by 6%, CO2 emissions from power by 7%.

And Europe did not cut back on gas consumption, it transferred its sourcing from Russia to the US at much higher cost. Their economies continued, because they could afford it. India and others were less fortunate as trade wars diverted gas to wealthier nations. It turns out that penalties of up to 100% are common in energy contracts with Western customers, while countries like Pakistan had penalties of 30%. Higher European prices more than covered those losses.

How Renewable Energy Works

Wind and solar are the only non-fossil-fuel-based generation technologies seeing significant growth. Their combined share of global electricity production exceeded just 1% in 2008 but had reached 12% in 2022, with more than 60 countries generating a least 10% of their electricity from these two sources. Most forecasters anticipate that nuclear will, at best, hold its share of global production at around 10%.

Unfortunately, for all that increased supply of renewables, we are falling further behind our targets because global energy consumption is growing faster than the supply of renewable electricity, driven in part by rising incomes, in part by new users like data centres - and partly by our decision to electrify everything to replace fossil fuels.

Wind and solar power are also not reliable generators: the wind does not always blow and the Sun does not always shine. The land component of their generating cost rises with proximity to the cities where power is needed, so using more renewables requires funding for a lot more transmission infrastructure to connect remote sources to population centres.

So, to deliver power where and when its needed, the power distribution network must source and pay for a diverse and flexible range of energy suppliers, and create additional transfer infrastructure which has to be paid for by someone. This is important for global progress; while Nordic countries may have the resources to socialise the cost of new infrastructure, many others will not, so global progress is slower.

Another less obvious but critical difference is that the Sun and wind are free, so the primary cost for renewable power is the upfront capital costs (80-90% of costs), translating to debt repayments, while the turbines and solar panels have relatively short operational lives before replacement. Fossil fuel generation includes the input cost e.g. oil or coal, so capital cost repayment is more like 40-50% of operating costs, while facilities have longer lifetimes.

Different regions start from different reliance on fossil fuels. In Europe they provide 40%, and higher usage. Lowest fossil fuel use in South America, dominated by hydro power. Fossil fuels still dominate power supply in Africa and Asia, with low usage, so future growth could be higher. For example, in India in 2018 alone, an estimated 100 million people gained access to household electricity for the first time, while current per capita electricity consumption in India is still one fifth that of China.

Who Develops Renewable Energy?

You probably think immediately of small tech startups, but no. The key reasons are the large upfront capital cost and uncertain future returns, given the relatively low profit rates for new renewables in the competitive generation market. Unlike many companies in other industry sectors, renewables operators generally do not have the luxury of funding major new capital expenditure out of operating cash flow. The most striking comparison here is with oil and gas companies such as Exxon and Chevron, which enjoy exactly that luxury. In recent decades, the hydrocarbon "majors" have been able to fund the lion's share of new exploration and development using profits from existing operations, relying only minimally on external financing.

Entrepreneurial companies stitch together the details; technology suppliers, land-use consents, longer term supply contracts to give income surety, and the all-important finance. But the majority of new project owners are large financial investment companies like BlackRock, alongside the established energy companies which own the majority of existing renewables and which are both generators and developers.

This last group includes both renewables specialists and companies with both fossil and renewable assets. If a renewables' energy developer needs capital from a financial institution in order to proceed with a new power plant, then it is finance capital which decides whether development will go ahead or not, so it is finance capital's motivations and machinations we must understand.

Creating Markets Where None Existed

First, we take a close look at the neoliberal electricity experiment. Inheriting State-owned generators and distributors in the 1980s, neoliberal Governments sold them off at fire sale prices to private interests and reshaped the whole sector to reflect their professed confidence in the efficiency of private markets, encouraged no doubt by the increased private profits made available.

There are four key features of the markets developed under neoliberalism: 1) the separation of electricity generation, distribution, and resale into different entities 2) private for-profit ownership 3) competition between electricity producers 4) markets determine the terms of trade, rather than regulation or public ownership.

But we need to be clear about the nature of these markets. Mark Christie, a commissioner of the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, put it this way: "The advanced electricity 'markets' we increasingly see around the world today, despite the label never have been true markets, but rather administrative constructs with some market characteristics". And Christophers: "it would be difficult to think of a sector in which markets are more deeply structured and shaped by State and regulatory design". And the growing share of renewables has had to fit into these existing market structures. This turns out to be pretty important.

During the previous renewables boom in the US, wind generation in the 1980s, the environment was very different. Electricity utilities were integrated at all stages from production to retail, without markets. The various companies were instructed where and when to invest, and were required "to serve all customers at cost-based prices in exchange for a guaranteed rate of return on invested capital, a model known as 'cost-of-service'". Haven't we come a long way? Thanks to the wonders of efficient markets, prices are higher, volatility is much higher, and productive businesses are shutting down in the face of these higher costs.

