For decades, US decarbonization policy has been pitted against various “economic trade-offs,” including the debt-to-GDP ratio, job losses, inflation, and recession. These debates are predicated on the notion that investment in decarbonization will necessarily create some economic ills—a tangible sacrifice borne today to prevent an ambiguous disaster in the future. And they largely originate from a conservative macroeconomic orthodoxy that abides by the axioms of narrow cost–benefit analysis, deficit hawkery, and present bias that has prevented any meaningful approximation of future damages or even deaths from climate change. 

Recently, progressive macroeconomists have argued that decarbonization investments are an economic boon. Their work shows that government investment in renewables will create jobs, will crowd in—not out—private investment and further stimulate economic activity. Their arguments suggest that a transition away from fossil fuels will create the conditions for long-term energy price stability and domestic energy independence rather than global volatility. 

All of these arguments undergirded the ultimate narrow passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) which aimed to provide inflation relief by building the infrastructure for low-cost, sustainable energy. The Trump administration has since clawed back nearly every IRA initiative and launched a climate-denial campaign that has overtaken the government and even found its way into liberal and centrist talking points. At the same time, working people have endured nearly five years of high inflation and are now suffering from what many have coined an ‘affordability crisis.’ When people are struggling to afford their basic necessities, it is imperative that future renewable investment protects working class affordability without shirking climate ambition. In order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, a complete renewable transition must happen by 2050 and that transition should distribute the costs to high consumers and polluters.

Keep in mind that while further analysis is necessary to look at the built environment, transportation sectors, food and agriculture, and heavy industry, this analysis aims to identify how the activities related to the decarbonization of the power sector may increase overall inflation or specific costs to households, assess the likelihood and magnitude of those increases, and propose policy fixes to prevent or minimize them. Importantly, this affordability analysis is intended to generate policy creativity, not validate inaction. 

The energy transition requires significant federal investment to build out renewable energy generation, transmission lines, expand grid capacity, and source critical minerals. Such a large government expense has often elicited mainstream economist pessimism stemming from the presumption that any large government spending will drive up inflation. These fears are all the more visceral after the 40-year-high inflation consumers experienced in 2022, when overall inflation reached 9.1 percent. Such a dramatic and sustained climb in household essentials was disproportionately painful to households in the lowest income brackets.

A renewed effort to advocate for federal investment should contend directly with concerns about its impact on the ongoing affordability crisis many poor and working class US residents,  especially, are facing. It is worth revisiting the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest federal climate investment bill in US history, to understand its inflationary impact. The bill was framed, as is clear in its title, as an investment package intended to bring down inflation. Specifically, the investments in renewable infrastructure and drug price reductions were intended to tackle two major long-term inflation drivers directly—energy and healthcare. Through a mix of grants and (mostly) tax credits, the bill would ignite renewable energy investment and lay the groundwork for sustainable low-cost energy and emissions reduction. 

By many accounts, economists agreed that the cost savings would offset any potential demand-driven inflationary effects. The investment package, amounting to $370 billion dollars to be spent over 10 years, was projected to have little to no impact on inflation.¹ An independent analysis from Penn Wharton School found the projected inflationary impact of the IRA to be statistically insignificant from zero.² The report projected a small increase in inflation in the immediate term that would then decrease thereafter; however, the likelihood of these impacts was so low that they concluded the bill would have no impact on inflation at all. Ironically, Ways and Means Committee Republicans cited this report to support their claims that the IRA was an inflation-worsening bill and deter its passage.³ A similar analysis from Moody’s Analytics projected the inflationary impact of the IRA to be slightly deflationary by 2030.⁴ A Center for American Progress report projected that the bill would also begin to improve the federal deficit by 2028.⁵

These projections aligned with inflation data, which shows that inflation peaked in June of 2022 and began to decline largely due to supply chain adjustments or, as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell claims, the Fed’s interest rate hikes. There is no evidence that the Inflation Reduction Act applied any upward pressure on prices since its passage. Of course, the Inflation Reduction Act was dramatically reversed during Trump’s second term and much of the allocated funds went undisbursed. Its projected size was also much smaller than previous climate proposals like the reconciliation iteration of the Build Back Better (BBB) Act which proposed closer to $1.7 trillion in spending over 10 years. But despite its much larger size, the Penn Wharton School analysis of BBB projected the bill would increase inflation by 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points in the first two years and then later reduce inflation in the subsequent years.⁶ Moody’s Analytics’s analysis similarly predicted inflation a “few tenths of a percentage point higher” in the first year of the bill's implementation followed by stable, target inflation of 2 percent.⁷

