It’s the climate that makes everything expensive.
Or is it?
Because there is a rather obvious problem with that explanation. All that new, shiny green-energy bling has cost an extraordinary amount of money. Trillions, in fact.
And those trillions were not simply lying around, waiting patiently to be spent.
Some came from budgets that were raided. Some came from taxpayers, squeezed until there was very little left to squeeze. Some came from ratepayers, who were presented with a deal they could not refuse.
Literally could not refuse.
Regulation had pinned them down so tightly that resistance was hardly an option. You either paid or you stopped participating in the system altogether.
But even all of that was nowhere near enough. Not remotely.
So what do you do when you need impossibly large sums of money, but financing the whole thing honestly would require asking voters to pay the bill directly?
You find another way.
You create the money.
You print it. You conjure it into existence. You expand the supply of money and throw the newly created purchasing power at projects that would never have been financeable in quite the same way through ordinary taxation and savings.
It is a remarkably convenient arrangement.
There is only one small problem.
Money is not wealth.
And when more money is created to chase a limited supply of goods, services, labour, materials and productive capacity, something has to give.
The value of the money falls.
We call that inflation.
This distinction matters because inflation is often described as though the things themselves have somehow become intrinsically more expensive. Sometimes they have. Energy can become scarcer. Materials can become more difficult to obtain. Labour can become more expensive.
But there is another mechanism, and it is considerably less intuitive.
Sometimes the thing has not changed very much at all.
The money has.
If a basket of goods costs twice as many euros as it did a few years ago, it is tempting to conclude that the goods have become twice as expensive.
But that is only half the story.
The other possibility is that the euro has become worth substantially less.
This is not a semantic distinction. It is the distinction between prices rising because the world has become more expensive and prices rising because the measuring stick has been shortened.
And that is why the question deserves to be asked without the usual political choreography:
How much of what we experience as “everything becoming more expensive” is actually the consequence of the enormous sums of money created to finance everything we insisted on having?
The climate may indeed make some things expensive.
But it is not the only force at work.
And when governments spend, subsidise and regulate on a scale that requires financial engineering because the electorate would never willingly write the cheque, the consequences do not disappear.
They simply arrive somewhere else.
Usually on the price tag.
That is not the whole explanation for why life feels expensive now.
But it is a very large part of it.
A very large part.
https://phys.org/news/2026-08-climate-triple-price-wheat.html