President Donald Trump dismisses climate change as a hoax. He calls federal policies aimed at curbing it a wasteful “Green New Scam.” His administration has worked furiously to gut such policies and unleash unbridled consumption of fossil fuels.
But the Trump agenda has inadvertently dealt a sizable blow against global warming.
His war on Iran, now in its seventh month, has led to a plunge in the consumption of oil and gas around the world as fighting disrupts production and transportation.
Analysts had initially forecast that the shortages would be just a blip in the global economy, with the conflict winding down quickly and fuel exports ramping right back up to where they were. That is not how things are playing out.
The shortages have gone on for so long that they are aggressively driving down how much carbon is being released into the atmosphere, a Washington Post analysis of data from the International Energy Agency shows. People worldwide are using significantly less oil and gas, which means less climate pollution.
These charts show how the revised 2026 forecasts for oil, gas and coal use from the International Energy Agency have markedly changed the emissions outlook. They build on a development first spotted by the outlet CarbonBrief.
In January, IEA forecasts anticipated big increases in emissions from the fossil fuel sector compared with 2025. By this month, the outlook had changed drastically. Even with a spike in coal burning, as countries race to replace the oil and gas they can no longer access or afford, fossil fuel emissions this year are on track to be significantly lower than they were last year.
Such an annual decline has not happened since the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Fossil fuel consumption dropped significantly more then, and consumption was lower in absolute terms, too. Crude oil demand averaged 91 million barrels per day in 2020, compared with 102 million barrels per day under the latest IEA forecast.
But this year’s drop — especially given the sharp increase that was initially forecast — is substantial.
The IEA analysis suggests global demand for oil in 2026 will decline 2.5 percent compared with last year. That would erase the amount of greenhouse gas emissions created by 42 million internal combustion engine cars.
And the IEA had initially projected the world’s appetite for oil and gas would grow significantly over last year, so much so that the difference between its January projections and what is actually happening is the equivalent of avoiding the emissions from 103 million cars.
The open question is how much of the drop in oil and gas use — known in the industry as “demand destruction” — is permanent. That is hotly debated in the energy industry, with many forecasts showing demand returning to prewar levels in 2027.
But economists generally agree that the longer an energy disruption persists, the more permanent the shift may be.
Drivers burdened by gas shortages and soaring prices turn to hybrids and fully electric vehicles. Utilities unable to get shipments of liquefied natural gas shift to wind, solar and nuclear power. Homeowners trade in their oil-burning furnaces for heat pumps and rooftop panels. The economics of budding technologies, such as geothermal power, start to look more attractive, leading to infrastructure investments that permanently shift what energy is consumed for decades.
Some of these shifts are already playing out around the globe.
“The IEA expects 2027 demand to barely recover to pre-conflict levels, and a portion of demand destruction may be permanent,” Pavel Molchanov, investment strategy analyst at Raymond James, assessed in an email this month.
DNV, a multinational consultancy that models global energy demand, has dropped the assumption held by many in the industry that oil and gas consumption will come roaring back.
“It is time to acknowledge that we could all be wrong,” the firm wrote in a report a few weeks ago. It noted how EV sales are surging in some parts of the world, and how expected sustained high prices of diesel — regardless of when the war ends — could reshape the shipping industry. It pointed out how the shortage of natural gas in Europe at the outset of the Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to a permanent shift away from imported energy. Renewables installations have surged on the continent since then.
“For every month the conflict lasts,” DNV wrote of the war in Iran, “the probability of permanent demand destruction increases.”
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