Not all government spending is the same. The IRA and BBB both included revenue-raising policies to offset the costs of investments, and the investments themselves would grow the productive capacity of the economy instead of induce overheating. Many macroeconomists have argued in favor of this type of renewable investment: a spending package that invests in large-scale infrastructure creates jobs, crowds in private investment, and is thus pro-growth. They further argue that a package that invests in energy sources that are significantly cheaper than fossil fuels will reduce energy costs to consumers, alleviating household budgets in the long run. A climate bill that includes revenue-raising policies that effectively shift the costs of renewable investment to corporations and the wealthy can also improve the federal deficit and alleviate some economic inequality. This was the projected outcome of the Inflation Reduction Act, which included provisions to ramp up IRS investigation of wealthy tax evasion, an increased corporate minimum tax rate, and an excise tax on stock buybacks. Perhaps most importantly, federal investment in renewable transition carries the economic benefit of preventing the drastic costs associated with unmitigated warming and continued fossil fuel production. 

The next round of advocacy for a large investment package in renewable buildout should avoid relitigating the now-observable positive macroeconomic impacts of constructive, job-creating, cost-reducing federal spending. Instead, focus should be on getting the policy tools right for a managed transition that goes further to center working class affordability. The current macroeconomic ills that the United States faces at the midpoint of Trump’s second term—a cost-of-living crisis driven in part by rising electricity prices and extreme weather events, outsized corporate profits and deepening inequality, looming concerns of recession and sticky, growing unemployment—would all benefit from the type of investment required to build out renewable energy.⁸

In the following sections we review the specific challenges of renewable transition in the medium term—critical mineral mining, transmission and grid expansion, renewable generation, and fossil fuel wind-down—and discuss the potential affordability dynamics of each of these elements. By identifying cost pressures associated with the transition phase, we can better design federal and state policy to protect affordability. 

The critical minerals necessary to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are energy- and water-intensive to extract and process, and they are often geographically concentrated. They also create an entry point for supply bottlenecks and price volatility in renewable energy production and manufacturing. Indeed, their extraction dynamics and geopolitics are reminiscent of fossil fuel extraction. But there are key differences, as one International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) report clarifies: while fossil fuels are extracted and combusted as fuel, critical minerals are inputs to production.⁹ Disruptions to fossil fuel supply thus result in immediate and repeated impacts to energy costs and energy security. This ongoing price volatility, directly borne by consumers, is not replicated by critical mineral supply dynamics. Once renewable infrastructure is built, energy costs are unaffected by disruptions in mineral supply. Instead, critical minerals are a potential bottleneck for the energy transition itself and lasting energy security in a post-transition world. 

Potential supply limitations of these minerals could drive up the cost of manufacturing or slow down the pace of the renewable buildout. There is no clear consensus in the literature about the likelihood, timing, and economic repercussions of potential critical mineral reserve depletion. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported in their 2025 Global Critical Minerals Outlook report that the prices of key minerals have come down since their peak in 2022 and 2023 and that average growth in supply has outpaced demand from 2021 to 2024.¹⁰4

Together these empirics reveal an optimistic outlook on global supplies meeting growing demand. Similarly, the Energy Transitions Commission reports that there are “sufficient existing mineral resources available on land to meet future demand through 2050,” but also acknowledges that the absolute value of these resources is not the most pressing concern.¹² Rather, the rapid increase in demand between now and 2030 could lead to higher prices. Their recommendation is to invest in recycling technology and open hundreds of new mines, shorten mining timescales, and increase public financing. Still, their analysis does not take into account the web of geopolitics that will ultimately decide whether country-specific supplies meet country-specific demands.¹³ The race to hoard these resources is already underway and will have consequences for each country’s domestic transition potential.¹⁴ Other scholars point out the shortsightedness of these reports in that they do not take into account demand for minerals beyond 2050. Others argue that “fears of an ever increasing scale of mining activities in the energy system are unfounded,” and major reductions in mineral demand by 2050¹⁵ can be achieved by recycling electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines and by reducing the size of and dependence on personal automobiles via investments in public and active transit.¹⁶

