Trump’s Iran War Is Smashing His Fossil Fuel Dreams
The Strait of Hormuz is still closed, and it isn’t poised to open anytime soon. Donald Trump signaled on Wednesday that he intends to keep the U.S. blockade in place until Iran cries “uncle” and says, “We give up.” The longer the strait stays closed, the less likely any sort of return to normalcy gets.
Soon, this mounting human and economic disaster will crash into another climate-changed summer. Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, warned last week that the world faces “the biggest energy security threat in history.” Surging jet fuel prices and shortages threaten everything from commercial air travel in Europe to fighting wildfires in the western United States. Making matters worse, a potential super El Niño could trigger heat waves across Asia, further increasing demand for air conditioning and, accordingly, fossil fuels. Droughts or flooding from that weather pattern could force hydropower stations to shut down or reduce output, compelling hydropower-dependent regions to increase their demand for increasingly scarce, pricey supplies of oil and gas. The combination of extreme weather and shortages of gas-derived fertilizers that typically flow through the Strait of Hormuz stands to exacerbate a looming, climate-fueled global food crisis.
While the Trump administration certainly doesn’t seem too concerned about the crises its reckless, illegal war of choice is exacerbating in other parts of the world, the war is continuing to influence one of the few things Trump genuinely seems to care about: gas prices. In the U.S., they have soared to almost $4.30 per gallon. For the U.S., though, war in Iran risks a lot more than pissing off voters who are paying more at the pump. As the war drags on, more countries are souring on the idea that oil and gas are reliable and necessary ingredients for a thriving economy. The White House, meanwhile, is going to elaborate lengths to safeguard the fossil fueled growth model its war is endangering.
The Trump administration’s recent wave of foreign interventionism has arguably been impelled by its booming fossil fuel production. If the U.S. were still a net importer of oil and gas, that is, the White House might have seen the prospective closure of the Strait of Hormuz as an unacceptable risk. Well before Trump, the U.S. saw its ability to export these fuels as an essential part of its economic vision, locking other countries into dependency on its oil and gas in the name of energy security. With plenty of attractive alternatives on the table, though—and from much less petulant sources—that’s starting to look like a bad deal.
Some nations are starting to chart out energy futures that depend less on fossil fuels and the U.S. Leaders from nearly 60 countries gathered this past week in Santa Marta, Colombia, to discuss getting off of fossil fuels. Part of the inspiration for the meeting was that powerful fossil fuel producing countries—namely Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States—have made such discussions virtually impossible at U.N. climate talks. Selwin Hart, special adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General, pointed out in Santa Marta that three-fourths of the world’s population live in countries that are net importers of fossil fuels. For every $10 increase in the price of oil, the energy consultancy Ember noted recently, net-import costs rise by about $160 billion annually. “So today,” Hart continued, “the urgency of transitioning away from fossil fuels is no longer only a climate or environmental imperative. It is a security imperative, an economic imperative, and a development imperative.”
This kind of talk isn’t new: Climate advocates have long argued that ditching coal, oil, and gas can help insulate economies from fossil fueled volatility. Wars in Russia and Iran, however, have helped underline the urgency of that message. Steep declines in the price of renewable energy—thanks largely to China—have made it much more possible for even fast-growing countries to reduce their reliance on imported hydrocarbons in key sectors like power and transportation. For the first time last year, renewables provided more power than coal worldwide.
The war in Iran has helped accelerate shifts that were already underway—and confirmed any and all suspicions that the U.S. is an unreliable partner for energy security. The New York Times’ David Wallace-Wells pointed out recently that China’s solar, battery, and electric vehicle exports grew by 39 percent between February and March of this year. Its exports to India, Laos, and Malaysia more than doubled; exports to Kenya, Ethiopia, and Nigeria more than tripled. Chinese solar exports to Africa grew by 176 percent. In Australia—which imports nearly 80 percent of its gasoline and diesel—battery E.V. sales doubled compared to March 2025, and Japan’s E.V. sales nearly tripled. Climate pledges that a few years ago might have sounded like watery virtue signaling now seem to have a bit more heft behind them. At the Colombia conference, France announced a “first of its kind” fossil fuel phaseout plan, which aims at transitioning off of coal, oil, and gas by 2030, 2045, and 2050, respectively.
These developments don’t amount to anything like a smooth glide path toward a clean energy future. Countries that have fossil fuel reserves are rapidly drawing up plans to tap them. Bloomberg reports that Malaysia’s Petroliam Nasional Bhd., for instance, “will reinvest a potential windfall from higher oil prices into its domestic gas fields” to try to reduce the country’s reliance on imported liquid natural gas. Many countries in Asia are boosting output from aging coal-fired power plants.
Whether consciously or not, the Trump administration is resorting to increasingly desperate measures to ward off a future where its carbon-intensive products are less important. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has now spent nearly $2 billion bribing developers to ditch offshore wind projects. At the end of March, the Agriculture Department announced it was halting the Rural Energy for America Program, which has helped tens of thousands of farmers and rural business owners install solar power. Congressional Republicans want to impose an annual $250 fee on E.V.s. Abroad, U.S. officials are mounting a full-court press at the International Maritime Organization to halt plans for a quasi–carbon tax in the global shipping industry.
The irony, of course, is that the Trump administration’s reckless war on Iran has imposed an implicit carbon tax that’s leagues more ambitious than anything the IMO might hope to enact. The continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz is driving up fuel and commodity prices, forcing drillers to halt production, pushing governments and consumers alike to consider lower-carbon alternatives, and endangering what not too long ago had been considered promising growth markets for U.S. companies. In attempting to cling onto U.S. hegemony and global energy dominance, Trump might be ending both.