Ratepayers beware. Team Trump’s eagerness to enrich his fossil fuel industry cronies with his “drill baby drill” agenda is going to raise energy costs for American households.

Burning fossil fuels is deadly on many levels. The pollution in our air and water from burning coal, oil, and gas kills people. The pollution from extracting fossil fuels from the ground and transporting them kills people. And the climate crisis and its extreme weather events — extreme heat waves, supercharged wildfires, and hurricanes — kill people.

Just as our continued reliance on fossil fuels kills people and entire ecosystems, slowing down our transition to clean energy kills jobs. Because of former President Joe Biden’s signature legislative achievements, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), and the CHIPS and Science Act we have seen clean energy projects create more than 406,000 new jobs across this country. Hundreds of thousands additional jobs are being created as an indirect result of these new clean energy jobs.

We are reshoring entire supply chains for the products and technologies that will be the foundation of the new global economy. American manufacturing is back. And after losing 65,000 American factories since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect 30 years ago, factories are now coming back — this time, building solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and batteries.

But it is not enough for fossil fuel interests and their allies in the Trump administration to put our lives and livelihoods in jeopardy. They are sprinting to make those factories empty once again, sending American jobs anywhere but America as they kill our pocketbooks with higher energy costs.

Energy from solar and wind power is not only already less expensive and more resilient than energy from fossil fuels, it keeps getting cheaper. So efforts by the Trump Administration and its allies in Congress to slow the transition to clean energy are not just anti-climate, they are anti-consumer. When they say they want to come after the IRA or undo “Green New Deal” policies, they are talking about jacking up the cost of lighting and heating your home.

It is all based on the big lie that increasing fossil fuel production and supply will lower energy costs. That is hardly the case. Especially when we are talking about exporting those fossil fuels. And that brings us to liquefied natural gas (LNG).

The US is already the world’s leading exporter of LNG. Methane gas is a powerful greenhouse gas — more than 80 times more powerful at warming that carbon dioxide. And the lifecycle of LNG — from fracking and transport to liquefaction and refinement to shipping and burning — is fraught with methane leaks, making it nearly as harmful to the climate as coal. But the LNG market is also volatile, and the oil and gas companies that have such ambitious plans for expanding exports to countries and markets that will pay far more for it than the domestic market rate. That drives up the price of methane gas here at home.

The Department of Energy released a report confirming that unfettered LNG exports would drive up domestic energy prices — further supporting the Biden administration’s pause of LNG export projects as the right choice.

But ‘Big Oil and Gas’ can get rich from the higher prices other countries are willing to pay, so they don’t care about household energy burdens here at home. And they are even willing to undermine our national security by supplying LNG to our rivals, like the Chinese government, who can then resell it and leverage their role as an energy supplier elsewhere in the world. All the while, domestic consumers potentially face paying billions more in annual energy costs.

President Trump has made big promises to Big Oil and Gas in exchange for their support of his re-election. At one campaign fund-raiser, Trump told oil and gas executives if they collectively contributed US$1 billion to his re-election they would essentially get whatever they want and it would be a “deal” for them. They got the message. In addition to many other high-dollar contributions from the industry, the CEO of the country’s largest LNG exporter Cheniere Energy kicked in US$250,000. Cheniere continues to rapidly develop more export capacity at new and existing LNG terminals on the Gulf coast.

LNG is not the only way Trump could increase energy costs for everyday Americans. If his threatened 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports happen, prices at the pump could end up rising between 35 and 75 cents a gallon. That is according to GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis Patrick De Haan, who says the increases might be steepest in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain regions but would likely happen across all regions. And Trump’s baffling war on energy efficient home appliances threatens utility bill savings that would benefit millions of households and are especially important to low-income families. Those families spend as much as four times more on energy bills as a portion of their household income.

Trump has talked a big game on bringing down energy prices. But most of his proposed policies — from more oil and gas drilling to his attacks on clean energy and energy efficiency standards — are far more likely to drive the cost for consumers up. Americans need relief from punishingly high energy prices, not to be sacrificed on the altar of fossil fuel industry profits.

Ben Jealous is the executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.