As Christophers explains, the story of electricity in recent years is the story of neoliberalism, whose watchwords were competition, privatisation and marketisation. These reforms were rooted in ideology and driven by State and quasi-State institutions, to the benefit principally of capital and its particular class interests, with that capital-class constellation having played a consistently crucial role in lobbying for the enactment of these reforms. A further consequence of this urgent drive to secure private investment in renewables has been central Government taking back control of land use planning for critical projects from local governments.

And this is a story with markedly different shades in rich and poorer countries. In the former, restructuring has typically been relatively endogenous - determined, designed and driven largely internally. In poorer countries, by contrast, far-reaching neoliberal reforms were widely foisted upon countries across the Global South in the 1990s and 2000s as the price to be paid for much-needed fiscal support from bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. For example, the World Bank's 1993 policy paper on the electricity sector laid out five guiding principles for lending. The third was clear: "The Bank will aggressively pursue the commercialisation and corporatisation of, and private sector participation in, developing-country power sectors".

How Markets Work - Or Not

Unbundling, the commercial separation of different parts of the supply chain, progressed furthest in power generation, and this was particularly true for renewable producers which were typically newer startups and less likely to be "vertically integrated", i.e. have a stake in other levels of the energy sector. The result is those providers face the greatest competition and have the lowest profits. And with lower profits there are pressures to re-consolidate to recreate monopsony and raise returns. Additionally, as the newest providers, they frequently face barriers to their connection to networks of power delivery.

Marketisation has similarly progressed furthest where the providers connect to the grid. These are referred to as "wholesale markets", in contrast with the "retail markets" for electricity consumers. The most important part of the wholesale market is a "spot" market, which trades power for next-day delivery. Ahead of a cut-off time, generators bid the amount of electricity they expect to deliver for each hour of the day. Supply and demand determine the final prices, which is the last bid required from a stack of supplier bids ranked by price. All suppliers are paid the same price, which is the highest cost supplied, referred to as the 'single-clearing price' mechanism.

This has huge consequences, the most obvious of which is the very high volatility we see in "market" prices for power. The second is the need to reconcile bid prices with actual delivery, given the uncertainty of recyclables like solar and wind power. Another complicating factor is the geography of delivery; marketisation has now extended across national borders, so that providers may deliver to another country for higher returns. Today, around 15% of Europe's power is traded between countries in any given year.

To understand the price volatility in more detail, recall that bids are stacked by price. Since different sectors have different costs, this currently results in renewable bids being taken first, followed by nuclear, coal, and finally gas. Since everyone is paid the price of the most expensive bid, wholesale prices match gas prices on any day where gas is required. Gas prices are already volatile, especially since Putin's invasion of Ukraine, so now price volatility can range from the stable low of renewable costs, right up to the peak caused by short term gas supply disruption. Recent European prices have jumped by a factor of ten in a single day.

In addition, generators may sell direct through bilateral long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs), either to electricity resellers or firms with large energy use. These PPAs are often critical to secure funding for new renewables projects. And there's more. In markets where the renewable sector has grown significantly, this puts pressure on the profits of established providers. As a result, Governments have developed secondary funding streams for a "capacity market", where providers bid not to supply energy but to be available in the future if required.

New Government interventions in volatile markets can also have unintended consequences. In 2007, Spain introduced price support for renewables producers, but all its key assumptions underlying the pricing turned out to be wildly wrong. The result was to transfer higher energy costs onto Government books and higher retail prices for consumers. Meanwhile, technology costs fell and the renewables providers made windfall profits.

In conclusion, US energy commentator Meredith Angwin had this to say: "They are not markets as we know markets. They are complex systems, with new regulations constantly tweaking and trying to improve existing regulations. They are a bureaucratic thicket, not a market. Electricity is 'deregulated' only if 'deregulatio' actually means 'lots more regulations'. 'War is Peace'. Orwell would be amused".

The profits of renewables generators are the products of continual, ongoing and rather haphazard efforts by policymakers to keep highly volatile profits within an impossible 'zone of reasonableness'. If profits are too low, developers will not invest; too high, and critics will call Governments out. And beyond that failure, there are the constant cases of market abuse which are too many to detail here.

Why Investment In New Renewables Collapsed

And once the price competitiveness of renewables was successfully achieved, Governments understandably began to withdraw economic support for renewables. They were surprised to see investment in new renewable projects collapse. What went wrong, and more urgently, what needs to happen next to avoid a climate crisis?

First, as discussed, profits were low due to high competition among producers. With the wonderful benefit of hindsight, how were we ever convinced that such massive change - enormous new investment in renewables sufficient to reshape our whole world - would be driven by a sector with low profits so the benefits could be captured by wholesalers, distributors and retailers?

