Jimmy Carter at a ceremony for the dedication of solar panels he had installed at the White House, June 20, 1979. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum/NARA)
Iran’s daily strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure didn’t just set oil terminals ablaze. They have also torched one of the most persistent myths in modern energy politics: that oil and gas are the irreplaceable foundation of “energy security.”
It’s a myth that Daniel Yergin, the éminence grise of the oil commentariat and vice chair of S&P Global, has spent years carefully cultivating. From heavyweight essays to cozy conversations with BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Yergin has argued that hydrocarbons are the bedrock of a stable world—and urged more, not less, fossil fuel production.
Then came a few nights of missile and drone strikes.
Suddenly, the same man insisting the world must plan for “decades more” of oil and gas energy dominance now admits he is “alarmed” by the escalating odds of “the greatest oil supply upheaval in history.” With the Strait of Hormuz is choked an LNG plants and refineries idled, the war has reinforced the brutally obvious: fossil fuels aren’t a shield against chaos. They are a conduit for it.
What makes Yergin’s current position so striking is that younger Dan saw this coming. After the oil shocks of the 1970s, he praised Jimmy Carter as the first modern president who understood that America “could not continue” on a path of ever-rising oil imports. Carter symbolically installed solar panels on the White House roof and argued that sun and wind were immune to cartels, embargoes, and future energy wars. He pushed efficiency, funded early solar and wind research, and is widely seen as the first U.S. president to treat what we now call climate change as a serious, long-term threat.
View our latest digests
For a brief moment, it looked as if the crisis might actually change civilization’s energy trajectory. But oil prices collapsed, political will evaporated, and Ronald Reagan gleefully took the panels off the White House roof. Fossil fuel interests reframed the debate back to price and convenience. Solar cost $30 a watt, wind was experimental, and batteries were science fiction. It was easy to say the world “wasn’t ready.”
It also locked us into the current mess. Yet today, Yergin and other fossil-friendly “realists” are asking us to stay the course and yes, build renewables—but slowly, cautiously, always with a comforting cushion of oil and gas underneath. Do just enough to talk about transition, but never enough to achieve it.
The current Gulf war is not a freak accident. It is the logical outcome of an energy system designed around a single, hyper-strategic chokepoint. For more than 100 years, governments and oil companies have known that the global economy’s most critical energy corridor runs through a region that has not known sustained stability since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Yet about a fifth of the world’s energy, and up to 90%of the oil needs of nations like Japan and South Korea, still require tankers to thread a narrow strait bordered by rivals armed to the teeth.
Now that order is cracking in exactly the way critics warned. Tankers are pinned in port. Refineries and LNG facilities are offline. Import-dependent countries from Europe to India are discovering, again, that the fuel they were told was “reliable” can be turned off with a few well-aimed, battery-powered drones.
But in the ashes is hope. While leaders in the 1970s could dismiss renewable energy, pleading technical ignorance, today, the numbers tell a very different story. Solar module prices have fallen by around 98% since Carter’s day. Wind turbines have gone from niche experiments to backbone infrastructure. Battery costs have plummeted. Across most markets, new solar and wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity—often dramatically undercutting new coal or gas.
Unlike the 70’s, the world also has proof positive that renewable energy can be the backbone of a nation’s energy policy. While still importing vast amounts of fossil fuels, China has turned once-mocked renewables into national industrial policy, building a manufacturing capacity big enough to reshape global markets. Europe, shocked by Russia’s war in Ukraine, has raced to implement wind and solar on a continental scale. Even the United States has quietly built one of the world’s largest bases of renewable power—not because it is virtuous, but because it is profitable.
Yet instead of recognizing the accelerating transition to clean energy, oil veterans like Yergin, worry instead that transition is “more difficult, costly, and complicated than expected,” while insisting that oil and gas are continue to underpin the global economy. for decades to come.
The mayhem in the Gulf says otherwise.
Real energy security has never been about worshiping one fuel. It is about reducing strategic vulnerability. Every rooftop solar panel is an act of economic sovereignty. Every wind turbine is a barrel of oil that never has to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Every megawatt-hour of storage makes a grid less dependent on a pipeline or a tanker. Fossil fuels, by contrast, concentrate risk. Oil and gas must be drilled in sensitive locations, shipped along volatile routes, and refined at a few massive facilities — creating single points of failure that are irresistible targets in a world of cheap drones and long-range missiles.
In 1979, Carter told Americans the energy crisis was “the moral equivalent of war” and asked whether we were finally ready to change. The country—and the world—answered no.
This time, there is a real war. The only question now is how many more wars are we willing to fight to preserve the “energy security” of oil and gas?
No one has ever gone to war over a solar panel.
Peter McKillop is the founder of Climate & Capital Media, where this post was first published.
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I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.
