Is your electric bill too high? Thank LNG exports.

Just months after declaring a false “energy emergency,” the administration is moving to sell more American gas overseas, including to our competitors. It’s not only a disaster for the climate and our national security, but it will push American’s electricity bills through the roof.

Energy prices are already skyrocketing. Electricity providers and their representatives are blaming regulators. Some elected officials, understandably under fire from their constituents, point the finger at greedy corporations. Meanwhile, apologists for fossil fuel companies are writing trendy think pieces putting the blame for high prices at the feet of green energy providers. The evidence for those claims are even thinner than the paper they’re printed on.

There are plenty of factors at play that can explain rising energy costs. Some, like the huge demands placed on the grid by power thirsty data centers, crypto mining operations and AI are already widely known. But the role of LNG exports is not receiving nearly enough public scrutiny, especially since gas prices all but set electricity prices.

While it’s been billed as “clean, American energy,” or “liquefied natural gas,” the product we’re talking about is a fossil fuel. It’s mostly methane, the greenhouse gas that traps 80 times more heat in the atmosphere than does carbon dioxide. Its liquefied form, which is pumped into massive supertanker ships and sold overseas, comes at an enormous cost, requiring massive outlays of energy to chill the fuel into a liquid form. It also harms our climate along every step of its journey as it leaks into the atmosphere from the well head, through the pipeline, to liquefaction, shipping and eventually burning by the end user.

Taking gas out of the ground contributes to global warming. Processing it and shipping it overseas accelerates that impact.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: more than 40% of all electricity generated in the United States comes from methane gas. While we need to move rapidly toward more renewable energy, we can’t ignore the fact that gas is in great demand here at home. Allowing more gas to be sold overseas gives a windfall to corporate executives who profit from exports as well as from the higher prices they cause here at home by creating scarcity in the market.

Americans are being forced to pay more every month for electricity generation, even before we begin hitting peak demand, when summer heat forces us to turn on the air conditioning. And for Americans who rely on gas to heat their homes on top of paying for electricity generated by gas, the hits just keep on coming.

In Massachusetts, a northern state that receives gas from elsewhere in the country by pipeline, gas prices are up 93% and electricity costs are up 65% since 2015. Maryland, like many other states on the East Coast, is facing shocking spikes in electricity prices. One news outlet is telling New Jersey residents to brace for electric bills of several hundred dollars a month this summer.

This is not the free market at work. Like unnecessary tariffs, this is federal policy that favors a handful of corporations over American manufacturers, small businesses and families. And while Northeastern states face the double whammy of high gas prices and tariffs on imported hydroelectric power from Canada, large businesses in my home state of Louisiana are looking to generate their own electricity rather than pay through the nose to overpriced utilities.

At the state level, some officials are working on solutions. Wisconsin may join states like California and Virginia, where tech companies have sited large data centers, in imposing a separate, higher rate for electricity on those industrial consumers. It’s a decent idea, but it only looks at one side of the equation. And it doesn’t address the supply side or the disastrous federal policies set to make Americans’ electric bills outright unaffordable this summer.

We need federal policy that actually brings down energy prices for American consumers. That means stopping this nonsense posturing and ensuring that clean, abundant Canadian energy can continue to flow into northern states without unnecessary tariffs. It also means allowing the free market to continue to develop more clean domestic energy sources as those technologies become increasingly affordable.

Last and most urgently, it means ending the limitless and wasteful exporting of LNG. Selling energy to our competitors while families and businesses struggle isn’t putting America first; it’s putting us last.