The Only Good News From Iran

By David Wallace-Wells

Almost as soon as the war in Iran began — with U.S. missiles hitting an elementary school in Minab, Iran striking L.N.G. facilities across the Gulf, and Israel targeting Iranian fossil fuel infrastructure and blanketing Tehran in toxic black clouds — climate advocates saw a silver lining to the conflict. What the International Energy Agency’s Fatih Birol called the “mother of all energy crises” would “redraw the global energy map.” Clean energy proponents saw the new map quite clearly: The war would supercharge the green transition, they believed, by making green energy look like an irresistible alternative.

The logic was, at a glance, inarguable. The war was the world’s third major energy disruption in less than a decade, after Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Suddenly, fossil fuels looked not only expensive and volatile in price but also subject to wild geopolitical swings and being........

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