Americans blame climate change for energy-cost spikes

Americans blame – A new Yale survey shows two-thirds of US voters say global warming affects the cost of living, with a majority linking climate change to higher grocery bills, utility costs, and home insurance. Researchers who analyzed climate-related impacts estimate families

On a scorching day when the air conditioner finally becomes a necessity, it doesn’t feel like an abstract debate. It feels like a bill.

For more than a generation, American politicians have treated climate action as a risky bet—assuming they could get blamed for the costs. But the price of that delay is showing up in monthly expenses, as extreme flooding, fires, and heat strain household budgets.

“What’s striking is that already. households are bearing serious costs. ” said Kimberly Clausing. a law professor at the University of California. Los Angeles. Clausing co-authored a paper earlier this year finding that families are paying between $400 and $900 more each year because of the effects of climate change. In the 10 percent hardest-hit counties—many of them in Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, Colorado, and California—the costs rise above $1,300.

“Geographically rural areas are actually facing some of the highest costs.”

That reality is landing as broader inflation pressure mounts. On Wednesday. the Commerce Department reported that the annual inflation rate reached 4.2 percent in May. the highest rate in three years. The war in Iran is mostly responsible for this increase. but a surprising number of Americans are still tying the economic pinch they feel to a changing climate. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s new survey finds that two-thirds of US voters say global warming is affecting the cost of living to some degree. including most Democrats and moderate Republicans.

Among the voters who say global warming is driving costs, a majority also say it is pushing up what they pay for groceries, utility bills, and home insurance.

Rising energy prices sit at the center of that unease. and climate advocates are leaning into it as the midterm election approaches in November. On Monday. the LCV Victory Fund. a political action committee. announced it will target “energy bill voters” with messages arguing that clean. affordable energy can trim monthly expenses. and that Republicans have held back renewable power. The push follows off-year election wins for Democrats in 2025. where energy prices played a role in state races in Georgia. New Jersey. and Virginia.

There are, of course, many forces behind electricity prices. But in some places, the grid upgrade itself is the dominant story.

In California, utilities are upgrading infrastructure to reduce wildfire risk. In the Southeast, utilities are rebuilding after hurricanes and flooding and billing customers for it. And in Arizona. residents are relying more heavily on air conditioning during scorching heat—and paying more for power simply because they’re using more AC.

The link Americans are making to global warming cuts across political lines too. The Yale survey finds that 42 percent of conservative Republicans and 57 percent of moderate Republicans connect rising costs to global warming. Clausing said it makes sense. given the study’s results: “Geographically rural areas are actually facing some of the highest costs. ” and rural communities often absorb the brunt of damage from wildfires to hurricanes.

Her study found that the largest household costs occur in parts of the West, the Gulf Coast, and Florida.

Even with the energy bills getting the most attention, they are not where the burden lands hardest for everyone. Utility bills—while a top political issue—are smaller, at least in Clausing’s estimates. Households spend an average of about $35 more on electricity per year tied to climate change. compared with an extra $356 on homeowners’ insurance premiums. the highest cost category.

Clausing, who owns a house in Portland, Oregon, described how her own premiums have shifted. She said her insurance premium on her home rose from around $1,000 five years ago to about $2,200 today. Her insurance company told her the increase was to help recoup the costs of wildfire damage in Oregon.

Health is another major part of the picture, and the money is stark. As wildfire smoke grows more common and exposes people to harmful particulate matter, it contributes to early deaths. Clausing’s research estimates the economic damage of these premature deaths works out to $103 for every household in the United States each year.

That estimate sits alongside other health pathways tied to warming—lengthening allergy seasons and expanding the geographic spread of infectious diseases as temperatures rise, allowing ticks and mosquitoes to move into new areas.

Yet not everyone is drawing the connection. In the Yale survey, only 35 percent of the people who agreed climate change was driving up prices said they saw a link to higher health care costs.

Anthony Leiserowitz. the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. said the gap is partly about communication: “Health is one of the most powerful ways we have of saying. ‘Actually. this affects our lives right here. right now. It’s already affecting the people and places and things that we love,’” he said.

Food costs are a different kind of problem—harder to pin to climate events in a clean way. Catherine Wolfram. a co-author of the study and a professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. said it’s difficult to measure climate impacts on food costs because the United States’ food supply comes from all over the world. softening the impact of a drought in Brazil or a heat wave in the Great Plains.

Still, other research has found that hot summers can lead to higher food prices, and that more increases are projected as the world warms.

For lower-income Americans, the stakes are increasingly obvious. As the effects of global warming grow more extreme, Clausing said the costs are becoming a clear budget problem for families with less cushion.

She is studying ways to design climate policy that tackles the problem without burdening poor families, using rebates or other mechanisms to offset costs.

“I’m glad people are connecting the dots,” Clausing said. “I think, at the moment, if you pursue better climate policy, the benefits to households, for the country as a whole, would exceed the costs.”

The political argument now runs into something harder to dispute than rhetoric: the math of household bills in the places where the climate is already writing the next line.

United States politics climate change energy prices inflation Yale survey LCV Victory Fund midterm elections home insurance wildfire risk utility bills Anthony Leiserowitz Kimberly Clausing Catherine Wolfram