But mineral supply uncertainty does not necessarily need to implicate the working class consumer as it pertains to energy utility prices. A renewable investment program can be designed to subsidize manufacturers for their material costs, take ownership stakes in critical mineral mining endeavors to secure domestic supply, and include favorable borrowing costs for key firms or price floors and caps. Still, renewable electricity customers are not the end consumers of mined minerals in the same way they are for fossil fuels, and are thus significantly less exposed to their price fluctuations. Households that choose to install rooftop solar or purchase an electric vehicle, however, may face higher upfront costs if critical mineral prices cannot be stabilized through policy. 

Perhaps the largest concern for immediate consumer prices comes from the limitations of the current energy infrastructure and the task of rapidly expanding transmission and electric grid capacity. These critical infrastructure projects are poised to impact consumers because of the existing rules that dictate how utilities distribute the costs of maintenance and upgrades to the energy grid and the predominance of investor-owned utilities (IOUs). 

Investor-owned utilities are for-profit, publicly traded corporations that are owned by shareholders and often operate as monopolies in their service areas. They are regulated at the state level by commissions that cap, but also guarantee, a set rate of profit for the company. IOUs are the most common utility provider in the United States: 72 percent of the country is served by privately owned utilities, and their profit guarantees come in the form of a rate of return average of 9.7 percent.¹⁷ After weather-proofing lines, or replacing distribution poles, or building new transmission lines, utilities will bring a “rate case” to their state regulator to increase rates to consumers to cover their costs and their profits. Thus grid investments are currently funded by the ratepayers through raising electricity bills. This form of raising investment capital is limiting and regressive; the rate-setting process is highly inequitable and disadvantages poorer electricity users.¹⁸

In Arizona, two major utilities have applied for a 14 percent rate increase just for maintenance costs that would take effect this year if approved.¹⁹ California experienced the largest increase in electricity prices from 2019 to 2024 of all US states in large part due to wildfire damage to the grid and the repairs and upgrades utilities undertook to reduce wildfire risk.²⁰ At the same time, California’s high rate of rooftop solar adoption has intersected with utility cost-sharing in a regressive way. As more and more middle- and higher-income households install rooftop solar, they purchase less energy from the grid, leaving fewer customers to bear the grid and transmission costs passed along by the utility. The remaining customer pool is more likely to include lower-income households or renters who already spend a larger portion of their household budget on energy to begin with.²¹

The renewable buildout will require more than 91,000 miles of high-voltage transmission—57 percent more than exist today.²² Hitting this target would mean building an estimated 5,000 miles annually. Other estimates say the grid must expand by five to eight times its current capacity.²³ Executing this buildout under the current cost-sharing structures will undoubtedly raise rates in the near term. In recent years, we have built far below this target: the US added just 322 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in 2024 and has not exceeded 1,000 miles since 2016.²⁴ A major deterrent to expanding our transmission is the question of how to allocate costs, which is especially difficult for interregional lines that span multiple states.

Consumers do not want to pay for lines that pass through their state but do not give them additional energy sources and lower prices. At the same time, utilities are disincentivized from building these lines because of the difficulty coordinating construction and allocating costs between states, as well as their own vested interest in the success of fossil fuel generation.²⁵ Long-term transmission planning and cost-sharing agreements between states are needed to build at the scale the transition requires. In 2024 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued Order No. 1920, which aimed to mandate these efforts and expand the role of states in orchestrating the buildout.²⁶ The Inflation Reduction Act also included $2 billion to FERC to provide loans for the construction of transmission lines, but these funds have since been rescinded by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.²⁷

Renewed efforts to solve the cost-sharing, permitting, and funding problems for the transmission buildout will be essential to meet the scale of the renewable transition and to protect consumers from unmanageable rate hikes. The existing marketized, IOU-centered regulatory framework is not up to the task of building the scale required nor stabilizing prices to consumers. Policies that aim to protect consumers from rate volatility like rate caps or utility shutoff moratoriums should be implemented, along with more ambitious proposals to restore and expand public ownership and control of utilities.²⁸ By eliminating the profit imperative, and moving electricity provisioning and planning out of the private market, it is possible to plan for the monumental buildout of grid capacity while protecting consumers from unaffordable energy bills. 

