King Charles III stood before a joint session of Congress on April 28 and delivered a polished, carefully worded message about protecting “nature.” He was too diplomatic to say “climate change” out loud — he knew which room he was standing in — but the implication was clear enough. The king of England flew across the Atlantic to nudge America toward the kind of green energy agenda that his own country has spent the last decade enthusiastically destroying itself with.
With all due respect to the crown: no thanks.
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There is a question that the king’s preferred climate agenda has never honestly answered, a question that has to come before any conversation about policy, targets, or timelines: what happens to the people?
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Any energy policy that cannot answer that question, that treats human well-being as a secondary concern or an acceptable casualty, has already failed. Not just politically. Morally. The premise that we must choose between caring for the Earth and caring for the people who live on it is a false one, and America should reject it loudly. Our energy policy must serve human beings first. Everything else flows from that.
Britain forgot that principle, and the British people have suffered for it.
According to the United Kingdom’s own Office for National Statistics, average electricity prices for British industrial users rose more than 90% between early 2021 and late 2023 and, even after partial recovery, remained 75% above where they started. Those are the heating bills of retirees on fixed incomes. Those are the operating costs crushing small manufacturers and the working families they employ. Those are the impossible choices between heat or groceries, medication or electricity, that no family in a prosperous country should ever face. Britain’s energy-intensive manufacturing industries saw output fall by one-third since 2021, hitting the lowest level ever recorded. Factories shuttered. Livelihoods vanished.
And the human cost went beyond economics. In winter 2024-25 alone, more than 2,500 people in the United Kingdom died in connection with cold weather, the majority of them elderly people trapped in homes they could no longer afford to heat. Averaged across recent years, an estimated 7,409 winter deaths per year in Britain are caused by cold homes.
These are not acceptable losses in pursuit of an emissions target. These are the most vulnerable members of society, left behind by an elite-designed green agenda that was more concerned with hitting bureaucratic benchmarks than with keeping people alive and warm. This is what happens when environmental policy is made by people who will never feel its consequences and imposed on people who have no say in the matter.
America must choose a different path — not because we don’t care about the environment, but because human beings are not acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of any policy goal. And because the American approach to energy has already produced better results than Europe’s top-down model, without destroying a single family’s budget to do it.
That story doesn’t get told often enough. EIA data shows that CO2 emissions from U.S. power generation fell by 819 million tonnes between 2005 and 2019, with 65% of that reduction coming from the market-driven shift from coal to natural gas. No mandates. No economy-crushing price caps. No retirees freezing in government-managed energy poverty. The market worked. American producers and consumers made choices, and the environment got cleaner while the lights stayed on. That is the model worth building on, not abandoning in favor of the European framework that has already proven its human cost.
But to fully deliver on that promise, Washington has to get out of its own way. It currently takes an average of 4.5 years just to receive required permits for an energy project, and 7.5 years for a transmission project. The Constitution Pipeline — which would have saved families in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island an estimated $165 million a year in heating costs — was killed not by science, but by regulatory paralysis. Every blocked project is a cost that eventually lands on a family’s energy bill.
R Street Institute research found that average federal permitting timelines grew from 3.4 years in 2010 to 4.7 years in 2019 and have continued to worsen. The National Petroleum Council’s Bottleneck to Breakthrough report, requested by DOE Secretary Chris Wright, calls for streamlining NEPA reviews and establishing predictable federal approval timelines across all energy types — reform already backed by more than 600 organizations led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. When manufacturers, farmers, and small business groups all agree something is broken, it probably is.
Here is the bottom line. King Charles loves the natural world. So do most Americans, the hunters and anglers who have funded more wildlife conservation through licensing fees than any government program, the farmers who have tended the same land for generations, the parents who want their children to inherit something worth inheriting. That instinct is good and right and deeply American.
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But love for the land that does not account for the people who live on it is not stewardship. It is ideology. And ideology, when it sets energy prices, harms people.
America has proven it doesn’t have to be that way. We can expand our energy, protect our environment, and still make sure the grandmother on a fixed income can afford to heat her home in January. We don’t have to choose. But we do have to lead — and leading means rejecting any framework, foreign or domestic, that treats the human cost of energy policy as someone else’s problem.
Clare Ath is the co-founder and executive director of Vita et Terra, a Catholic environmental organization that champions care for creation.
