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Weekly transmissions from Adbusters, the journal of the mental environment

Hey Jammer,

What's in a price?

Raw materials. Labor. Equipment upkeep. Rents and fees. Supply and demand. Taxes.

Those things influence how much you pay at the till. But what about the cost of the wrapper you throw away, toxic run-off leaking into lakes and streams, carbon released into the atmosphere — in short, all the noxious side-effects of using or producing everyday things in a capitalist world? Who pays for that?

The short answer: We all do.

Not all costs are reflected in prices. The sorts of costs that harm the Earth — releasing pollution, toxins, or greenhouse gases into the environment — are called "externalities" by economists because, in our current (backward) economic paradigm, neither producers nor consumers are made to pay for them.

Instead, everyone on the planet pays the price of a world made less livable by the deadly cost of externalities . . . though you can be sure that some people pay a far greater share than others. And let's just say they ain't the same folks who run super-polluting, world-raping corporations.

The simple truth is that we don't pay for what we buy. And with every purchase of every item at every cash-register, this massive accounting error is slowly boiling our planet to death — and us along with it.

It's time to overhaul all our long-accepted (and now obviously failed) notions about how economics is supposed to work. To make this world livable not just for the future but for mere months and weeks and days to come, we need a radical new way to take stock of how every one of our lives affects this garbage-choked, carbon-clogged, gasping-for-air planet.

And that new way of thinking is called #TrueCost.

Spread the word about this mighty idea . . . one possible way out of the existential fix we're in. Confront the lions of the environmental movement with this moonshot metameme and ask them, Why can’t it work?!

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