Canada is a prime example of a large economy taking the public ownership route and delivering lower costs to consumers. A total of 58 percent of Canadian utilities are municipally owned, 24 percent are co-ops, and 6 percent are province- or territory-owned.²⁹ A recent study conducted by Hydro-Québec, the largest public utility in Canada, demonstrates the dramatic difference in monthly electricity bills in Canadian and US cities.³⁰ These cost savings in Canadian cities reflect the dual benefit of public utility ownership and majority renewable generation—67 percent of Canada’s electricity comes from renewables.³¹ Another academic study focusing only on the ownership effect reviewed 30 years of IEA and OECD data for the EU15 countries and found that public (electricity utility) ownership is associated with lower residential electricity prices in Western Europe.³²

The urgency of the grid expansion is not just coming from the climate crisis: AI data centers are spiking energy demand and driving unsustainable rate hikes to consumers. A Bloomberg analysis found that electricity costs 267 percent more than it did five years ago in areas with significant data center activity.³⁴ On average, residential electricity prices across the United States have risen by 31 percent in the same period and utility debt has increased by 32 percent since 2022.³⁵ The scale and timeline of electricity demanded by data centers can simply not be matched by existing grid resources and supply chain capacity, and bring-your-own-generation proposals can still raise prices by delaying fossil retirement and creating stranded grid asset risks that need to be paid for by the rest of the electricity user base.³⁶

Thus, AI data center proliferation presents an obstacle to the transition by exploding the demand that renewables will ultimately need to supply, and driving up costs to consumers. Transitioning the grid away from IOU ownership and regulatory structure, along with federal investment in transmission expansion, will alleviate the upfront fixed costs of grid expansion currently borne by ratepayers. But targeted policy to curb the energy demand of AI must be a part of an affordable transition.

Of course, the rapid expansion of renewables themselves is central to the transition. Renewable energy sources have significantly lower levelized costs of energy (LCOEs) compared to fossil fuels. This means that after accounting for the lifetime cost of building and maintaining a renewable generation project, each unit of energy is much cheaper to produce. Since 2010, the LCOEs for renewables have dramatically declined.³⁷ In 2024, the LCOE of onshore wind was 53 percent lower than the least-cost fossil fuel alternative generation in the global market, and that of utility-scale solar was 41 percent lower.³⁸

Critical enabling technologies like battery storage have also become much cheaper to produce.³⁹ Between 2010 and 2014, the “total installed cost of utility-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) dropped by 93 percent.” But the LCOE is not a comprehensive measure of the costs to end users. IRENA clarifies that their LCOE does not include the costs associated with transmission expansion, interconnection, storage, and permitting bottlenecks.⁴⁰ On the other hand, the cost savings from federal subsidies or tax benefits and the “merit order effect” are also omitted.

The literature on the cost impacts of renewable penetration in utility-scale electricity paints a somewhat blurry picture. One academic study seeks to determine the merit order effect of wind energy on wholesale electricity prices in the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection (PJM) region, where wind penetration is relatively low, and in the region covered by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), where wind penetration is high.⁴¹ The authors found that in day-ahead markets (DAMs) in the PJM and ERCOT regions, the merit order effect of wind consistently applies downward pressure on wholesale electricity prices. 

Another recent and widely cited study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that some states with renewables portfolio standards (RPSs)—laws that require utilities to procure a minimum percentage of their electricity from renewable sources—experienced higher electricity prices as a result.⁴² They argue that in those states, renewable energy sources are likely more costly to supply so the RPS requires renewable generation capacity beyond what the “market would supply,” prompting utilities to pass on higher retail prices.⁴³ 

The authors clarify, importantly, that 75 percent of the expansion of renewable generation occurred without an RPS in place and that those states in fact experienced more price reductions. These findings have led some commentators to conclude that an “affordability hawk” should support the repeal of RPS policies along with tax incentives that favor renewable energy sources, instead allowing the market to determine the ideal generation mix.⁴⁴ 

A broader analysis from Zero Carbon Analytics demonstrates the correlation (not causation) between higher renewable penetration and average residential electricity prices.⁴⁵ Of 14 states with above-average wind and solar production, nine have lower-than-average power prices. These results are encouraging for the broader argument in favor of renewable expansion, but they are less useful in identifying why some states were able to secure lower prices while others were not. 

