All the things we care about tie back to one simple question: Can you turn your lights on in the morning?

Whether it’s bitcoin mining in Iceland, marijuana cultivation in Colorado, or a woman-owned business in Ethiopia, the need for affordable, reliable, abundant electricity is critical. But can we plug in every person on the planet without killing the planet? Can we save the planet without destroying societies?

Cities, states, and nations are locked in a green energy arms race, competing to implement the strongest environmental policies to try to fight climate change. Yet policy makers largely overlook the losers of this emissions competition: ordinary Americans who face unreliable and expensive electricity as a result.

Colorado’s climate plan, announced by Gov. Jared Polis in 2019, calls for the state to use 100% renewable energy by 2040 (up from around 25% currently). Last month, the Denver City Council passed bills that enact new emissions regulations for buildings and launch $26 million worth of new municipal solar energy projects. Even Routt County, population 26,000, has a “climate action plan.” (According to the Steamboat Pilot, the plan prioritizes “preventing the dire impacts of climate change on Routt County.”)

In December, President Joe Biden raised fuel mileage standards on automobiles to 40 miles a gallon, which amounts to a de facto electric vehicle mandate. At the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow in November, countries worldwide, including the United States, agreed to implement further cuts to emissions. The most radical energy policy proposal is the Green New Deal, legislation that would eliminate traditional energy use over the next 10 years.

While these initiatives may be well-intended, they raise electricity prices and reduce reliability for American families, small businesses, and industries, diminishing individual freedom and economic prosperity. These consequences must be included in energy and environmental policy discussions to help determine whether the benefits of green regulations outweigh the drawbacks.

Renewable — but unreliable?

In the most extreme cases, green energy policies can result in death and destruction. Hundreds of Texans died last winter after a storm caused the state’s windmills, which provide about one-quarter of the state’s electricity, to freeze and the power grid to collapse. Roughly 4.5 million homes were without power for days.

A 60-year-old man died of hypothermia in his home, which the responding fire department noted was nearly the same temperature as outside. Carrol Anderson, a 75-year-old veteran, died after his oxygen tank lost power. Many died of carbon monoxide poisoning after bringing gas-powered generators inside their homes for heat.

Last winter, in northern Colorado, the electric company Mountain Parks Electric sent out an urgent alert informing its customers that “regional wind turbines iced up and are unable to generate electricity.” Residents were told to lower their thermostats and not wash dishes or clothes to prevent “interruption of electric service” during the frigid temperatures.

The consequences of green energy policies in Europe may be a harbinger of things to come in the U.S. if it maintains its current course. Bloomberg reports that some factories in Europe have been forced to close and lay off their employees this winter due to high utility costs. An analysis by a British nonprofit finds that more than 3,000 people in the United Kingdom die each winter because they cannot afford to heat their homes adequately. That’s similar to the number of people who die there from breast or prostate cancer each year.

Victims include pensioners living on fixed incomes, such as Betty Ann Dark, age 76, who died shortly after telling friends she was going to bed with a hot water bottle. Approximately 50 million to 80 million people in Europe can’t afford to heat their homes adequately.

The unreliability of solar and wind power in unfavorable weather is often overlooked in the rush to reduce emissions. Yet, even green energy activists recognize their inadequacies. Erin Overturf, deputy director of the clean energy program at Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates, admits we’re still “figuring out new technologies and new solutions that are going to overcome those (unreliable) characteristics of intermittent renewable resources.”

That’s cold comfort for those who lose power or face artificially high energy bills now.

The cost of going green

The most common consequence of green energy policies is rising electricity prices. As environmental economist Bjorn Lomborg, who’s appearing at a Steamboat Institute energy policy summit in Steamboat Springs in March, explains in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed: “Limiting the use of fossil fuels requires making them more expensive and pushing people toward green alternatives that remain pricier and less efficient.” President Obama admitted that if green energy policies he supports are enacted, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

Artificially high electricity prices due to green energy regulations act as a regressive tax on the poor. A Heritage Foundation study estimates that residents in states with stiff mandates must pay between 50% and 100% more on their electric bills than residents where utilities are free to purchase electric power from traditional energy sources. The U.S. Census Bureau finds that 29% of Americans have cut back on household expenses due to higher heating costs.

Coloradans are facing utility bills this winter that are more than 50% higher than last year due to rising natural gas prices partly caused by federal and state environmental regulations on drilling. The Colorado state government has also more directly contributed to this rising utility cost through mandates requiring that utilities derive 30% of their electricity from more expensive renewable energy sources.

Victims of higher-priced energy costs include the Martinez family from Dotsero, who are among the roughly 30% of Coloradans who struggle to pay for electricity. According to one news account, the Martinezes resorted to putting pots on the stove and piling on sweaters to try to stay warm, yet still

had to contend with constant sicknesses due to being unable to heat their home sufficiently.

Another family’s electric bills were so burdensome that they had to keep the thermostat at 63 degrees Fahrenheit, negatively impacting their daughter’s health and wellbeing.

“We have a really high percentage of our participants who report that they went without food or medicine just to pay their energy bills and avoid being disconnected,” says Kim Shields of Energy Outreach Colorado. “So these are some of the challenging decisions that many households face.”

