Recently, its author Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, re-iterated this sentiment in the MIT Technology Review.
In the article, he explains that the failure occurs because “the price we pay for products and services that involve emissions of greenhouse gases does not reflect the costs they cause through damage to the climate.”
On the five year anniversary of this historic report, it is time to acknowledge that there is a market failure even bigger than climate change and it is much farther reaching as well: the externalization of the true cost of environmental impacts from products and services.