Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has a column in Fox News this week explaining that your electric bill is soaring because of “climate change lunacy.” His employer is funded by the fossil-fuel industry, and the column never once mentions the price of natural gas. That’s the whole ballgame. The argument is that dismantling climate policy is the only path to affordable energy, that renewable subsidies and regulations are the real culprits, and that we must choose between cheap power and the climate agenda. I’ll grant Lieberman the clearest point first. Some climate policies really do add costs. The Inflation Reduction Act spent real money. California’s rates are high, and its climate policies are part of the story. He’s right about all of that.
Now here’s what he left out. The single biggest driver of the electric bill spike that’s got everyone panicked is the price of natural gas. Not the climate regulations he’s paid to denounce. The gas itself. Natural gas fuels about 40 percent of U.S. electricity, and when its price jumps, the bill jumps with it. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, residential electricity costs rose 12.8 percent in the first ten months of 2025, a faster climb than the prior two years combined. Over four years, power bills have jumped 20 percent, and the single biggest factor, according to the analysts who actually track this, is volatile fossil-fuel prices. The climate agenda Lieberman wants to scrap is the one that would reduce the dependence on that volatile commodity.
The column is a neat specimen of the genre. Take a cost spike caused by the fossil-fuel market, blame the policy that exists to wean us off it, and collect the check from the industry that benefits from the confusion. Lieberman’s employer, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has taken fossil-fuel money for decades. The omission isn’t an oversight. It’s the point. The column warns that climate policy will drive up energy costs, but the price we’re all paying right now is the price of the fuel itself. The subsidies for renewables are a fraction of the permanent cost of a grid held hostage to the gas market. A market, by the way, that rewards the very companies that fund CEI. Call it a feedback loop. Call it a racket. Either way, it’s not a policy debate; it’s a protection racket dressed up as an op-ed.
Lieberman points to California and Western Europe as proof that climate policies raise rates. And he’s right that those places have high electricity costs, but he omits the reasons. California’s rates are high partly because of wildfire costs, legacy infrastructure, and the way the state’s market was designed — not just climate policy. Western Europe’s rates are high because it bet big on imported natural gas, and that bet blew up when Russia invaded Ukraine. The common thread isn’t the climate agenda. It’s that both regions are still too dependent on fossil fuels whose prices they don’t control. The fix is to build out the alternatives faster, not slower. The column’s solution — lock in the dependence on the same volatile fuel and call it affordability — is like treating a gambling addiction by doubling down at the roulette table.
Anyway.
So what do we build instead? We already have the tools. Public power authorities like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bonneville Power Administration have delivered affordable electricity for generations. Rural electric cooperatives serve 42 million Americans across 56 percent of the country’s landmass — member-owned, not-for-profit, and deeply popular in red states. Community-choice aggregation lets municipalities buy power collectively, cutting out the utility middleman. A public bank, modeled on the century-old Bank of North Dakota, could finance the transmission lines we need without handing the returns to Wall Street. The goal isn’t to abolish markets. It’s to stop letting the people who profit from volatility write the rules about who pays for it. The next time your bill spikes, don’t blame the climate agenda. Blame the gas market, and the think tank that’s paid to keep you confused about the difference.