In the current marketized energy system, the net impact of a renewable expansion comes down to two countervailing forces: (1) the merit order effect from low-cost renewables, and (2) the fixed costs that utilities pass on to retail customers. If the magnitude of these effects are left to market forces, the affordability impacts of renewable expansion will remain a mixed bag. Furthermore, in the absence of strong market adjustments—such as portfolio standards or renewable subsidies—the energy transition is unlikely to progress at the speed or scale necessary to avoid even more dangerous warming. 

Still, energy scholars have warned that even with pro-renewable market adjustments, the economics of renewable generation will not incentivize enough private investment to meet the scale of the transition. Brett Christophers argues that the low cost of producing renewables actually works against the goal of large-scale expansion. Investors follow profit, and renewables are increasingly operating at near-zero marginal cost, which translates to extremely thin profit margins.⁴⁶ Christophers warns that as new firms enter, competition will drive market prices down further, thus eating away at the financial incentive for even more firms to enter. 

It is true, however, that even under the exceedingly hostile Trump administration, renewable generation and storage made up 92 percent of all new power plant construction in 2025.⁴⁷ This encouraging trend can be attributed to a mix of factors: the inertia behind private investment in the renewable boom, sustaining state-level incentives, pre-existing power purchase agreements, decreasing cost of capital, and technological improvements that are keeping investors focused on renewables.

Christophers,  CCI, and our colleagues at Common Wealth have argued for a public option in renewable generation.⁴⁹ Public generators can make unprofitable investment decisions that serve the needs of the energy transition, instead of return on investment. They can also weather bouts of low or negative revenue, and thus ensure that the cost benefits of renewables are passed on to customers. Importantly, public generators will not flee the sector when returns are low or financing costs are high, stranding the transition and leaving customers with costly supply disruptions. 

On the other side of a full energy transition is the fossil fuel wind-down. Weaning the global economy off fossil fuels and decommissioning deeply embedded physical infrastructure is no small task, especially as global oil and natural gas production continues to grow.⁵⁰ There is clear consensus in the scientific literature that halting the production and consumption of fossil fuels is the only way to avoid unlivable planetary warming.⁵¹

Macroeconomic models that propose alternative “optimal pathways” where warming exceeds 2 or even 3 degrees of warming should be unequivocally ignored.⁵² Still, fossil fuel CEOs (unsurprisingly) and centrist Democrats (more surprisingly) have argued strongly against a “hasty” wind-down of fossil fuels, encouraging a focus on emissions not emitters, or an “all of the above” approach to energy development, respectively.⁵³

The centrist capitulation to fossil interests often reflects concerns about securing affordability to energy consumers.⁵⁴ This concern mirrors polling of Democratic voters which shows overwhelmingly support for the expansion of renewables, but only 49 percent support for completely winding down fossil fuels.⁵⁵ When energy prices spike as they did in 2022—when overall inflation was 9 percent, one third of which came from energy costs—policymakers tend to favor expanding fossil fuel supply.⁵⁶ For example, Biden ordered the release of strategic petroleum reserves into the global market in an attempt to bring prices down—a move that produced negligible reductions—and approved thousands of oil and gas permits by July of 2023.⁵⁷

This creates a dangerous cycle where energy price volatility entrenches reliance on volatile fossil fuel sources and, thus, bouts of unaffordability in the future. At the same time, it merely delays an even more chaotic—and inevitable—fossil wind-down. An unmanaged transition from fossil fuels, where divestment occurs according only to market signals, carries significant risks to financial stability, consumers’ energy bills, and workers.⁵⁸

The 2025 World Energy Outlook report from the IEA projects peak fossil fuel demand by the mid-2030s under the “Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS)” which presumes all countries will act on their stated decarbonization goals.⁵⁹ This projection takes into account the Trump administration’s anti-renewable turn, but also “major new [decarbonization] policies” in 48 countries. As global demand for these resources declines, the US fossil fuel sector will inevitably suffer some form of wind-down in production.