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Jimmy Carter at a ceremony for the dedication of solar panels he had installed at the White House, June 20, 1979. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum/NARA)
Iran’s daily strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure didn’t just set oil terminals ablaze. They have also torched one of the most persistent myths in modern energy politics: that oil and gas are the irreplaceable foundation of “energy security.”
It’s a myth that Daniel Yergin, the éminence grise of the oil commentariat and vice chair of S&P Global, has spent years carefully cultivating. From heavyweight essays to cozy conversations with BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Yergin has argued that hydrocarbons are the bedrock of a stable world—and urged more, not less, fossil fuel production.
Then came a few nights of missile and drone strikes.
Suddenly, the same man insisting the world must plan for “decades more” of oil and gas energy dominance now admits he is “alarmed” by the escalating odds of “the greatest oil supply upheaval in history.” With the Strait of Hormuz is choked an LNG plants and refineries idled, the war has reinforced the brutally obvious: fossil fuels aren’t a shield against chaos. They are a conduit for it.
What makes Yergin’s current position so striking is that younger Dan saw this coming. After the oil shocks of the 1970s, he praised Jimmy Carter as the first modern president who understood that America “could not continue” on a path of ever-rising oil imports. Carter symbolically installed solar panels on the White House roof and argued that sun and wind were immune to cartels, embargoes, and future energy wars. He pushed efficiency, funded early solar and wind research, and is widely seen as the first U.S. president to treat what we now call climate change as a serious, long-term threat.
View our latest digests
For a brief moment, it looked as if the crisis might actually change civilization’s energy trajectory. But oil prices collapsed, political will evaporated, and Ronald Reagan gleefully took the panels off the White House roof. Fossil fuel interests reframed the debate back to price and convenience. Solar cost $30 a watt, wind was experimental, and batteries were science fiction. It was easy to say the world “wasn’t ready.”
It also locked us into the current mess. Yet today, Yergin and other fossil-friendly “realists” are asking us to stay the course and yes, build renewables—but slowly, cautiously, always with a comforting cushion of oil and gas underneath. Do just enough to talk about transition, but never enough to achieve it.
The current Gulf war is not a freak accident. It is the logical outcome of an energy system designed around a single, hyper-strategic chokepoint. For more than 100 years, governments and oil companies have known that the global economy’s most critical energy corridor runs through a region that has not known sustained stability since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Yet about a fifth of the world’s energy, and up to 90%of the oil needs of nations like Japan and South Korea, still require tankers to thread a narrow strait bordered by rivals armed to the teeth.
Now that order is cracking in exactly the way critics warned. Tankers are pinned in port. Refineries and LNG facilities are offline. Import-dependent countries from Europe to India are discovering, again, that the fuel they were told was “reliable” can be turned off with a few well-aimed, battery-powered drones.
But in the ashes is hope. While leaders in the 1970s could dismiss renewable energy, pleading technical ignorance, today, the numbers tell a very different story. Solar module prices have fallen by around 98% since Carter’s day. Wind turbines have gone from niche experiments to backbone infrastructure. Battery costs have plummeted. Across most markets, new solar and wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity—often dramatically undercutting new coal or gas.
Unlike the 70’s, the world also has proof positive that renewable energy can be the backbone of a nation’s energy policy. While still importing vast amounts of fossil fuels, China has turned once-mocked renewables into national industrial policy, building a manufacturing capacity big enough to reshape global markets. Europe, shocked by Russia’s war in Ukraine, has raced to implement wind and solar on a continental scale. Even the United States has quietly built one of the world’s largest bases of renewable power—not because it is virtuous, but because it is profitable.
Yet instead of recognizing the accelerating transition to clean energy, oil veterans like Yergin, worry instead that transition is “more difficult, costly, and complicated than expected,” while insisting that oil and gas are continue to underpin the global economy. for decades to come.
The mayhem in the Gulf says otherwise.
Real energy security has never been about worshiping one fuel. It is about reducing strategic vulnerability. Every rooftop solar panel is an act of economic sovereignty. Every wind turbine is a barrel of oil that never has to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Every megawatt-hour of storage makes a grid less dependent on a pipeline or a tanker. Fossil fuels, by contrast, concentrate risk. Oil and gas must be drilled in sensitive locations, shipped along volatile routes, and refined at a few massive facilities — creating single points of failure that are irresistible targets in a world of cheap drones and long-range missiles.
In 1979, Carter told Americans the energy crisis was “the moral equivalent of war” and asked whether we were finally ready to change. The country—and the world—answered no.
This time, there is a real war. The only question now is how many more wars are we willing to fight to preserve the “energy security” of oil and gas?
No one has ever gone to war over a solar panel.
Peter McKillop is the founder of Climate & Capital Media, where this post was first published.
Your email address will not be published.
I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.
…
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