Trying to engineer a boom in renewables investment on a world-changing scale, while retaining the profitability of existing renewables providers, and doing no harm to the well-connected legacy fossil fuel generators, in a volatile market. Let's get real. It was never even possible, just another opportunity for short term profits to the new kids on the energy block, asset management companies.

Second, it's important to understand the financial structure of new renewables investment. The companies involved overwhelmingly prefer debt financing to issuing equity, since the latter dilutes future profits and lowers the already marginal return on capital. Debt to equity is typically between 70% and 85%. Consequently, the recent period of high interest rates has been a major contributor to the collapse in new investment.

And comparing fossil fuels to renewables during inflationary times, gas producers' costs get an automatic buffer because high interest policies lower demand and gas prices. New renewables projects fail, faced with sudden, extreme increases in debt financing. The fundamental issue here is uncertainty - the general uncertainty of markets, and the specific, radical uncertainty of these artificial energy markets.

But the beneficiaries of neoliberalism weren't worried; they have continued their domination of policy making to double their wealth through inflation and covid disruption, with that expanded wealth further increasing their global political influence and power. To hell with the climate, we prefer short term profits and lifestyle excess.

"Feed-in-tariffs" have used increasingly in Europe to provide pricing stability. Not really tariffs, they offer suppliers fixed prices under long term contracts. But then we also need to factor in the rising likelihood of geo-political strife rooted in energy supply and security, escalating regional climate disasters, and neoliberal support for authoritarians around the world.

Slow-moving, stable Government ownership and cost-price energy pricing sounds so much better. Unfortunately, that is not the way the world is currently moving. China launched its first integrated regional power market in 2022, while the Indian government was planning for the share of electricity traded through their new spot market to rise to around 25% by 2024.

Christophers: "In sum, around the electricity world, markets remain the model of choice. The volatility that characterises those markets can be expected to become much more common, not less. This volatility, as we have seen, has profoundly important implications for the ability of renewables developers and their financial backers to confidently predict future revenue and profit streams. The result, absent meaningful extrinsic mechanisms of stabilisation, can be a dramatic chilling of investment - which, on a broad scale, would spell catastrophe."

The Taxpayer, Then The Consumer, Steps Back In

In response to declining new investment in the US, the Government provided a new subsidy via income tax credits. Under these deals, the banks provide capital to the developer, while the ownership structure transfers the tax credits to the bank. This helps with initial viability but doesn't deal with long term pricing volatility. Building up interconnection capacity is another pressing issue, reducing the cost and capacity to bring dispersed renewable generation to where it's needed, increasing utilisation rates and profitability.

The willingness of Governments to undermine the markets they created, permitting bilateral sales contracts, turns out to be the most important change because it provides pricing stability. Recent contracts by Norsk Hydro at Fosen and Google at Tellenes were fixed for the duration of the contracts, respectively 20 and 12 years.

But are they enough for taxpayer subsidies to end? KPMG said in 2020: "While the recent growth of global corporate PPA volumes has been steep, it is expected this is just the tip of the iceberg". Readers of Watchdog are likely sceptical of directions supported by KPMG. The end result may be the end of taxpayer subsidy, replaced by citizen subsidy as we pay higher prices forever, yet again giving asset managers a rent on another cost of daily life.

In Europe, the steep escalation in electricity prices in 2022 led to widespread calls for deeper reform of electricity markets. The European Commission has so far responded by backing the new PPA markets as an enhancement of existing wholesale markets. Unaccountable markets remain firmly in control. Energy giants like Amazon, Google and Facebook will drive the direction of those markets.

Amazon is one of the largest purchasers of carbon-neutral PPAs, yet its energy-gorging cloud-computing Web services business is growing so quickly that its overall carbon footprint continues to increase. As Christophers puts it: "It would be difficult to conceive of a more ironic statement on the warped political economy of contemporary green capitalism".

And, finally, "far and away the most significant reasons for caution concerning corporate PPAs are economic. There are far too few to enable corporate PPAs to power the renewables market at large" sufficiently to limit climate change. "The companies benefitting most from the corporate PPA market being a buyers' market are, of course, the big tech companies". And if they get good deals, generators don't. Large scale investment in renewables won't proceed at scale and pace. As a result, taxpayer support packages are generally being increased rather than decreased.

The Private Sector Steps Back

Friar Michael Crosby, explaining a shareholder question about investing in renewables at Exxon's 2022 AGM: "This company has to be making plans for the future". CEO Rex Tillerson's answer, to loud applause: "We choose not to lose money on purpose". Oil companies made unprecedented profits from higher prices after war in Ukraine. The time was right for the green pivot Shell and BP had talked up.

