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The pain from the Strait of Hormuz crisis will be felt far beyond the pump

Four billion people are fed by fossil fuels. The Iran war is showing just how fragile that is.

The gas prices are unmissable.

Since the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, Brent crude oil has surged past $100 a barrel for the first time in four years, briefly topping $119 on March 19. California drivers are paying over $5 a gallon, while gasoline prices in Japan hit a record high. The International Energy Agency (IEA) coordinated a release of 400 million barrels from strategic petroleum reserves — the largest in history. Gas station price boards have replaced worried stock traders as the image du jour of economic crisis.

So that is the crisis you know about.

Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.

Here’s one you may not: the Strait of Hormuz, now effectively closed to Western-allied commercial shipping for the third consecutive week, is a key route for more than just oil. It also carries roughly a third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer trade — including nearly half of all global urea exports and 30 percent of ammonia, according to farm sector analysts. These are the chemical building blocks that make our current agricultural system possible. When Iran shut the strait, it didn’t just curtail fuel. It curtailed access to one of the basic components of modern food.

How Trump’s war with Iran is helping Putin

“We’re up for a food disaster and all we talk about is gas prices,” Michael Werz, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in food security, told the Atlantic this week.

He’s right. And the reason most people don’t see this crisis coming is that most people don’t understand what fossil fuels actually are — and exactly what we really need them for.

The chain that keeps us alive

When we think about fossil fuels, we think about burning them — in our cars, in power plants, in furnaces. That’s the version of fossil fuel dependence that dominates the public conversation, and it’s the version that the clean energy transition is, gradually, addressing. Renewables now generate more than half of Germany’s electricity, led by........

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