And consumers have responded. In the first two weeks of the war, there has been a surge in the number of Americans looking to save money on energy—by asking for quotes on home solar systems and looking up electric vehicles online. We can expect similar trends in other countries. In India, where many kitchens depend on increasingly scarce and costly liquefied petroleum gas cylinders, consumers are racing to buy induction stoves. Many models are out of stock because restaurants have snatched them up; in the early days of the war, some Mumbai eateries shut their doors because they couldn’t find cooking gas and others stopped selling deep-fried or long-simmering foods because they required too much energy. Crematoria couldn’t find gas for their fires.
During Trump’s first term, the United Kingdom pledged to get off fossil fuels by the middle of the century, largely because of climate concerns. The country’s Labour government has stuck to this pledge. (In contrast, the Trump Administration has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Agreement.) But its green-energy policies, such as a plan to help Britons install electric heat pumps, have been under relentless attack by the Tories, the Reform Party, and right-wing tabloids. Nigel Farage, who is the closest that Britain has to a MAGA politician, has decried the “lunacy” of building wind and solar power. One tabloid-favorite claim is that green-energy plans would cost the U.K. nine trillion pounds. Yet the calculation turned out to rest on faulty assumptions: it overstated the costs of net-zero policies and ignored costs of a dirty energy system.
Since the war in the Middle East began, a growing number of voices have been demanding that the U.K. reopen oil fields in the North Sea. But the problem with the “Drill, baby, drill” argument is that gas prices are set by global markets. The U.K. is unlikely to lower its own prices by extracting oil that it controls—and, anyway, it would take years for proposed oil wells to have an appreciable impact. “We’re a price taker, not a price maker,” the U.K.’s energy secretary, Ed Miliband, recently explained on BBC Sunday. Instead, he argued, “We need homegrown clean power that we control.”
Miliband was arguing that the U.K., like any nation, needs the energy equivalent of drones: solar panels, heat pumps, E.V.s, induction cooktops. We need the small tech that, in Miliband’s words, would let us get off the “fossil-fuel roller coaster.” The sickening effect of that roller-coaster ride was made clear in a new report from the Climate Change Committee, which advises the U.K. on its net-zero goals. It showed that coping with the last big energy price shock, from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, cost taxpayers more than forty-one billion pounds. If the U.K. invested a similar amount in homegrown clean energy, the committee found, it would get much of the way toward its net-zero goals. The best way to save Brits money—and to safeguard the country’s independence from tyrants as diverse as Vladimir Putin, Trump, and the mullahs of the Middle East—is to push ahead quickly toward a clean future.
China has already learned this lesson. As the Columbia scholars Erica Downs and Jason Bordoff wrote in Foreign Policy, recently, China has been preparing “for a world in which energy security is inseparable from geopolitics—by electrifying its economy, securing domestic sources of energy, amassing stockpiles, and dominating clean technology supply chains.” The good news is that none of these technologies are secrets, and we can buy them much more cheaply than we can buy oil. And, once we have them, we’ll no longer depend on the flow of oil through an indefensible, roughly twenty-one-mile-wide ditch. Instead, we’ll rely on a continuous stream of photons from the sun—an energy source that will last another five billion years. ♦