President Donald Trump’s war against Iran is the perfect embodiment of what is wrong with continued dependence on fossil fuels. And it puts an exclamation point on the case for transitioning to clean energy. Renewable energy promises safer, domestically sustainable and inexhaustible energy sources through wind, solar, geothermal and energy storage technologies.
It will not lead to further global warming or climate instability. And it doesn’t lead us to fight dangerous, often misguided wars in faraway lands.
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The pandemic and resulting lockdown caused oil prices to fall for the first time in history. Fossil fuels were not needed for transportation because no one was going anywhere. However, renewable energy is largely unaffected by demand and has proven resilient to global economic shocks.
As governments look to revitalize their economies, it seemed like an opportunity to retire dirty fossil fuel energy infrastructure, rebuild in its place a clean, green global economy, and tackle the biggest challenge facing us today: the climate crisis.
But that wasn’t the case. As my co-author Dr. Peter Hotez and I detail in our recent book, Science Under Siege (PublicAffairs, 2025), the petrostates, plutocrats, and bad actors who profit from the fossil fuel status quo have simply redoubled their efforts to spread propaganda and disinformation, turning the idea of a “Great Reset” into a swamp boogeyman for right-wing conspiracy theory frenzy.
Another reason this opportunity failed was the delicate relationship between the immediate crisis and the underlying environmental factors. Habitat destruction and climate change both foster conditions that enable zoonotic transmission (e.g., from bats and pangolins to humans) that are responsible for the spread of coronavirus. But look how long that last sentence was.
In the case of Trump’s war against Iran (and, for that matter, the last attack on Venezuela), the relationship is relatively simple. It’s about fossil fuels, idiot!
Global warming poses unprecedented threats in the form of more dangerous storms, rising sea levels, coastal flooding, and deadly and damaging extreme weather events. It is a direct result of the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels. And President Trump’s war against Iran is fundamentally about fossil fuels.
A war against Iran would advance the interests of oil nations such as Saudi Arabia and Russia and support the fossil fuel industry by seeking to seize control of oil and liquefied natural gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz from Iran.
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The United States itself is an oil nation under President Trump and the Republican administration, which actively opposes green energy projects that would make the country self-sufficient in its energy supply. And continued dependence on fossil fuels poses a major threat to our country. It’s a double whammy. As exemplified by this unpopular war, we rely on dangerous foreign oil and gas purchases and spend untold amounts of blood and treasure to maintain access to the world’s fossil fuel reserves. And it damages the climate, pushing us into a dangerous and unstable planetary future.
We now understand the market volatility that comes with our continued dependence on fossil fuels, as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has driven U.S. gasoline prices to levels not seen in years, increasing the cost of goods and services more broadly, cascading through the economy and negatively impacting consumers.
Renewable energy is currently cheaper than fossil fuel energy on a levelized basis (and that doesn’t take into account the huge costs of climate change). These can be produced at a domestic level and offer predictability and security that fossil fuels cannot.
That’s why the fossil fuel-driven Trump administration is focused on blocking, or at least slowing down, the inevitable transition to clean energy. The absurdity of these efforts reaches a new level with recent reports that the Trump administration has canceled a project to build wind farms off the U.S. East Coast and instead paid major energy companies $1 billion to invest in natural gas facilities in Texas.
Meanwhile, President Trump’s attack on renewable energy has increased energy prices along with tariffs. His chosen war with Iran is, ironically, fueling the economic crisis that now threatens his presidency.
Fortunately, progress is being made at the state and local level. For example, the state of Virginia, led by Democratic climate change advocate Abigail Spanberger, is moving ahead with construction of a new offshore wind farm that has just begun generating electricity, having defeated the Trump administration’s efforts to block the project.
Elections have consequences, and the midterms, less than a year away, will provide an opportunity to rein in a misguided administration that is leading us down an increasingly dangerous path of fossil fuel dependence, war, and economic devastation.
In the meantime, we need to envision a better future, a clean energy future with a livable climate. In that future, we won’t start dangerous foreign wars in a desperate bid to extract every last bit of fossil fuel.
Opinion on Live Science provides insight into the most important issues in science that affect you and the world around you today, written by experts in the field and leading scientists.
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