When Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, rolled back drilling restrictions, ordered the expansion of coal mining, and dismissed the authors of the Sixth National Climate Assessment, many worried that the American president was an enemy of climate activists.
Environmental economists stated that the Department of Energy’s 2025 July report which questioned facts about climate science and the economic implications of climate change was, “woefully out of date” and reliant on “an array of fallacies.”
Earthjustice launched lawsuits against the Trump Administration in an effort to protect the Pacific Islands marine environment against commercial fishing and to restore content purged in the government’s climate censorship.
Now, however, it appears we were wrong.
Donald Trump’s war in Iran, which began on 28 February 2026, has caused seismic shifts in many places around the globe. Luis Moreno Ocampo, who served as the first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court between 2003 and 2012, stated, “Now we go [from rules-based system] to the rule of the man, whatever today President Trump decides will be the rule.”
This war, which is considered by many to be illegal, has also produced rippling effects in global energy supply. Iran’s retaliatory closure of the Strait of Hormuz in February 2026 led to a drastic fall in oil shipping. In 2025, around 20 million barrels of oil passed through the strait every day, representing around 20% of oil shipping. Now, just a handful of ships are getting through. In March, oil prices rose to over $100 (£73.94) a barrel for the first time in four years (since the energy shocks caused by the Russia-Ukraine war). It then did so again in July and again in September. This presented a major problem for economies which rely on importing their energy supply. Countries such as Japan and South Korea import more than 80% of the energy they consume, and Turkey and the EU are also classed as high importers, with 57% of the EU’s energy consumption coming from imported fossil fuels. Bob McNally, founder of Rapidan Energy Group and former adviser to George W. Bush stated that, “Traders have shifted away from being unable to imagine a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz a week ago, to pricing in the largest oil disruption – by a factor of two – in history”. As the International Energy Agency declares the worst oil crisis in history, renewable energy is suddenly looking a lot more attractive.
First Russia-Ukraine, now Iran-America, the repeated shocks to the global oil supply have hammered home the instability of fossil fuels as energy sources. Reliant on commodity prices, such as oil and coal, they suffer from price shocks, as we know all too well. Renewables, however, can be produced at home. They are therefore insulated from these commodity price shocks simply because they do not require commodities to fuel them. Instead, renewables need a large upfront capital expenditure and after that demand relatively low level operating costs.
Indeed, estimates suggest that between the beginning of the war and May Britain had saved itself around £1.7 billion pounds due to a surge in wind and solar energy. Gas-fired energy generation is nearly a third lower than last year and fell to record lows in both March and April this year. Other countries have also seen the benefits of renewable energy generation; for example, electricity prices in Spain and Portugal actually declined in March. Pakistan is also leading the way with rooftop solar panels. Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy at Oxford University explained that, “households and businesses have discovered the rooftop solar coupled with batteries are cheaper than electricity imported from the grid”.
US secretary of state John Kerry told the Guardian that oil and gas are a “security challenge” and United Nations Secretary General António Guterres stated, “our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilising both the climate and global security.”Although there certainly was a trend towards renewables before the war in the Iran, the recent mesh of climate and energy security needs, produced by the conflict, has accelerated plans and programmes. On 22 April 2026 the European Commission published “AccelerateEU”. The commission stated that “the need for transition is not new, but it must be significantly accelerated”. Europe needs to reduce its dependency on imported fossil fuels quickly, before the next current affairs earthquake causes another dearth of oil. This last war has already cost them an extra €24 billion (£20.5 billion) in fossil fuel spending.
AccelerateEU is a hyped up version of the REPower EU programme. REPower was initially designed to reduce consumption of Russian gas by boosting renewable energy. Now, Accelerate is broadening out the programme. It reflects a more structural and systematic shift away from fossil fuels. The plan stipulates measures such as encouraging investment into renewables; removing barriers to electrification; and implementing initiatives such as the Clean Energy Transition Investment Forum and a Clean Energy Summit. The bloc aims to invest €660 billion between now and 2030 to facilitate the energy transition.
The Columbia Conference was another significant step forward. In April 2026 Colombia and the Netherlands convened the first of a series of conferences aiming to develop a fossil fuel treaty. Almost 60 countries have agreed to develop national “roadmaps”, setting out how they will end the production and use of fossil fuels. Although many of the biggest emitters were not present at the talks, with the US, China, India, Russia and petrostates such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE all absent, the countries present represented roughly a third of the world economy, more than half of global GDP, and nearly a third of energy demand and a fifth of fossil fuel supply. Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia’s environment minister stated, “We decided not to resign ourselves to an economy built on the destruction of life. We decided that the transition away from fossil fuels could no longer remain a slogan, but must become a concrete, political, and collective endeavour.”
During the conference, discussion centred on trade, debt, producer countries’ dependence on fossil fuel exports, and ways to reduce demand. Colombia published its roadmap during the conference as well, as an example for other nations, and established a scientific panel to advise countries on the best way for them to achieve Net Zero. On Tuesday 28 April, France became the first developed country to release their national roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. They aim to end consumption of coal by 2030, oil by 2045, and fossil gas by 2050.
Other countries have also made significant promises. South Korea, for example, has stated that it will increase its renewable energy capacity from 37 GW to 100 GW by 2030. In late March, the UK government introduced a new requirement that all new homes in England be equipped with heat pumps and solar panels. A few days later, Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto committed to deploying 100 GW of solar energy within the next three years. The Philippines’ Department of Energy stated it would fast-track around 1.47 GW of renewable energy and storage by the end of April. All in all, since the beginning of the war, 25 countries have announced new clean energy measures.
And it’s not only countries who are boosting investment into renewables. Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) are single investment funds you can buy into but which hold many different assets, such as shares, bonds and commodities. Buying an ETF is a bit like buying one of those pre-made picnic baskets; you buy one thing, but get lots of different snacks inside. ETFs linked to renewable energy attracted over $3 billion (£2.2 billion) of investment in April 2026, the largest monthly net inflow since January 2021. The S&P clean energy transition index rose by 17% from the beginning of the war to the end of May 2026 and peaked on 2 June.
It seems that Adi Imsirovic, an oil trader who lectures at the University of Oxford, is correct, “the oil market will never be the same following this conflict.” So, has Donald Trump, supposed enemy of the polar bears and Thunbergs of this world, actually singlehandedly, “supercharg[ed] the global renewables boom”, as Simon Stiell (the top United Nations climate official) puts it.
“This will finish the important monopoly of oil in road transportation”, Imsirovic confidently declared. Thanks, Mr Trump, I guess. Although, as the world’s biggest producer of oil and natural gas, you do seem to have screwed over your own economy a little there. “All in the line of duty,” I suppose, would be his response.