What a magnificent opportunity.
Oil prices have crept upward. Not exploded. Crept. From around seventy dollars a barrel to roughly a hundred. Noticeable? Certainly. Catastrophic? Hardly. History has seen far worse without civilization immediately dissolving into ash.
But then, it doesn’t have to be catastrophic.
It merely has to be useful.
It’s hot outside. Not unprecedentedly hot—2017 was hotter—but undeniably hot enough that most people stop caring about numbers altogether. Once you’re sweating through your shirt, nobody asks whether it’s thirty-nine or forty-two degrees. Both feel as though the sun has personally declared war on your existence. And when you’re uncomfortable, patience for inconvenient details evaporates faster than rain on asphalt.
Unfortunately, those details matter.
One of those irritating little facts is that we still haven’t reached the forty-two degrees Celsius recorded back in 2017. Not this year. Not last year. In fact, not once in the years since. Yet every warm spell arrives wrapped in the same apocalyptic packaging, carefully delivered to justify another round of expensive interventions.
Summer, meanwhile, continues the scandalous habit of behaving like summer.
When I was a child, half a century ago just north of Vienna, we spent hot afternoons poking at the tar used to seal cracks in the roads. Once the sun had baked it long enough, it became soft enough to play with. Looking back, I don’t remember anyone declaring the end of civilization. It was simply another hot summer’s day. Heat existed then, just as it does now.
The real story isn’t the temperature.
The real story is what politicians choose to do with it.
Every fresh subsidy, every emergency package, every hastily assembled programme designed to prove that someone is “doing something” digs public finances a little deeper into the hole. Debt accumulates. Obligations multiply. The bill quietly grows while everyone applauds the announcement and ignores the invoice.
That is the part that should worry us.
Weather comes and goes. Fiscal arithmetic has no such mercy.
And if there is one collapse I would happily bet on, it is not climate-induced Armageddon but the slow-motion demolition of public finances by governments incapable of distinguishing genuine necessity from political theatre.
We have handed the controls to people who confuse headlines with competence and slogans with policy. They preside over economies they barely understand, bureaucracies they continuously enlarge, and budgets they treat as though mathematics were merely another opinion.
Financial collapse will not arrive because the thermometer briefly touched an uncomfortable number.
It will arrive because, for years, we allowed fools to run almost everything.
Enjoy the show.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/06/19/war-in-iran-and-hot-air-at-home/