POLITICO claims: ‘Climate inflation is here’ – ‘Climate change is already here & it’s already impacting our pocketbooks’ – ‘Climateflation is a key factor in rising electricity costs’
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-surge/2026/09/18/climate-inflation-01083586
‘Climate change is also making goods more expensive’
BY ZACK COLMAN
Excerpt: DISASTER TAX: Wars and tariffs may get the blame for inflation, but they have a costly accomplice: climate change.
The greenhouse gases blanketing the atmosphere are already costing U.S. households between $400 and $900 a year.
Wildfires are spiking home insurance premiums and lumber costs, droughts are destroying wheat harvests, and heat waves are pushing power bills higher. As climate change intensifies, those impacts are becoming a feature, not a bug, of the global economy.
But climate change is getting drowned out of the national cost of living dialogue, said Christopher Knittel, one of the authors of the 2025 study that calculated the household burden of climate change.
“What we’re trying to do is reframe the discussion from climate change being this thing we got to worry about decades from now to climate change is already here and it’s already impacting our pocketbooks,” said Knittel, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Climate Policy Center. “You know, $900 a person or a household is real money to most U.S. households. Those are dollars being spent already because of climate change.”
Those warnings come as officials from around the world prepare to meet in New York City beginning Monday for Climate Week, where climbing energy demand, and prices, will be a featured issue.
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But “climateflation” is a key factor in one of the top political issues today: rising electricity costs.
More intense and frequent wildfires are a leading cause for rising power rates in California, as utilities repair damage and bury power lines. Extreme heat is forcing households around the world to not only shell out for air conditioning — but also for more energy than they receive, since electricity doesn’t travel efficiently in high temperatures. And power prices spiked in Europe this summer when nuclear, coal and gas plants ramped down because drought deprived them of water needed to cool thermal systems.
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It gets worse: The U.N. Environmental Programme acknowledged that the world would fail in its goal to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius since the preindustrial era. That means more extreme weather and rising seas.
Climate change has already significantly curbed agricultural productivity, said Richard Choularton, climate and resilience service director with the U.N. World Food Programme. Droughts and floods wreck harvests, he said, and farmers strain to keep pace with shifting growing seasons.
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“They may experience a price shock that for urban consumers is really difficult to absorb,” he said. “Drought in India, Pakistan, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, the United States and Europe all affect global commodity prices that then get passed on to poor consumers around the world.”