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Americans need energy that is affordable, abundant and reliable. Right now, a wave of lawsuits is quietly working against all three, and most of the people who will pay for it don't know and never get a vote.
Across the country, 40 lawsuits have been filed by states, counties and cities trying to hold energy producers financially responsible for climate change. Eleven states, the District of Columbia, and dozens of local governments representing more than one in four Americans are asking courts to order oil and gas companies to pay billions in damages.
Here is what that means in practice. Producing and selling gasoline, diesel and natural gas is entirely legal. Americans depend on these products to drive to work, heat their homes, and keep the lights on. They provide 80 percent of our energy needs.
Yet these suits seek to punish companies after the fact for supplying what the country asked. And any money the producer is forced to pay doesn't come out of thin air. It comes out of the price the rest of us pay at the pump and on our utility bills. Even the cost of fighting the lawsuits gets passed down. It is, in effect, a hidden tax on energy that no legislature ever passed and no voter ever approved.
That last point is the heart of the problem. No matter where you stand on climate change, these consequential decisions should be made by elected officials we can hold accountable at the ballot box, not by a single judge or jury in one county.
When a Boulder, Colo., courtroom or a San Francisco jury sets the terms, the cost doesn't stay in Boulder or San Francisco. It spreads to families in every state, with no say. The Supreme Court agreed this year to hear the Boulder case, which will help decide whether local courts can set what amounts to national energy policy. They shouldn't.
The right venue is the one where the public actually gets a voice: our state capitals and Congress. And states are already stepping up.
This spring, four states -- Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Iowa -- passed laws keeping these climate-damage claims out of their courts. Oklahoma named its measure the Energy Security and Independence Act, written explicitly to "preserve lawful access to affordable, clean and reliable fossil fuels."
That is a policy choice, made in the open, by lawmakers who answer to voters. If people disagree, they can say so at the next election. That is how a democracy is supposed to weigh costs and benefits.
States can move faster than Washington, which too often waits until a problem becomes a crisis before acting. This ultimately needs a national answer because emissions and interstate commerce don't stop at state lines.
Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., has introduced the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act, which would end retroactive climate liability suits and affirm that regulating emissions is a federal responsibility to be decided through accountable lawmaking rather than piecemeal litigation. It deserves a serious hearing.
There is one more reason to doubt these lawsuits are worth their cost: they won't move the needle on the climate they claim to address. China now emits more greenhouse gases than all developed nations on Earth combined, and emissions in India and across the developing world keep climbing.
If we drive up the cost of American energy while global emissions are increasingly driven by countries an ocean away, we will have made our families poorer without meaningfully changing the outcome. That is a bad trade.
None of this requires pretending the climate isn't changing or that it doesn't matter. It requires honesty about who should make these decisions and who ultimately pays for them.
Affordable, reliable energy is not a luxury; it is the foundation of everything else in our economy and our prosperity, not to mention air conditioning. Decisions that put it at risk should be made in the open, by people we choose, answerable to the voters who foot the bill.
That is a debate worth having out loud, not one settled quietly, courtroom by courtroom.
Frank Lasee is a senior policy analyst with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). He wrote this for InsideSources.com.