Donald Trump is known as a supporter of fossil fuels and an enemy of renewable energy. His administration has been creating roadblocks for wind power while encouraging increased production and use of oil, gas and coal. However, his war of choice against Iran has (very predictably) lead to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which normally about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas will pass (along with aluminium, nitrogen fertilizer, helium and other supplies needed by economies around the world).
The closure of this crucial naval passage has globally driven up prices of fossil fuels, despite vast amounts of oil being released from strategic reserves by governments in many countries. Because these strategic reserves are limited in capacity, the current response is not sustainable. If the blockade doesn’t end soon, prices will inevitably go much higher. Sustained crude prices of US$ 150-200 a barrel would probably trigger a global recession. Countries including Japan and Germany have used temporary subsidies to bring gasoline prices down again, but these measures are costly to government budgets and inevitably end up driving up profits of oil companies, which are still in control of pump prices.
Fortunately, the extra cost from higher gasoline prices to me has been zero. I bought my last liter of gasoline some time in early December, before I took delivery of a Hyundai Ioniq 5, a car that I love to drive. Now I just plug it into the wall socket in my garage some time while I am not driving it. This can be at night when I’m asleep but most of the electricity for charging has actually come at daytime from the solar panels on the roof of my house. The effective cost for me is 15 JPY (9.6 US cents) per kWH, which is what the grid operator would pay me if I were to feed the surplus into the grid instead of consuming it myself. Over the past 2200 km the car has averaged a power consumption of 15.2 kWh per 100 km, which is the equivalent of 228 JPY (US$1.46) per 100 km. With current gasoline subsidies in place, that amount of money would buy me about 1.5 liters of gasoline here in Japan. Not even a Honda Supercub motor scooter could go 100 km on that amount of fuel, let alone a car that comfortably seats 5 adults. And note that I am not actually paying that money: I just don’t get paid that amount from the power company if I charge the car instead of selling power to them.
A lot of people who would not ordinarily be considering EVs, either because they don’t think that much about the climate disaster or because of various concerns they have still had about the practicality of EVs, are now re-evaluating the situation and taking a serious look at available EVs, either new models on the market or cheaper second hand cars available without wait.
With skyrocketing LNG prices, countries that have invested in onshore and offshore wind and solar are somewhat insulated from these economic shocks as they consume less of the expensive imported fuels. Solar and wind are now the cheapest source of new generating capacity almost anywhere on the planet. This was true even before the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but the price shocks are lending an urgency to plans for a shift away from fossil fuels that wasn’t felt by many before. Also, the falling cost of batteries has allowed renewable energy to displace more and more fossil power as output can be time-shifted via batteries, with a combination of solar plus batteries still beating fossil gas on cost. Battery farms can soak up cheap surplus power at midday and sell it at a profit in the evening, when demand is high.
“Sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, but none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz.” (Bill McKibben)
In the discussion about the energy transition, those who wanted to slow it down or delay it have often emphasized the supposed unreliability of renewable sources such as wind and solar, compared to dispatchable output from coal and gas power plants. Germans have even coined the unique word “Dunkelflaute” for a period when it’s dark and there is not much wind. However, many countries depend on imports for much of their fossil fuels and that makes them highly dependent on events outside their control. If it wasn’t already clear after the Ukraine war, the war between Israel, the US and Iran has now made it abundantly clear that fossil fuels are not the safe, dependable option: Renewable energies are.
From 2011 to 2022, Germany depended on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline for supposedly cheap and secure Russian gas. Then on August 31, 2022, six months after Putin started a full scale war against Ukraine, a European country, he halted all gas supplies via the pipeline. On July 25, 2022 Russia had already throttled supplies via Nord Stream down to 20 % of capacity. At the time Germany’s largest gas storage site, the Rehden storage facility, was actually operated by Gazprom, the Russian gas conglomerate. It turned out that before the winter of 2021/2022 it had not refilled the storage site as usual, instead letting it drop to a mere 0.5 % of capacity by April and thus directly exposing Germany to Russian blackmail when Russia launched the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Several weeks after the complete shutdown of Nord Stream 1, three of the four 1200 km pipes at the bottom of the Baltic sea were destroyed by an explosion.
The German government took over the Rehden storage facility but had to work hard to quickly secure alternative supplies of gas, relying heavily on LNG from Qatar. All shipments from Qatar to Europe have to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. In March 2026, Iranian missiles knocked out 2 of the 14 gas-to-liquid trains needed for filling LNG tankers. Even if the Strait of Hormuz were to reopen quickly, according to industry experts it could take as long as 3-5 years for the damage to be repaired to return to the previous export rate.
For many countries, use of fossil fuels sends wealth abroad. Germany spends 80 billion euros per year on fossil fuel imports, money which could be spent on setting up wind turbines, solar panels and batteries in Germany, thus creating local jobs rather than funding unsavory regimes abroad. More than half of Germany’s electricity is already generated from renewals. More than 20 % of new cars are EVs. These are far lower rates than in Denmark, Sweden or Norway, but much more than in Japan. Only about 2 % of new cars in Japan in 2025 were EVs. Solar and wind provided no more than 12 % of electricity in Japan in 2025. Meanwhile China has been adding more wind and solar power per year than the rest of the world combined.
The fossil fuel crisis triggered by the war with Iran has the potential to dramatically speed up the transition away from costly and unreliable fossil fuels. Even fossil fuel exporters understand this, as shown by the recent decision by the UAE to leave OPEC. It was a landmark step, as the UAE has been the second largest swing producer within OPEC after the Saudis. This step will allow them to increase their production rate without adhering to agreed ceilings, to maximize export revenue in the short term before global demand for oil ultimately collapses. If demand for oil was steady, it would make more sense for UAE and OPEC to artificially restrict supply to maintain high prices to rake in profits. This is no longer a viable option, as renewables are now undercutting fossils, putting an expiry date on the fossil fuel industry as a whole.