The images appearing on our television screens are stark and increasingly familiar: tankers anchored uselessly outside the blockaded waterway, energy ministers in emergency session and markets convulsing with each new headline from the Persian Gulf.

Since Iran’s conflict with Israel and the United States escalated in late February, the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas once flowed daily, is now effectively shut. Some commentators are calling the conflict “the largest oil supply disruption in recorded history.”  As of today, Brent crude stands at $109.77 per barrel, and West Texas Intermediate has surpassed $112 a barrel. Californians, never strangers to pain at the pump, are paying a statewide average of $5.89, with San Franciscans pushing past $6.81. The world, it seems, is once again hostage to the vicissitudes of the Middle East.

And yet, neither we nor our political leaders have internalized, that something remarkable is happening beneath the surface of this crisis: the war may be accomplishing in five weeks what a decade of climate diplomacy could not.

The New Energy Calculus

After oil prices spiked past $100 a barrel, the economics of personal transportation transformed overnight. Autrotrader reports a 28% surge in electric vehicle inquiries with electrified vehicles, accounted for a record 26% of new vehicles sold in the first quarter of 2026. In Germany, EV-related traffic on automotive platforms jumped 40%. Across Europe, used electric vehicles are flying off lots as petrol becomes simply unaffordable for working families. The $4-per-gallon threshold that economists long identified as the American tipping point for EV adoption has been blown past so decisively that it is well to ask whether the internal combustion engine as a mass-market product has much of a future at all.

This shift is not merely behavioral; it reflects a technological reality advancing........

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