The war launched by the United States and Israel on Iran has caused an unprecedented disruption in global energy markets, bottlenecking 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil and liquefied natural gas. We don’t yet know exactly what this means for the fight against climate change. But, thanks to two new reports released this week, we now have the clearest picture yet of the path the world was on before the conflict sent the price of oil soaring — and it was a path where the fossil fuels threatened by the war were less central than ever to meeting growing global energy needs.
The world is entering an “age of electricity,” according to the reports, which come from the International Energy Agency, or IEA, an intergovernmental organization that publishes the world’s most authoritative analyses on the global energy sector, and the think tank Ember. That’s because core economic activities that traditionally involve burning oil and gas — driving cars, heating buildings, and even running industrial processes like steelmaking — are increasingly powered by electricity instead. And, most importantly for the climate... Read more
