From Climate Realism

By Anthony Watts

In The New York Times (NYT) article “Is Climate Change Making Inflation Worse?,” writer Lydia DePillis suggests that extreme weather linked to global warming is quietly raising the price of everyday goods like food, electricity, and insurance. The framing is, at best, misleading and, at worst, flat-out false. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon driven by fiscal policy, central banking decisions, supply-chain disruptions, and energy policy choices — there is no evidence climate change has altered in a way that impacts any of those factors. The NYT erroneously substitutes weather anecdotes and speculative projections for demonstrated economic causation. However, since instances of extreme weather haven’t become more frequent or severe in recent decades, climate change can’t be causing “inflationary” impacts.

The NYT opens by asserting that there is “mounting evidence that extreme weather is making some everyday stuff more expensive.” That claim is presented as a settled fact. It’s not. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) assigns low confidence to global increases in most types of extreme weather and emphasizes regional variability. The IPCC AR6 does not claim that extreme weather trends are uniformly intensifying in a way that would systematically impact global inflation.

The NYT then turns to food prices, citing drought in Eastern Europe and China, coffee impacts in Brazil, and ranchers culling cattle. Agricultural output, however, fluctuates every year due to natural variability. Long-term production data in the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s FAOSTAT database, shown in the figure below, illustrate that global grain production has generally trended upward, amid modest warming and the recent claims of the “three hottest years ever” from 2022 to 2025.

Commodity markets automatically adjust; when one region underperforms, trade reallocates supply. The NYT acknowledges that tariffs and export controls can amplify price spikes. That is policy-driven inflation, not climate-driven inflation.

When discussing energy, the article points to grid repairs and increased electricity demand during heat waves. U.S. electricity prices have risen sharply in recent years, but that’s not due to a changing climate but rather is primarily due to fuel mix changes, regulatory mandates, and grid reliability challenges tied to rapid renewables integration driven by climate policies. It’s not climate change, but climate policies that have driven higher energy prices. Historical pricing data available through the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) electricity database show that price increases correlate more closely with political decisions that cause fuel supply volatility and shifts to expensive, intermittent, wind, solar, and battery storage power rather than with long-term temperature trends.

The NYT also cites a study projecting that weather-related disruptions could raise electricity infrastructure costs by as much as 25 percent toward the end of the century. That is a modeling projection, not an observed cost trend. The United States has already experienced roughly 1°C of warming since the late nineteenth century, yet official inflation tracking in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Consumer Price Index database attributes recent inflation primarily to pandemic-era stimulus, supply chain disruptions, and energy price shocks, not temperature changes.

The article presents insurance costs as the clearest climate-related inflation driver. But insurance markets respond more to litigation environments, construction costs, regulatory frameworks, and development patterns in high-risk areas. Long-term normalized hurricane damage trends discussed at Climate at a Glance Hurricanes  show no upward trajectory after population growth and coastal development are accounted for. The same is true for rising wildfire costs. They are due to shifting policies on public lands and increased development in areas historically prone to wildfires, not significant changes in the climate in those regions. Indeed, acreage lost to wildfires has declined significantly over the past two decades. Rising premiums reflect higher rebuilding costs and denser development in vulnerable zones, not necessarily stronger storms.

The article pegs global warming’s impact at “between $400 and $900 per person annually,” but concedes the wide range stems from difficulty separating weather variability from climate change. That uncertainty is not incidental, it is central. Without a clear attribution chain linking long-term warming trends to persistent price acceleration in specific sectors, the NYT claim remains purely speculative; it’s not just that there is no causal link, there isn’t even a correlation between experienced weather trends and inflation related price increases.

The NYT further notes that U.S. commodity crops like corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice “have been less affected by shifting weather patterns.” Those crops form the backbone of global calorie supply. If staple production remains broadly stable, sweeping claims about climate-driven food inflation collapse.

Finally, the article cites mitigation policies, such as emissions trading systems and regulatory mandates, as contributors to rising prices. That is not climate inflation. That is climate policy inflation. When governments impose carbon pricing, trade barriers, or compliance costs, consumers pay more by design. Conflating the cost of political decisions supposedly designed to fight climate change with the cost of climate change itself obscures the true driver.

Inflation over the past five years has been historically elevated across advanced economies, driven primarily by unprecedented fiscal stimulus, monetary expansion, pandemic supply disruptions, and geopolitical energy shocks. None of those are climate variables. Economic research consistently identifies monetary policy as the dominant long-term determinant of inflation.

Weather variability can affect specific commodity prices in specific years. That has always been true. Droughts affected grain markets in the 1930s. Hurricanes disrupted supply chains in the twentieth century, yet sustained inflation requires sustained monetary imbalance.

The New York Times frames climate change as an emerging inflationary force poised to accelerate, but observational economic record refutes any such economy-wide climate-driven inflation trend. Weather anecdotes, modeling projections, and policy cost provide no proof of climate-driven inflation. Inflation is fundamentally a monetary and policy phenomenon. Blaming it on the weather may make compelling click-bait copy, but it does not withstand economic scrutiny.