Free markets, not government mandates, will ultimately drive the transition to a low-carbon economy.

This debate began as a tightly contested exchange but rapidly transformed into a decisive victory for the Con position, with the turning point emerging in Round 2 when Con dismantled Pro's central premise regarding the relationship between markets and institutional frameworks. While Pro opened with a compelling narrative about the "economic inevitability" of renewable energy cost parity—scoring a narrow 6.3 to Con's 6.1—the subsequent rounds revealed critical deficiencies in Pro's evidentiary rigor and logical structure that Con exploited with increasing sophistication.

The decisive factor was Con's persistent and ultimately unrefuted demonstration that Pro had committed a fallacy of confusing correlation with causation (and effect with cause). Con successfully established that the "market-driven" phenomena Pro celebrated—corporate renewable procurement, cost reductions in solar PV, and private investment flows—existed exclusively within government-created regulatory structures including carbon pricing mechanisms, renewable portfolio standards, and interstate transmission regulations. Pro's failure to engage substantively with this "framework versus actor" distinction in Rounds 3 and 4 proved fatal; rather than demonstrating how markets would internalize carbon externalities without mandates, Pro repeatedly asserted that declining costs alone would drive transition, ignoring Con's evidence that markets systematically underprice long-term climate risks without regulatory compulsion.

Pro's evidentiary quality deteriorated markedly across rounds, shifting from specific LCOE (levelized cost of energy) data in the opening to increasingly unsupported assertions about "market inevitability" in the closing. Conversely, Con strengthened their position by citing specific historical failures of unregulated markets to address externalities (acid rain, ozone depletion) and demonstrating that even ostensibly "private" decarbonization investments responded to mandate-driven signals. The 5.3 final round score for Pro reflects a closing argument that largely repeated earlier claims without addressing Con's challenge regarding the free-rider problem and tragedy of the commons dynamics inherent in atmospheric carbon—conceptual gaps that Con identified as early as Round 2 and which Pro never successfully closed.