In the volatile waters of the Strait of Hormuz, maritime traffic has slowed to an agonizing crawl. Roughly a fifth of global oil trade passes through this narrow passage. Nearly half of the crude oil headed toward Asia must cross these waters.
As the Iran war escalated, insurance firms raised premiums sharply, ship operators slowed departures, and cargo owners started holding back shipments. The result is a choke point where the world’s energy arteries suddenly look sclerotic.
You are watching, in real time, how a decade of climate-themed hostility to fossil fuels has hollowed out resilience. Governments told you that restraining domestic drilling and pipeline construction in the name of “net zero” would make the world safer. The Strait of Hormuz today tells a different story.
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Western nations spent the last two decades systematically crippling their own energy independence. Driven by climate alarmism, European leaders deliberately dismantled their domestic production capabilities. Germany shuttered its nuclear plants and coal facilities under green mandates, forcing a desperate reliance on liquefied natural gas from distant suppliers.
The United Kingdom abandoned abundant North Sea oil and gas reserves, leaving billions of barrels in the ground to satisfy the demands of environmental activists. In Canada, regulatory hurdles have stalled critical infrastructure, such as the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which aimed to transport the output of Alberta’s vast oil sands to global markets. These decisions, rooted in a narrative that paints hydrocarbons as villains, have eroded self-sufficiency.
By artificially suppressing domestic exploration, developed nations engineered their own dependency on volatile foreign energy imports. They traded secure, homegrown energy for extremely vulnerable supply lines stretching across hostile regions. When Russian gas volumes collapsed after 2022, many European governments scrambled to charter LNG cargoes at eye‑watering prices and sign short‑term deals with Gulf and U.S. suppliers.
That experience should have triggered a sober reassessment. Instead, policymakers stood firm on net-zero pledges and treated the crisis as an excuse to accelerate the “transition,” not to rebuild baseload capacity or secure diversified, long‑term supply. The current Hormuz disruption is a second wake‑up call, and this time their contingency plans are little to nothing.
Southeast and Northeast Asia sit at the epicenter of this shock. Nearly half of all crude destined for Asia flows through the strait. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and others have built world‑leading manufacturing economies on the assumption that Gulf oil and gas will remain both available and affordable.
South Korea’s industrial heartlands — Gyeonggi‑do’s factories, Ulsan’s refineries and shipyards — run on imported coal, oil and LNG. In 2024, fossil fuels provided 79% of primary energy consumption. Japan’s refineries, too, feed a dense ecosystem of automobile, electronics, and chemical plants that cannot substitute the intermittent energy of wind and sunshine for steady combustion.
The financial reckoning for this green delusion is brutal and immediate. On the morning of March 4, South Korea’s market cratered 12% and triggered a circuit breaker, plunging off a cliff in a matter of minutes. South Korean shares plummeted by more than 10%, erasing $430 billion in value and hitting a 17-year market low amid the escalating Middle East conflict.
To withstand geopolitical shocks like the current conflict, countries need greater dispatchable generation capacity, more storage, and a genuinely diversified supplier portfolio. That means long‑term oil and LNG contracts with producers outside the Gulf, new receiving terminals, and investments in coal where appropriate.
It also means treating natural gas as a core pillar and not a “bridge” to be dismantled on schedule. None of the region’s heavy industries can function on wind and solar alone. Pretending otherwise does not cut emissions; it just raises the odds of blackouts the next time tankers stall in a war zone.
Besides, the climate crisis narrative that drove this global vulnerability is finally collapsing under its own weight. The mask is falling off. Major investment firms, global airlines, and giant commercial banks are quietly letting go of their net-zero agendas. The financial returns on mandatory green investments proved disastrous.
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The disruption at the Strait of Hormuz has exposed how a political campaign against fossil fuels, built on exaggerated climate claims and enforced through finance and regulation, has eroded the energy security of rich and poor countries alike. When insurers cancel coverage for tankers and markets in Seoul lose hundreds of billions of dollars in a matter of hours, you are witnessing the cost of building an economy on narratives rather than on physics.
The crisis also showcases America’s capacity to support allies and the poor. Long‑term LNG contracts with Asian and European partners, coupled with support for reasonable financing of oil and gas projects in developing countries, can reduce dependence on chokepoints like Hormuz and on coercive suppliers. Energy sovereignty for India, Southeast Asia, and Africa aligns with U.S. strategic interests and moral stance.
Vijay Jayaraj is a science and research associate at the CO2 Coalition. He holds a Master of Science in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at the University of British Columbia.