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"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."

"Buying and selling life-supporting assets at a dizzying pace, the crux of the asset manager business model is not long-term investment and careful custodianship but the pursuit of quick profits for themselves and their investors. In asset manager society, the natural and built environments that sustain us become one more vehicle for siphoning money from the many to the few"--

In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination and sweeping critique of early-twenty-first-century capitalism. Brett Christophers styles this as 'rentier capitalism', in which ownership of key types of scarce assets - such as land, intellectual property, natural resources, or digital platforms - is all-important and dominated by a few unfathomably wealthy companies and individuals: rentiers. If a small elite owns today's economy, everybody else foots the bill. Nowhere is this divergence starker, Christophers shows, than in the United Kingdom, where the prototypical ills of rentier capitalism - vast inequalities combined with entrenched economic stagnation - are on full display and have led the country inexorably to the precipice of Brexit. With profound lessons for other countries subject to rentier dominance, Christophers' examination of the UK case is indispensable to those wanting not just to understand this insidious economic phenomenon but to overcome it. Frequently invoked but never previously analysed and illuminated in all its depth and variety, rentier capitalism is here laid bare for the first time.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Influences, Approaches, and Arguments -- 1. Competition under Capitalism -- 2. Exchanging Production for Markets -- 3. Law as Leveler -- 4. Designs on Monopoly -- 5. The Revival of Competition -- 6. Remaking Monopoly for the Twenty-First Century -- Coda: Back to Balance? -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Knowing the television economy. Enframing creativity -- Television's economy and the power of the geographical imagination -- Knowledge travels -- Conclusion to part I -- Capitalizing and circulating power. Power, scarcity and a 'spatial fix' -- Television's local power relations -- Power and program pricing in international markets -- Circuits of capital -- Mirrors, meters and media power -- Conclusion to part II -- From space to place. Geopolitics -- Putting television in its place -- The political economy of place in programming -- Conclusion to part III -- Afterword: into the home of media power -- Closing remarks

AbstractAsset managers have assumed a position of unprecedented power and influence in the control of essential infrastructures of social life, with broadly negative ramifications. But as the commentaries assembled here all insist, it did not – and does not – have to be this way. In this reply, I discuss the potential, as I see it, for the world to be otherwise, offering a rather pessimistic prognosis.

Abstract
'Rentier capitalism' is the term increasingly used to describe economies dominated by rentiers, rents, and rent-generating assets. A growing body of scholarship considers how the ownership of such assets by individuals and households is reshaping patterns of class and inequality and accordingly requires the reconceptualisation of the latter phenomena. The significance of company-owned assets and corporate rents for class, inequality and their conceptualisation has not been considered, however. This article offers an exploratory investigation along these lines, highlighting the importance of employees' working relationship to company-owned, rent-generating assets for their class position. The article further reflects on how developments in this regard might be approached from the perspective of Marx's writing on value, labour and class, and the challenges that those developments potentially pose to Marxian concepts.

Launched in 2016, Flood Re is a government-supported scheme for flood-risk insurance in Britain that is intended to pave the way towards an eventual 'free' market featuring risk-reflective pricing. This paper introduces the concept of 'the allusive market' to denote the figurative work that the market vision performs in this context. Alluding to the merits of what is in reality a highly implausible market-based future for flood insurance releases the government from having to substantively address intractable problems associated with the financial risk of flooding in the present: the market will come to the rescue. A risk-management crutch, the allusive market engenders contemporary policy paralysis, occasioning in turn the worsening of the very problems that the market is being relied upon, eventually, to resolve.

It is widely recognized that to limit the long-term extent of global warming and its socioecological consequences, the world must transition over future decades to a low- or zero-carbon economy. Among the many imponderables relating to this eventual transition is the role of the principal owners of the fossil fuel companies that are primarily responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions-namely, institutional financial investors. The investment behavior of these institutions will substantively shape not only the speed and nature of the economy and society's transition to cleaner energy sources but also the speed and nature of the global financial system's own parallel transition to a low- or zero-carbon world. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, governments and regulators around the world are increasingly concerned that the latter transition might represent a major potential source of future financial instability. These authorities are calling on institutional investors to effect an orderly and measured transition by fully recognizing the climate-related risks of investment in fossil fuel companies and pricing these risks appropriately. Yet they are doing so in the absence of informed, up-to-date, and meaningful knowledge of how the investment community actually thinks about climate change and fossil fuel risk. This article maps out the key lineaments of this thinking on the basis of an extensive program of interviews with global investment institutions. Contra government and regulator hopes and expectations, this thinking indicates that fossil fuel investment is set to be a long-term locus of excess, not minimal, financial market volatility: of environmental beta.

n endeavouring to deal with a longstanding problem of contamination of waterways in Washington, D.C. due to combined sewer overflows, the responsible utility, DC Water, has recently embarked on a two-fold, simultaneous 'greening' – firstly of the physical infrastructures being installed to address the overflow problem, and secondly of the financing of this capital investment. This article examines DC Water's turn to green infrastructure and green bonds in order to consider the question of how environmental and financial processes in general – and environmental and financial risks in particular – co-determine not just one another but the transformation of contemporary urban socioecological landscapes more broadly. In the process, it aims to inject a greater sensibility both to finance and to 'green capitalism' into urban political ecology. Through a critical consideration of the interlocking temporal, spatial and monetary dimensions of DC Water's two-fold greening project, the article shows that this project has served significantly to augment levels of environmental and financial risk, entangling them in significant new ways.