You know when Wile E. Coyote runs off that cliff and he just hangs in the air, magically suspended for a while until he realizes what’s about to occur? Only then does he plummet. Well, Colorado energy regulators are the coyote just before he sees there’s nothing below him.

When Colorado’s energy system falters as your bills skyrocket even higher than your already ridiculously high rates, you need to remember this: Our lawmakers and regulators made it happen, knew of the cost and carnage their decisions were going to cause, and instead of changing coarse, they redoubled their effort to make Colorado an energy desert, and all to make no real difference in global emissions.

Government has a few core functions, public safety and utility oversight are among them. Certainly, bad decisions can be made — we call that negligence. But knowingly making our energy unaffordable, scarce and unreliable for future lawmakers and regulators to deal with is maleficence.

Except some municipal-run energy providers, like Colorado Springs, most of us are “served” by privately-owned energy monopolies like Xcel. A grand bargain was struck decades ago with these monopolies: We’d let them have guaranteed profits, and a lot of them, in exchange for charging us the “least cost” possible for energy within environmental standards.

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The state’s Public Utility Committee, solely appointed by the governor, was tasked to enforce the “least cost” principle; it was their stated primary mission. That is, their “job one” was to protect our wallets.

Then, this unelected PUC changed its mission from working for consumers to decarbonizing Colorado no matter the cost, making crony power companies rich in the process.

In other words, no one — NO ONE — in the system is protecting you, the consumer, from power failures and unaffordable bills. And it’s getting so bad even the energy monopolies who make more money when they’re “forced” to build windmills and solar farms are saying the mandates are unachievable.

When the companies making obscene profits from green mandates are saying it can’t be done, it might be a sign our lawmakers have overdone it.

Some particulars of the latest insanity: In 2021, the legislature required the energy companies to cut their greenhouse emissions by 22% before 2030, and, in exchange, they could charge us customers up to 2.5% more. Easy-peazy, right?

Utilities had to submit “Clean Heat Plans” to show how they’ll do it.

Here’s what Xcel just said in their plan: “In order to achieve the ambitious 2030 emission reduction target, annual program costs are expected to exceed the 2.5% retail cost cap by approximately six to 17 times … approximately 15% to 30% of all residential single-family homes will need to be at least partially electrified by 2030.”

Translation: To cut emissions by 22% before 2030 they’ll have to blow past the legal rate increase limit and charge us up to 17 times more and up to 30% of us will have to ditch our gas furnaces and water heaters and pay for electric ones.

And that’s optimistic. Here’s what another energy utility, Black Hills Energy, says in their plan: “This scenario has high-cost impacts to customers, with an annual spend of $397 million, exceeding the annual 2.5% cost cap by 67 times.”

Quick math: To reach this goal by 2030, your energy bill goes up not 2.5%, but 167%.

Black Hills Energy said if they can only increase their prices 2.5%, the maximum the legislature set, they would be only able to reach about one-tenth of the emissions reduction the legislature mandates. That’s it!

Reality sucks. I get it. But in the real world we can’t have two opposing things at once.

Fortunately, the PUC has the authority to stand up for us customers and enforce the 2.5% cost cap (meaning the utilities won’t meet their reduction goals). So, of course, they didn’t.

This is how divorced from reality our lawmakers are. Instead of re-tooling their emission mandates to something a little less than complete fantasy, the governor’s energy office is now trying to double this already unreachable 2030 emissions reduction goal by only 2035.

These people are completely unhinged.

Oh, and if it matters, even if we were to reach the state’s unreachable emission reduction it wouldn’t make any real difference to global emissions. You’re going to have to talk to China and India to make that happen. But it will economically flatten Colorado and your family.

Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute in Denver and hosts “The Devil’s Advocate with Jon Caldara” on Colorado Public Television Channel 12. His column appears Sundays in Colorado Politics.