When Gov. Josh Shapiro announced Pennsylvania would join a multistate lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, he no doubt expected applause. What he should expect instead are questions. For starters, how does suing the federal government actually lower electricity bills for Pennsylvanians?

The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t.

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And the governor’s timing couldn’t be worse or more tone deaf. While Pennsylvania families are struggling under the weight of higher energy costs, the governor’s instinct is to grandstand via litigation, which does little — if anything — to ease their financial pain.

Sadly, this has become a familiar pattern. Shapiro litigates rather than leads. He has filed or joined 17 lawsuits against the Trump administration. Regardless of your thoughts about the president, reflexive litigation is neither a substitute for leadership nor an ideal governing strategy. And Pennsylvania voters elected an attorney general, not the governor, to lead the commonwealth’s legal strategy.

Plus, this “strategy” is antithetical to the governor’s own self-proclaimed “get stuff done” ethos. Prosecuting policy disputes in the courtroom — where outcomes are slow, uncertain and costly — does very little to ameliorate the present-day concerns of struggling Pennsylvanians. To add insult to injury, Pennsylvania taxpayers probably don’t realize they are on the hook for the financial costs of these lawsuits.

What makes Shapiro’s public posturing particularly galling is how his own policies have compounded the commonwealth’s energy woes. Pennsylvania’s six-year on-again, off-again flirtation with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — the multistate cap-and-trade compact — froze energy development here in Pennsylvania. Predictably, Shapiro fought in the courts to implement the energy tax, costing taxpayers at least $4.2 million in legal fees.

Amid this prolonged regulatory uncertainty, businesses and developers avoided making the billion-dollar investments needed for exploration, infrastructure and workforce development. All of this has resulted in increased energy costs for Pennsylvania families and businesses.

And now, the governor’s “Lightning Plan” — an unsavory collection of new energy taxes, mandates, and subsidies — would only compound the problem. His plan includes two costly proposals: (1) the Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction Act, or PACER, a carbon tax like RGGI’s, and (2) the Pennsylvania Reliable Energy Sustainability Standard, or PRESS, a renewable energy mandate that expands the commonwealth’s existing alternative energy mandates.

Combined, PACER and PRESS would double Pennsylvanians’ electricity bills over the next decade, according to an analysis by the Commonwealth Foundation.

The irony of these Green New Deal-style policies is that Pennsylvania didn’t need them to cut emissions. In 2023, the Independent Fiscal Office found that the commonwealth cut emissions by nearly 11%, the biggest year-over-year drop in decades. All the while, Pennsylvania’s energy generation grew, making it one of the few states on the PJM grid to cut emissions and boost energy output, demonstrating that we don’t need to sacrifice energy production for environmental stewardship.

A better legislative pathway involves enacting no new energy taxes and passing additional meaningful regulatory reform. Pennsylvania’s obtuse permitting systems have entangled new energy projects in red tape, hindering investment and development and threatening Pennsylvania’s ability to compete domestically and internationally.

While the commonwealth measures in years, other states do so in months. For example, Texas approved an 8,000-acre, 8-gigawatt gas-fired data center just five months after developers approached regulators.

To be fair, the commonwealth has made some progress.

State lawmakers successfully expanded the Streamlining Permits for Economic Expansion and Development, or SPEED, program, which was implemented to expedite permitting. Initially, SPEED’s scope was limited to only five of Pennsylvania’s 80 different permit categories. Now the program features a “deemed approved” measure, which automatically approves completed permit requests within 30- or 60-day windows, depending on the permit type.

But these reforms are limited. Deemed approval only applies to certain water- and air-quality permits. And even with the recent reforms, SPEED only applies to about 13% of Department of Environmental Protection permits.

What we really need is broader, universal regulatory reform. Maintaining this momentum toward comprehensive reform could unlock investment, accelerate energy development, increase supply and lower costs. If Pennsylvania cut one-third of its more than 164,000 regulations, Pennsylvania could add about $9 billion and more than 180,000 jobs to its economy — something all of Shapiro’s lawsuits combined could not even come close to achieving.

Pennsylvania is supposed to be an energy leader, yet our electricity prices don’t reflect our abundant natural resources. A new report from the Joint Economic Committee finds that the average Pennsylvanian paid $210 more annually than the national average.

This unsettling trend — the logical result of years of policy decisions that prioritized virtue signaling over affordability and reliability — demands serious leadership and meaningful policy reforms, not wasteful lawsuits and legal grandstanding. With each passing lawsuit, Shapiro seems more interested in self-promotion and less in addressing the problems Pennsylvanians elected him to solve.

These self-interested lawsuits can wait, but our growing energy affordability crisis cannot.

Megan Martin, a former state Senate parliamentarian, is the chief operating officer and general counsel for the Commonwealth Foundation.