Both chose to use the vast surplus capital at their disposal to return money to shareholders via dividends and share buybacks. One researcher calculated that BP spent 14 times more on such payouts in 2022 as on "low carbon" capital expenditure. Globally, just 1% of the oil and gas industry's cash spending went on investment in low-carbon technologies.

Where We're At Today

In 2021 the Conference of Parties (COP) 26 conference advised that the current emissions gap - the gap between greenhouse gas emissions reductions promised and the reductions needed to achieve the 1.5^o C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement - is as large as ever. The 2022 Climate Action report identified 40 key emissions indicators; not one is on target for 1.5^o C.

Christophers points out that, in focusing unrealistically on the growth of renewables, we have been chasing the wrong target. The all-important measure is the reduction of fossil-fuel-based electricity generation, and that is still growing. The driver of this trend is the continuing growth in energy consumption in China and India, which accounts for four fifths of global energy growth. And fossil fuels, mainly coal, supply about two-thirds of electricity in China and three-quarters in India.

And a recent study in Bangladesh predicted that per capita electricity demand in Bangladesh will be 22 times higher in 2050 than it was in 2014, as many who have never had electricity get access for the first time. Across the Third World, the West's agenda is of shifting electricity from State support to competitive markets. Western institutions have pushed this agenda, fiscal constraints on Government spending encourage it, the sharp increase in sovereign financing costs after 2022 has added new pressure.

It should be clear by now that even in Western electricity markets, Government intervention and subsidies remain essential, prices and volatility are higher. In the developing world, this agenda offers nothing but disaster ahead. It is time to remove Western domination of global institutions, mock its self-serving economic models and market failures, battle against its monopolistic supply chain control, and start on the State-supported path to real development.

And citizens of the West should withdraw support from Governments which can't see beyond subsidising short-term profits for asset managers, while consumers pay ever-higher prices and the world walks blindly into climate catastrophe. Our failures to clean up electricity generation prove the best way forward is rebuilding State capacity and wresting excess wealth back from the corporate giants. Support only political parties with clear support for Green New Deal policies, which include rebuilding the vision and capacity of the state to manage public ownership of essential infrastructure.

Beyond The Necessary Starting Point, Rebuilding State Capacity

Christophers' focus in his book is to provide a clear picture of how and why the current model of private investment in greener energy is failing, and he achieves that brilliantly. This is probably the most important economic analysis you'll read this decade. He briefly points out the obvious in his conclusion, that only a return to State capacity and leadership can hope to limit climate change. But there are other aspects of modern capitalism revealed in his investigation of energy that need changing too.

First, the push by consultancies and investors for public-private vehicles, whether for energy, infrastructure, health, housing or whatever. These are short-term investment structures which offload the risk to Governments and turbocharge the profits of the asset management companies which set them up.

These funds put minimal capital in and typically charge 20% fees, with target returns of 12-14% per annum now standard - because they dominate large-scale new investment funds. The world desperately needs changes regulation which reduce this style of investment and incentivise genuine long-term investments. State-led and financed projects are far less expensive. If you'd like to read more or view presentations, the UK's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose Website is excellent.

Second, Christophers reveals the clear preference of legacy industries like coal, petroleum and gas not to invest in green alternatives, but rather to continue extracting excess profits from their control of key global resources. He points out that the world wasn't always this way. During past wars, Governments imposed cost-pricing on industry to ensure beleaguered nations survived.

Getting through the enormous expense of climate change will be just as challenging. The World Economic Forum estimates that cost at 12% of annual gross domestic product (GDP) for each one degree of warming. The time might be fast approaching when we have to impose State ownership back on power distribution, and cost-pricing on both State-funded renewable energy (to keep consumer costs down) and on legacy generators (because they've imposed too many years of excess profits on consumers already).

Third, our looming failure to limit climate change by believing corporate lies and accepting excess profits is just one part of this crazy, distorted economy we live in today. Neoliberalism is driving ever-higher levels of inequality in the First World, while confining the Third World nations to life under autocrats and economies limited to selling resources to offshore supply chains. The developing world desperately needs to reinvigorate nonaligned forums and rebuild democracy.

Fourth, since the targets are wrong, and much reporting against them is less than honest, what should the targets be? Two clear improvements are: 1) Shifting from high level outcomes which we keep missing, to specific reductions in fossil fuel use. 2) Shifting the focus from endless multilateral negotiations where vested interests ensure slow progress and watered down resolutions, to the specific agreements with the shortlist of nations which contribute the most greenhouse gases.

"The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save The Planet" was written by Brett Christophers and published by Verso, London (2023) Note: Verso, the Leftwing publisher of "The Price Is Wrong", lost £1 million pounds of sales revenue when its distributor failed. This is delaying the paperback edition of this important book. To survive, they offer good deals on PDF editions of their catalogue, which you may like to browse and support.

Watchdog - 167 December 2024