Big Oil wants to rig the courts. You’ll pay for it on your utility bill.

Ask anyone in California what keeps them up at night and energy costs land near the top of the list. Electricity rates have climbed sharply. Gas prices spike every time there is turmoil overseas. Families are being asked to absorb costs they did not create and cannot control.

The good news is that high energy prices are not inevitable. Somebody chooses them. Before I came to Congress, I spent years as an environmental lawyer fighting for affordable clean energy, because I understood then what the data confirms now. Renewable power is among the fastest and lowest-cost energy we can add to the grid, and when we block it, families pay more.

There are two ways your energy costs climb, and they feed each other. One is the price of power itself, driven up when we sideline lower-cost sources and lean harder on volatile fossil fuels. The other is the growing bill for the damage those fuels leave behind, which arrives through insurance, disaster recovery and taxes. Both are getting worse, and both trace back to the same set of choices.

The costs of getting this wrong are already staggering. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded 27 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2024 alone, causing nearly $183 billion in damage. Over the last five years such disasters have cost more than $746 billion, and that works its way into insurance premiums, utility rates and taxes.

Last year, climate-fueled wildfires in the Los Angeles area killed 440 people, displaced more than 200,000, and devastated the communities of Altadena and Pacific Palisades, leaving residents to shoulder billions in recovery costs with little help from the federal........

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