I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the world transitioning away from fossil fuels, with or without America’s help.
Last month, a coalition of fifty-seven countries held an international conference to discuss their plans for phasing out fossil fuels for good. Petrostates like Russia and the Gulf nations weren’t invited. Neither was the United States.
This so-called coalition of the willing is fed up with the mainstream U.N. climate track, where a single holdout can stall progress forever, and even when agreements are reached, they’re toothless and non-binding. Countries that actually care about climate change are opting out of this designed-to-fail diplomacy and moving forward with what they can do right now, from funding renewable energy development and battery storage to banning ads for fossil fuel.
This conference shows that petrostates are losing their influence over world affairs. In their place, we’re seeing the rise of the electrostate – countries that secure their own energy independence through renewable and zero-carbon power sources. With their decades of investment in green energy, China has surged to a lead, but countries around the world are racing to catch up. This century will belong to the nations that win this green marathon – and in a massive irony, America’s war on Iran has turbocharged the competition.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:
Against this backdrop, the biggest story is America’s colossally stupid war on Iran and Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. This conflict has cut off 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas supply, most of which had been going to Asia.
The supply shock and overnight price spike was a rude awakening for Asian nations that depended on Mideast oil and gas. In this interview with Deutsche Welle, energy analyst Sam Geall calls it their “Ukraine moment”. First Europe, and now Asia, have realized the folly of basing their economies on a volatile commodity that can be cut off at the whim of a dictator.
And Asia is responding. The magnitude of the crisis has broken through political inertia and cut across partisan divides. As the DW story puts it, “decisions that might have once taken years are being made in weeks”.
Between the Iran war, the recent exiting of OPEC of the U.A.E. (and Qatar’s leaving back in 2019), and this more co-ordinated project… things are going to get even more interesting in the Middle East.
I think a lot of the blame can be laid at Saudi Arabia’s feet: we know (because Kushner has no concept of operational security) that the Saudi were almost certainly part of the push to get the U.S. to strike Iran, wanting to damage one of their primary rivals in the region. And the U.A.E.’s exit was pretty openly caused by the Saudi control of the cartel and their dissatisfaction with that control and with the House of Saud in general. Saudi Arabia has been pretty much treating OPEC as theirs for years, and MBS seems rather less subtle about some of that than his predecessors. While OPEC isn’t in trouble yet, I bet everybody in the region is going to be watching to see how the U.A.E. does, and if they don’t suffer any obvious negative consequences aside from the Saudi potentially trying to actively sabotage them, they may not be the last to leave.
You’re right that the recent shock is going to get other countries moving faster to disentangle themselves from all this, much like the energy crisis of the 1970s caused a big surge in looking for sources of oil that weren’t in the Middle East.
I hadn’t heard that Saudi Arabia was pushing for the attack on Iran. That’s strange to me, because I recently read that the Saudis were refusing to grant the American military permission to use their territory and airspace to escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. I understood it was their way of showing they’re upset about damage from Iranian missile strikes and the impact on their economy from the oil blockade.
Does that mean they pushed for the war but they’re unhappy about how it’s played out? Did they assume the U.S. would be able to win quickly, or at least shoot down Iran’s missiles so they wouldn’t suffer any harm from it?