This is to say that insufficient demand will drive a disjointed contraction of the fossil fuel sector that could include dramatic, non-linear drops in private fossil fuel investment which in turn could lead to rapid depreciation of fossil fuel stock and even financial crises.⁶¹ Excess supply could also lead to extremely low wholesale prices that bring firms below their break-even point. This could, in turn, force firms to shutter their physical infrastructure and enact mass layoffs. In an unmanaged scenario, it is hard to predict whether finance or real capacity will wind down first. It is also difficult to estimate the magnitude of the impact on consumers and fossil fuel workers. However, the prognosis is grim: consumers can expect greater price volatility and workers can expect to be hung out to dry. 

There is evidence that contraction in the shale oil industry, which accounts for 65 percent of US production, is already underway even in the absence of emissions regulation or codified wind-down goals. One report from Enverus finds that “North America’s dominance in supplying global oil demand growth is waning.”⁶² In part, the authors of the report attribute this drop to the maturation of the shale industry, but also to the Trump tariffs driving up input costs, and OPEC countries removing production limits. They predict that increase in costs will drive the break-even point for shale producers from today’s ~$70 a barrel to $95 a barrel in 2035. Higher input costs along with IEA projected trends in demand are damaging to the sector. 

When oil companies decommission unprofitable capital, they first sell off their assets to smaller producers, who then file for bankruptcy to conduct mass layoffs while preserving CEO pay and shirking their responsibility to plug and clean up abandoned wells.⁶³ For example, this type of offloading of environmental regulatory responsibility occurred during the unmanaged wind-down of the coal industry in the twenty-teens.⁶⁴

An unmanaged transition can create unpredictable gaps in supply that do not correspond with adequate renewable expansion. One analysis describes the challenges of managing the mid-transition energy mix, in which some fossil fuels are still needed to meet energy demand but fossil fuel companies cannot support low production levels while still making a profit.⁶⁵ The authors argue that different fossil fuel production processes have a minimum viable scale needed to maintain operation. If fossil fuel demand is too low to support that scale, there are likely to be supply gaps that can be costly to energy consumers. 

Together these risks make a compelling case for a publicly managed wind-down that goes beyond market signals to fossil fuel producers to include: discontinuing fossil fuel subsidies and repurposing them as renewable investments or in other ways to ensure energy affordability to low-income households; windfall taxes on fossil fuel profits; a carbon price and dividend; banning oil and gas exports; and, ultimately, nationalizing the fossil fuel sector.⁶⁶ These proposals are necessary to ensure that fossil fuel production and consumption decline at the pace necessary to avoid unlivable warming. They are also critical for protecting consumers against price volatility.

A populist approach to a renewable energy transition requires a focus on working class economic well-being. Energy is not a luxury expense. It is a necessity to secure a dignified standard of living. When energy prices fluctuate upwards, it is working class households that take the largest hit; they can expect to either forego the energy they need in order to pay for food, transportation, or other essentials, or take on utility debts.⁶⁷ A Green Economic Populist agenda aims to shield working class households from cost pressures through the transition, and improve their lasting ability to afford their basic needs. As described above, there are policy tools and reimagined ownership structures that can achieve this. 

To be sure, there are losers in a renewable transition that centers working class affordability: decommissioned fossil fuel and fossil-adjacent firms and their investors, decommissioned IOUs and their investors, and high energy users like AI data centers or wealthy households. The major driver of potential energy price volatility through the transition is the same driver that causes price volatility now: profit-driven firms providing essential services at prices determined by largely under-regulated markets. The trade-off associated with an affordable, renewable transition that meets the urgency of the climate crisis is the privatized energy market structure. 

Treating existing market structures and a limited policy toolkit as a given and then pitting affordability and climate action against one another is not a productive exercise. In practice, it has only served to fracture support for renewable policy and embolden fossil fuel producers to cling to their relevance. Identifying the potential channels for cost increases throughout the transition is useful so long as we plan to eliminate or mitigate them. We can move politics toward this vision through a populist articulation of the need for public ownership and market controls as a means to secure energy price stability and bring down the cost of living.