People are beginning to notice the cost of politics on their electricity bills.
Fair enough.
Energy has become more expensive, and a significant part of that increase can be traced to years of ambitious policies that promised a greener future while paying remarkably little attention to economic reality.
Someone always pays for experiments.
It was never going to be the politicians.
Nor the consultants.
Nor the project developers.
Nor the institutions that promoted them.
It was always going to be the public.
It always is.
But your electricity bill is not the real story.
It is merely the first invoice to arrive.
Not even the largest one.
Not remotely.
You would have needed to spend the past decade living beneath a rock somewhere on Mars not to notice what has happened to prices.
Everything costs more.
Food.
Housing.
Insurance.
Restaurants.
Construction materials.
Repairs.
Holidays.
Everyday life itself has become steadily more expensive.
Official inflation figures acknowledge the trend.
Yet almost everyone who actually buys groceries or pays invoices has noticed something else.
Their lived experience often feels considerably harsher than the statistics suggest.
You do not need an economics degree to recognise inflation.
You simply need a supermarket trolley.
I am now well over half a century old.
For much of my life, inflation was something economists talked about more than ordinary people experienced.
Outside periods of travel, price increases were usually gradual enough to fade into the background.
That world has disappeared.
Today prices rise quickly enough for people to notice them without consulting an economic report.
A weekly shopping trip tells the story perfectly well.
So where did all this come from?
At its core, sustained inflation reflects an imbalance between the amount of money circulating through an economy and the quantity of real goods, services and productive capacity available to absorb it.
When governments and central banks dramatically expand the supply of money while the real economy cannot keep pace, purchasing power eventually adjusts.
Reality keeps the books.
The correction arrives through prices.
For years, enormous quantities of new money flowed into economies around the world.
Some financed emergency measures.
Some supported financial markets.
Some underwrote public spending that would have been politically difficult—if not impossible—to finance through ordinary taxation alone.
And yes, a substantial share found its way into climate-related programmes, subsidies, investment schemes and regulatory frameworks that would have struggled to attract sufficient capital under normal market conditions.
Cheap money makes almost every grand project appear affordable.
Until reality presents the invoice.
That is the stage we are entering now.
The bills are arriving.
Not in one dramatic envelope.
But in thousands of small ones.
A higher electricity bill.
A more expensive mortgage.
Dearer groceries.
Higher insurance premiums.
Increased transport costs.
A renovation postponed because materials suddenly cost far more than expected.
People often search for a single villain.
A supermarket.
An energy company.
A landlord.
A retailer.
But inflation is rarely confined to one sector.
It spreads because the underlying imbalance spreads.
The rising cost of electricity is therefore not the disease.
It is one symptom among many.
One visible reminder that for years we consumed financial promises that the productive economy had not yet earned.
Reality is remarkably patient.
But it is also remarkably persistent.
Eventually it reconciles the accounts.
That process is rarely pleasant.
And it rarely ends quickly.
The cost of political decisions is almost never paid when those decisions are announced.
It arrives years later, quietly, in the ordinary bills that millions of people open every month.
By then, the speeches are forgotten.
The debt remains.
And the public is left settling accounts for promises that once sounded almost free.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/07/16/the-cost-of-politics-is-showing-up-on-your-electric-bill/