Brett Christophers teaches at Uppsala University. His most recent book is The Price Is Wrong.
In an episode of Seinfeld from 1996, Kramer and Newman hatch an ingenious moneymaking scheme. In New York, where they live, bottles and cans can be recycled for five cents each, but in Michigan the refund is ten cents. They realise that if they collect bottles in New York and take them to Michigan, they can double their money. Kramer spots a hitch: transport costs, including petrol and...
Around fifteen years ago, a new term entered the climate change lexicon: stranded assets. The concept was straightforward enough. If global warming is to be kept from getting out of hand, there is a limit to the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted into the atmosphere. Yet the fossil fuel reserves currently held by the world’s energy and mining companies would, if extracted...
Since the 1980s, Brett Christophers wrote recently in the LRB, ‘firms have made vast amounts of money by sending the rich world’s waste to the global South’ – hazardous waste at first, joined...
In 2015, a vigorous response to climate change seemed possible: even fossil fuel companies talked about transitioning to cleaner energy. But exploration and exploitation of oil and gas reserves have continued...
When it’s capitalism that’s the problem, and not markets, the only alternative is post-capitalism. But the central fact of the climate crisis is that there is very little time, and the scale of the...
These days, the debate about the balance of private and public investment in the Global South has been settled in favour of private capital. Privately owned mobile and internet networks, potable water...
Public land became surplus as the result of the state’s determination to shrink itself. At the heart of this project lay a brazen deceit.
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