This week, the United States launched a war in the Middle East for the fourth time in as many decades, and the impact on energy markets has been swift. What is less clear is whether the war could unwittingly present an opportunity for renewables at the same time that an emerging order of countries taking climate action as a matter of national security is beginning to take shape.
The fallout of war with Iran may still be unpredictable, but it is not unprecedented. Two weeks ago marked the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and just as that military action provoked an energy shock that shapes Europe’s energy transition today, the world’s economies are once again confronting the vulnerability of fossil fuel supply chains during wartime.
On Tuesday, Iranian officials responded to American and Israeli strikes by effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage connecting the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean. Roughly one fifth of the world’s oil and gas supply passes through the strait, and its closure has already pushed gas prices up roughly 50 percent in Europe. Iran has also launched missile attacks on the world’s largest oil refinery in Saudi Arabia, as well as a major natural gas hub in Qatar, forcing both facilities to shut down indefinitely.
[IMAGE: Credit: Goran_tek-en, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons]
Within weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Europe cut off its supply of Russian coal, oil and gas, triggering an energy crisis that lasted into 2023. European officials responded by doubling down on renewables through an initiative known as REPowerEU.
The question now is whether the latest energy shock will produce a similar response.
This time around, energy analysts are divided on whether the spike in energy prices will lead countries to deploy more renewables in an effort to shore up electricity supply. On the one hand, expanding wind and solar installations would allow countries cut off from fossil fuels passing through the Strait of Hormuz to generate more electricity domestically.
But some analysts remain skeptical, pointing to the possibility that higher energy costs could provoke global inflation, leading to higher interest rates from central banks. Those interest rates influence the cost of borrowing money, as wind and solar projects rely heavily on cheap financing because of their high upfront costs. They also point out that the region most affected by restrictions from the Hormuz Strait is Asia, where many countries could simply burn more domestically available coal to compensate for lost gas and oil.
Unlike previous adventures in Iraq, Libya and (covertly) in Syria, the reason for American military intervention in Iran is neither a straightforward oil play nor an explicit attempt to install a regime more favorable to American fossil energy interests. In fact, a definitive explanation for what precipitated the war is still forthcoming from the administration that launched it. Energy experts agree that if the conflict extends beyond the four-week window the Trump administration outlined, the effects on fossil fuel markets could last for years.
The geopolitical implications of that shift extend well beyond energy markets.
Climate & National Security
One of the striking ironies about the new era of fossil fuel wars is that they are coming at precisely the time when a number of countries are elevating the climate crisis to a matter of national security. In recent months, at least two European countries have given signals that they see dealing with climate change and reducing emissions as critical to their security interests, and have made the case for how climate impacts could pose an existential risk in the coming decades.
In October, Iceland made history when it became the first country to declare a national security emergency due to climate impacts. The Icelandic government’s principal concern is the impending collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the ocean current that brings warm water to the North Atlantic and regulates temperatures in Europe.
Iceland’s Climate Minister Johann Pall Johannsson was quoted in October as saying that AMOC collapse "is a direct threat to our national resilience and security…(this) is the first time a specific climate-related phenomenon has been formally brought before the National Security Council as a potential existential threat.”
Officials in the UK have also begun to view impending climate impacts in the same light, although in a decidedly less public way. In January, the Times reported that the UK government had suppressed the release of a report that found climate impacts could cause economic damage twice as large as the 2008 financial crisis if left unchecked, and could potentially draw the UK into wars to protect Europe’s remaining arable ‘breadbaskets’ in Ukraine and Russia if emissions remain unchecked. The report even speculated that the most extreme climate scenarios could lead to nuclear war and unmanageable levels of immigration to the global north.
These assessments are perhaps the most stark warnings of climate impacts on security and war to date, but they are not the first. It seems like a long time ago now, but the United States took the lead on the climate-national security discourse as recently as 2019. That was the year that the Department of Defense listed climate change among the top national security threats in its annual threat assessment report that has since been deleted by the Trump Administration.
The fact that a superpower and a country so small that it developed an app to notify people if their Tinder date was in fact a genetically close relative both saw climate change as a threat to its core interests speaks to the wide-spread impacts that climate change could have on war and security in the near future.
The Military Emissions Gap
America’s newest war is also an occasion to revisit what has become known in climate circles as the “military emissions gap”.
As we explained back in 2023, the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions from military activities are unaccounted for precisely because the Paris Climate Accords were designed that way. The Accords explicitly state that no country is obligated to report how much carbon and methane result from military activities. Exactly 43 countries (known as ‘Annex-1 parties’) are encouraged to report, chief among them the United States along with two tiers of developed nations that exclude rising military powers such as India and China.
That was actually an improvement over the Kyoto Protocol, the predecessor to Paris adopted by the United Nations in 1997, which excluded disclosure of military emissions after vigorous lobbying from the United States under the Clinton Administration.
In spite of the lack of data, what is sure is that the impact of military emissions is enormous. Estimates suggest that the total footprint of the world’s armed forces is roughly 5.5% of all annual emissions, surpassing the carbon emissions of the entire African continent. The leaders in military emissions will likely come as no surprise: China, Russia and the United States militaries have by far the highest footprints, determined by an analysis that crunches estimates based on spending and known fuel consumption from assets like planes, ships and vehicles.
Finally, military emissions have a recursive and self-reinforcing effect on the climate. As tensions in one part of the world rise, neighbors on the outskirts of a given conflict are forced to prepare their own militaries in case fighting spills over into their borders. That means more military training exercises and preparation, and more unseen emissions. War also locks in carbon emissions well into the future after the shooting stops, as the affected areas require carbon-intensive cement and steel to replace buildings and infrastructure destroyed in the fighting.
