In a thoroughly screwed and technically correct sense, the headline is true: people make less money because of climate change. But not because of climate change in any physical, meteorological, or planetary sense. What is actually reducing disposable income is not the climate itself, but the crushing cost of the supposed solution to it.
The bill for all this green bling has to be paid somehow. Wind farms, solar subsidies, grid overhauls, compliance bureaucracies, transition funds, consultants, think tanks, and the endless layer cake of regulation do not materialize out of moral virtue. They require money. At first, governments went for the obvious sources: taxes and higher energy costs for consumers. That worked for a while—until it didn’t.
Very quickly, it became clear that this wouldn’t be enough. The scale of the project demanded a much bigger spigot of cash. And conveniently, one was found. Governments all over the world simply started printing the money. Digitally, of course. Clean, abstract, and politically painless—at least at the beginning.
More money meant more green projects. More announcements. More targets. More self-congratulation. It also meant that inflation, which had long been treated as a theoretical exercise discussed by economists with charts and caveats, would eventually turn into something very real. Something people would feel every time they bought food, paid rent, filled their cars, or opened an energy bill.
That moment has now arrived.
Life has become unaffordable for a large portion of the population. And even those who can still cope often do so only barely, by cutting back, postponing, or pretending this is all temporary. Wages haven’t kept up. Savings are being quietly eaten alive. “Doing fine” increasingly means “not collapsing yet.”
So yes—climate change has made people poorer. Not the real version, but the narrative version. Not rising temperatures, but rising costs. Not physics, but policy. For the same work, people now have less money in their hands, less margin for error, and less patience for lectures about how this is all for their own good.
The planet may or may not be saved. But the middle class is being carefully, methodically priced out of existence.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/01/16/false-and-absurd-the-bbcs-fantasy-of-climate-driven-pay-cuts/