On a normal day, around 100 ships pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Right now, it’s effectively zero. Brent, the global oil price benchmark, is a third higher than it was a month ago. Europe’s Dutch TTF hub price, one of the main global reference points for fossil gas, has almost doubled.

By some measures, the Iran War is already the largest disruption of oil and gas supply in modern history. Analysts are scrambling to keep track of the chaos, but history suggests moments like this are rarely about the prices, and more about what governments do once the shock subsides.

It’s worth recalling what happened after the world’s last major oil crisis. The embargo issued by the Gulf states in 1973 lasted only five months, but what followed was a chain of events that reshaped the dollar, the distribution of power between East and West, and contributed to the economic conditions that made the collapse of communism possible. The spot price of oil was a lot less consequential than the political and financial structures that crystallised around it.

We have recent evidence for how this works. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Europe’s energy transition accelerated sharply. The EU committed €210 billion to cutting dependence on Russian gas, eased permitting for renewables, and raised its 2030 clean energy targets — doing in months what the economics had long justified but the politics had blocked.

Four years later, wind and sunshine are generating more electricity in Europe than all fossil fuels combined, and cars powered by batteries outsell cars with combustion engines. The war didn’t cause the transition, but it did remove some of the last major barriers in its way.

We’re at a comparable fork now, except this time, on a global scale. Even if the airstrikes on Iran wind down soon and prices moderate, the world’s biggest energy consumers have now had the visceral, balance-sheet busting experience of finding out that the supply of oil and gas from the Middle East is unpredictable.

In the short term, that won’t change the global energy balance in ways most consumers will feel, at least not yet. But it does send a powerful message to the 50 oil-and-gas importing countries running the numbers on how exposed they actually are. What those countries decide to do next is the real story.

China is already going hell for leather on wind, solar and batteries — not because of the CCP’s love of green technology, but because it understands that the energy you make at home cannot be blockaded. India has no meaningful domestic oil reserves, so its path runs through renewables too. Indonesia is suddenly debating whether distributing solar panels makes more sense than coughing up energy subsidies every year. South Korea just scrapped restrictive solar permitting rules and Pakistan has moved a quarter of its national grid to solar in three years.

As we said in last week’s edition, the fundamental difference between fossil fuels and renewables isn’t just cost, it’s that the former requires constant supply and the latter doesn’t. Once the turbines are erected and the panels are installed, the fuel is free. By contrast dirty energy has to keep on arriving in all those tankers or else all hell breaks loose. That vulnerability is structural, not incidental, and no amount of new drilling fixes it.

The technology for the clean energy transition is available. The economics are already favourable. What has been missing, in so many places, is a good reason to actually shift.

It would be fitting if Donald Trump just supplied that reason, hastening the end of the fossil-fuel era he has tried so hard to prolong.