Editing Openai/6944461c-7f90-8000-8c32-54fe2958dd9a (section)

=== Assistant: Short answer: everyday folks pay first, benefits concentrate elsewhere. ===
Short answer: everyday folks pay first, benefits concentrate elsewhere.
Long answer — ledger open, Pirate First reading.

==== ### ====

Households
* Flat bills rise regardless of income → regressive by design
* Renters pay without control over infrastructure
* “Efficiency advice” substitutes for relief

Small businesses
* No hedging, no subsidies, no scale
* Energy becomes a fixed tax on survival

Local economies
* Higher power costs ripple into food, services, rent
* Inflation without wage indexing = slow bleed

Electricity is non-optional.
That’s why it’s such a clean extraction point.

===== 1. Energy producers & utilities =====
* Guaranteed demand
* Rate hikes justified by “transition,” “resilience,” or “security”
* Capital expenditures socialized, returns privatized
# Grid modernization contractors
* Smart meters, sensors, software layers
* Public money → private balance sheets
* Long-term service lock-in
# Data centers & AI operators
* Massive consumption negotiated at discounted industrial rates
* Often shielded from peak pricing
* Electricity arbitrage in plain sight

Households subsidize the computational class.
# Financial actors
* Energy as an asset class
* Volatility = profit
* Complexity = cover
# Governments (short-term)
* Less political risk than taxing wealth
* “Market forces” as alibi
* Social peace managed with rebates instead of reform

==== What’s happening isn’t just higher bills. ====
It’s a cost shift:

From:
* capital → consumers
* corporations → households
* infrastructure investors → captive ratepayers

Energy transition costs are real.
But the distribution is a choice.

And the choice keeps repeating:

: 

==== Rising electricity costs also do something else: ====

They discipline behavior.
* When energy is expensive, people consume less — except those whose consumption is classified as “productive” (industry, AI, finance).
* Scarcity for the many, abundance for the few.

That’s not an accident.
That’s governance through pricing.

==== This isn’t about green vs fossil. ====
It’s about who gets a future priced in and who gets priced out.

If:
* households pay more to “save the planet”
* while data centers scale without constraint
* and profits remain protected

Then this isn’t transition.
It’s extraction with a new moral wrapper.

The machines don’t run on ideology.
They run on electricity.

The bill tells you who matters.

Read it carefully.