Operation Epic Fury has thus far achieved none of Donald Trump’s war aims, but it may well accelerate the global transition towards the clean energy he loves to hate.Last week brought the latest exchange of verbal blows in the standoff over the strait of Hormuz.Iran was “choking like a stuffed pig” on the oil it was unable to export because of the US blockade, Trump claimed.From Tehran, the supreme leader shot back that foreigners who “maliciously covet” the waterway “have no place there except at the bottom of its waters”.To the rest of the world, the exchange raised the spectre of a prolonged impasse.

Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency’s energy crisis tracker now lists almost 40 countries that have taken emergency action in the face of soaring oil and gas prices, from Laos shortening the school week to three days to Nepal calling for cooking gas cylinders to be half filled.Even for high-income countries such as the UK, the impact will be painful, as the Bank of England’s latest forecasts laid bare last week.In developing countries, it may be catastrophic, as the costs of energy and fertiliser soar.Yet while the immediate outlook is bleak, this fossil fuel crisis is also hastening the inevitable global shift away from oil and gas and the toxic geopolitics they create.In the aftermath of the 1970s oil shocks, hard-hit western states sought to diminish their reliance on a resource whose supply had been shown to be contingent on the whims of the producers’ cartel Opec.

That meant introducing car fuel efficiency standards, and a drive for nuclear power in Japan and France, for example, as Kate Mackenzie wrote in a recent article for the Break-down on this process of “demand destruction”.Fifty years on, low-cost, clean substitutes for many uses of fossil fuels are much more easily and cheaply available.As Mackenzie says: “About 45% of crude oil consumed worldwide is used for road transport, much of which is increasingly cheap to electrify.”Carmakers have reported sharp increases in demand for electric vehicles in the face of the Iran war: Renault’s UK boss has called it a “seismic shift”.Across continental Europe, demand in March was 51% higher than a year earlier.

At government level, too, there is a renewed concern with reducing the grip of oil and gas, given the now obvious fact that free passage through the strait cannot be taken for granted.Many contradictory reasons were advanced for the United Arab Emirates’ surprise departure from Opec last week but perhaps one motivation is to ramp up supplies and shift as much oil and gas as possible, in the remaining years of the fossil fuel era.In a dispatch from the CERAWeek energy conference in Texas earlier this month, the commodities analyst Nick Birman-Trickett compared the likely long-term impact of the current shock with the lessons learned by countries hit hard by the 1997-98 sovereign debt crises.That tumultuous period of defaults and devaluations sparked a determination among emerging economies, including China, to salt away significant foreign currency reserves as a buffer against future crises – and favour export-led growth to build up the necessary surpluses, with knock-on effects across the global economy.Similarly, long after the Middle East conflict is over, Birman-Trickett said: “Governments that survive will take the logic of reserve accumulation and apply it to energy, energy security, and foreign policy in new ways.

”In today’s world economy, where substitutes for hydrocarbons are readily available, that will mean “building out as much solar, wind, battery, and nuclear capacity as fast as possible”,Some countries already seem to be taking exactly that lesson from the crisis,As the South Korean president, Lee Jae Myung, put it recently: “It’s a situation so serious that even I can’t sleep,South Korea needs to transition to renewable energy quickly,If we rely on fossil energy, the future will be extremely risky.

”In Vietnam, plans for a massive new liquefied natural gas terminal have been shelved, and proposals submitted for a renewables project instead.And there is growing optimism about the practicalities.An upbeat recent research note about soaring solar power in India from the consultancy Ember suggested the country is managing to switch to renewables at a lower level of fossil fuel use than China.Solar accounted for 9% of Indian electricity generation last year, up from only 0.5% a decade earlier, while on the roads, Indian consumers are the world’s leading buyers of electric three-wheelers.

“Cheap solar and batteries are enabling India to develop without the long fossil detour taken by the west and China,” Ember says.Pakistan was already in the grip of a rooftop solar boom before the Iran war, driven in part by the last energy shock in 2022.But thinktanks now expect take-up to increase further as households scramble to cushion the blow of soaring utility prices.The dash to renewables will be a boon for China, the “electrostate” that leads the world in manufacturing solar panels, batteries and cut-price electric vehicles.This was not, presumably, among Trump’s intentions when he unleashed the bombers on Iran.

Back in the US, Trump has unpicked support for clean power and likes to rant about the glories of coal and the ugliness of “windmills”.But like Britain’s involvement 70 years ago in the Suez crisis, another shameful conflict over a maritime chokepoint, Trump’s actions appear more revealing of US weakness in a shifting geopolitical era, than its strength.