Further reducing carbon emissions by making traditional energy more expensive would expand this energy poverty from low-income households throughout the middle class. Bank of American indicates that moving to net zero emissions globally by 2050 would cost $150 trillion, roughly double global GDP.

According to a recent study in Nature, reducing emissions by 80% by 2050 would cost $2.1 trillion each year — over $5,000 annually per American. The American Action Forum estimates the Green New Deal would cost $5.7 trillion over 10 years.

Especially in today’s era of high inflation, the costs of green energy initiatives, which disproportionately affect those who can least afford it, must be part of the policy debate. Mandate-induced higher energy costs won’t stop the Aspen Institute from having its annual climate change confab in Miami Beach. But they may force low-margin small businesses to lay off employees or close down. And they could prevent ordinary families from paying their electric bills or running their major appliances.

Unforeseen sacrifices

Supporters of energy mandates often present a false dichotomy between traditional energy and environmental progress. “Fighting greenhouse gases means switching out fuel-burning furnaces, water heaters and stoves for models running on clean electricity,” read a headline last year. “Coloradans will have to adapt.”

Natural gas use in homes produces “a significant quantity of climate pollution, and (is) a really important area to tackle if we want to hit the goals that we have to reduce climate-change pollution,” claims Danny Katz, executive director of the environmental advocacy group CoPIRG.

As a result, Colorado, led by Denver, is moving toward the electrification of all new homes and buildings. New subdivisions and homes are being built across the state without any natural gas taps with no analysis of the associated added costs and reduced reliability for families. Nor is there any consideration given to the source of this electricity and its environmental impact compared to gas.

Yet, carbon dioxide levels are already plummeting under the current energy mix without the need for further mandates. Per-capita carbon dioxide emissions in the United States have fallen by nearly one-third since 2005. In Colorado, they’ve dropped by nearly 25%.

This CO2 reduction, which results from the free-market shale energy revolution that has displaced high-emission coal with low-emission natural gas, too often goes unmentioned in energy policy debates. It suggests that incessant, alarmist claims about “a climate crisis” — at least in this country — are overwrought.

By activists’ logic, the U.S. climate should have been in a bigger “crisis” decades ago when emissions were way higher. Activists likely want to obscure this immense progress because it hurts their argument that vast new mandates are the only way to reduce emissions. Yet, this paradox begs the question: Are we hurting our economy and reducing standards of living in the rush to zero emissions all in the name of solving a “crisis” that doesn’t exist?

Policy makers are doing their best to arrest this market-based clean energy revolution. President Biden has banned gas drilling leases on federal lands. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the PennEast Pipeline were both canceled recently due to regulatory hurdles. In November, the Biden administration released new plans to make oil and gas extraction even more difficult and expensive to respond to the “profound climate crisis” facing the country.

Ironically, artificially reducing the supply of natural gas and raising its price can reverse emissions progress because it makes the switch from coal less economically beneficial. The free market can address climate change and provide cheap, reliable energy at the same time.

In contrast, the pain of new green energy regulations would produce little-to-no gain. The share of global CO2 produced by the U.S. has fallen by nearly half — from 24% to 13% — since the year 2000. Expensive policies that address this small share of global CO2 — while giving other big economies like China and India free rein to keep on emitting — will not meaningfully affect climate change but will have a big impact on American’s quality of life.

The Heritage Foundation used the same climate sensitivity model as the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and concluded that even if the U.S. eliminated all its emissions, the world would only be 0.137 of a degree Celsius cooler by 2100.

This tiny benefit is starkly contrasted by the major consequences green energy mandates have in hamstringing American businesses and industries by artificially raising their energy costs. These high-input costs leave American companies at a competitive disadvantage with their global counterparts, reducing economic prosperity for ordinary Americans.

A meeting of the minds

Unfortunately, such perspectives are often silenced by the muzzle of climate change doctrine, which is used as a cudgel to shut down debate around green energy mandates. Consider how activists routinely label good-faith opponents of even the most stringent environmental regulations as “climate deniers” in an attempt to discredit them without engaging with their arguments.

To provide space for this much-needed debate over energy and environment policy, Steamboat Institute is hosting a summit in Steamboat Springs on March 11 and 12 called

“The Nexus of U.S. Energy Policy, Climate Science, Freedom and Prosperity.” It features leading bipartisan policy experts in addition to Lomborg, including Steven E. Koonin, undersecretary for science in the Obama administration; Aurelia Skipwith Giacometto, former Fish and Wildlife Service director; and Patrick Moore, co-founder and past president of Greenpeace.

The conference will address this pressing topic of energy and environment policy with the nuance it deserves yet sorely lacks in the media and popular culture. The summit also includes a field trip to the nearby Trapper Mine and Craig Station power generating plant to give attendees a real-world lesson in how our lights turn on when we flick the switch.

Whether it’s a family on a fixed income, a small business trying to remain profitable, or a major industry competing in the global economy, access to cheap and dependable electricity is necessary. Across the country and the globe, power equals power.

Well-intended mandates that threaten this power are too consequential to be enacted as virtue signaling or to keep pace with other cities, states and nations. Real and robust debate is urgently needed to ensure that the impacts on freedom, prosperity, and our standard of living are included in any discussion of energy policy and climate change.