There are countless estimates floating around, but the figure I keep coming back to is this: the Climate Industrial Complex now extracts roughly $1 trillion every single year from the global economy.
It is, admittedly, a wonderfully round number. Economists, politicians, activists, lobbyists, and accountants can spend the next decade arguing over what belongs inside it and what does not. Fair enough. Once you have spent decades weaving climate policy into every corner of an economy, separating the costs becomes almost impossible.
And there is another complication.
Much of the money poured into this machine never really existed in the first place. It was conjured into existence through debt, monetary expansion, and central-bank magic. The bill only arrives later, disguised as inflation. Not the politely massaged official inflation figures that governments assure us are under control, but the inflation ordinary people actually experience when they walk into a supermarket or pay an electricity bill.
If you still do your own shopping, you already know this.
Prices have not crept up by a few percentage points over the last decade. In many cases they have doubled, or come alarmingly close. That is the inflation that matters. That is the inflation families budget for. That is the inflation no statistical adjustment can explain away.
When an industry commands a pie measured in trillions, nobody should be surprised that those feeding from it become desperate when the feast begins to shrink.
The old methods are losing their power. Appeals to moral virtue, endless declarations of emergency, and ever more ambitious spending packages no longer land as effortlessly as they once did. People are hurting. Households are cutting back. Businesses are closing. Voters are beginning to notice that every grand promise eventually appears as another line on their monthly bills.
And elections have consequences.
For the first time in years, genuine political alternatives are beginning to emerge across much of the Western world. Whether they ultimately succeed is another question entirely. What matters is that they exist at all. That alone changes the calculation.
If your income, your prestige, your career, or your institutional relevance depends on the Climate Industrial Complex continuing exactly as before, then you have entered uncomfortable territory.
The easy years are over.
The ride from here on will be considerably rougher.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/10/bills-trump-clean-energy-coal