The Iran War Is Another Reason to Quit Oil
And consumers responded. During the first two weeks of the war, the number of Americans looking to save money on energy increased — requesting quotes for solar home systems and researching electric vehicles online. We can expect similar trends in other countries. In India, where many kitchens rely on increasingly rare and expensive liquefied petroleum gas cylinders, consumers are rushing to buy induction cookers. Many models are out of stock because restaurants have picked them up; At the start of the war, some restaurants in Mumbai closed their doors because they could not find cooking gas and others stopped selling fried or stewed foods because they required too much energy. The crematoria were unable to find gas to fuel their fires.
During Trump’s first term, the United Kingdom pledged to abandon fossil fuels by mid-century, largely because of climate concerns. The country’s Labor government has kept this commitment. (By contrast, the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement.) But his green energy policies, like his plan to help Britons install electric heat pumps, have been the target of relentless attacks from conservatives, the Reform Party and right-wing tabloids. Nigel Farage, who is the closest to Britain MAGA politician, denounced the “madness” of building wind and solar power. One of the tabloids’ favorite claims is that green energy projects would cost the UK nine trillion pounds. Yet the calculation turned out to be based on flawed assumptions: it overestimated the costs of net-zero emissions policies and ignored the costs of a dirty energy system.
Since the start of the war in the Middle East, a growing number of voices have called for the United Kingdom to reopen the North Sea oil fields. But the problem with the “Drill, baby, drill” argument is that gas prices are set by global markets. The UK is unlikely to lower its own prices by extracting the oil it controls – and, in any case, it would take years for the proposed oil wells to have an appreciable impact. “We are a price taker, not a price maker,” British Energy Secretary Ed Miliband recently explained on the BBC on Sunday. Instead, he argued, “we need local clean energy that we control.” »
Miliband argued that the UK, like any country, needs the energy equivalent of drones: solar panels, heat pumps, electric vehicles, induction cooktops. We need the small technology that, in Miliband’s words, would take us off the “fossil fuel rollercoaster”. The sickening effect of this rollercoaster ride has been highlighted in a new report from the Committee on Climate Change, which advises the UK on its net zero emissions targets. It showed that dealing with the last big energy price shock, following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, cost taxpayers more than forty-one billion pounds. According to the committee, if the UK invested a similar amount in local clean energy it would go a large part of the way towards its net zero emissions targets. The best way to save Britons money – and safeguard the country’s independence from tyrants as diverse as Vladimir Putin, Trump and the mullahs of the Middle East – is to move quickly towards a clean future.
China has already learned this lesson. As Columbia scholars Erica Downs and Jason Bordoff wrote in Foreign policy, Recently, China has been preparing “for a world in which energy security is inseparable from geopolitics – by electrifying its economy, securing its domestic energy sources, accumulating stockpiles, and dominating clean technology supply chains.” The good news is that none of these technologies are secret and we can buy them for much less than oil. And, once we have them, we will no longer depend on oil flowing into an indefensible ditch about twenty-one miles wide. Instead, we will rely on a continuous stream of photons from the sun, an energy source that will last for another five billion years. ♦
