The Strait of Hormuz is roughly 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest point. One fifth of the world’s oil and gas moves through that corridor. Since the conflict involving Iran, the United States, and Israel escalated a month ago, that corridor has been effectively shut.
The consequences arrived fast. Fuel prices climbed. Import-dependent economies started recalculating budgets they’d assumed were settled. Power grids in countries with no domestic production and no alternatives found themselves rationing. None of this was unpredictable. What’s striking is how little preparation existed for something everyone could see coming.
António Guterres had warned in February that our collective addiction to fossil fuels was destabilising both the climate and global security. The language was blunt for a Secretary-General. It wasn’t enough to shift policy. It rarely is, until the shortage is already priced in.
Three quarters of humanity lives in countries that are net importers of fossil fuels. That’s the number Guterres put on the table at an International Energy Agency ministerial meeting earlier this year. Those countries don’t control what they consume, and they can’t predict what it’ll cost them. Development budgets shrink to cover fuel bills. Infrastructure projects stall. The dependency isn’t incidental; it’s structural.
Renewable energy doesn’t solve every problem in that structure, but it addresses the core one. Solar panels built in Chile’s Atacama don’t stop generating because a strait closes. Geothermal wells in Kenya’s Rift Valley aren’t subject to tanker route disruptions. India’s solar buildout, still incomplete and still layered over heavy fossil fuel use, nevertheless moves generation capacity closer to where consumption happens. Local production, in energy as in most things, is harder to embargo.
Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, put it plainly earlier this year: renewables are the cheapest path to energy sovereignty, and they protect economies from the shocks that wars and trade disputes routinely deliver. That case used to be made primarily on environmental grounds. It’s now made on strategic ones too, and that changes who listens.
For households, the arithmetic is more direct. In most markets, electricity from solar and wind already costs less than electricity from coal, oil, or gas. A family insulated from oil price spikes by locally produced renewable power isn’t just better off environmentally. They’re better off financially, and with more predictability than markets anchored to geopolitical risk can offer.
The crisis hasn’t created a new argument for the energy transition. It’s made an existing argument impossible to defer.