Almost as soon as the war in Iran began — with U.S. missiles hitting an elementary school in Minab, Iran striking L.N.G. facilities across the Gulf, and Israel targeting Iranian fossil fuel infrastructure and blanketing Tehran in toxic black clouds — climate advocates saw a silver lining to the conflict. What the International Energy Agency’s Fatih Birol called the “mother of all energy crises” would “redraw the global energy map.” Clean energy proponents saw the new map quite clearly: The war would supercharge the green transition, they believed, by making green energy look like an irresistible alternative.
The logic was, at a glance, inarguable. The war was the world’s third major energy disruption in less than a decade, after Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Suddenly, fossil fuels looked not only expensive and volatile in price but also subject to wild geopolitical swings and being periodically held hostage by malign actors. Renewables sparkled like an obvious alternative — in theory cheap, abundant and produced domestically, at least once you’ve gotten the infrastructure in place.
Still, I was somewhat skeptical. It seemed intuitive that, over time, the war in Iran would accelerate the green transition as the war in Ukraine had done in Europe. But in the short term? Crises don’t always generate orderly or rational responses, and within days I was hearing not just about the war’s many downstream consequences for fertilizer and food and semiconductors and A.I. but also, for instance, about the value of enlarging our fossil fuel stockpiles and the wisdom of becoming the world’s biggest producer of both oil and gas. I was watching estimates of the profits expected by the world’s largest fossil fuel companies grow and grow. I was reading stories about the world’s panicked “return to coal.” And writing one about the conflict as a “mid-transition” war, with fossil fuels the central point of leverage and contestation and net zero still pretty far off.
It was hard to know what to expect even a few days in advance. That wasn’t just because of erratic American leadership, or because of the informational fog of war. It was because alongside persuasive warnings about harrowing global consequences you could easily find muted market responses suggesting that everything was going to turn out fine. Not that long ago, financialization seemed routinely to exacerbate commodity crises by stoking small fires into big ones. This time, it seemed mostly to play the opposite role, like a blanket thrown over the flames.
Yet out in the real world, as it happened, things did change. The possibility of a long-term settlement to the war now hovers in the middle distance, though whether we’ll ever get there and what we’ll endure along the way remain open questions. In the meantime, we now have some insight into what happened in the short term. Here are a few observations.
First, any way you look at it, the war immediately boosted green energy.
In the first frantic month, there was not a big coal comeback. Excluding China, global coal generation didn’t rise at all in March. It actually dropped significantly, compared with last March. Coal shipping around the world fell, too. As middle-income countries dealt with fuel shortages, there was a lot of what energy people call “demand destruction,” particularly across Asia, where workweeks were shortened, schools shut down and industrial production reduced. But at the global scale much of the war’s short-term shortfall appears to have been filled by renewables, according to research by Lauri Myllyvirta at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. In percentage terms, wind power grew, from March 2025 to March 2026, more than twice as much as coal power fell. Solar power? More than four times as much.
Those changes don’t look like a blip.
The war has plunged the energy world into a kind of time warp: The last boats to exit the Strait of Hormuz before the war are just now approaching their refineries, and seven weeks is not a terrifically long time in which to recalibrate national energy systems.
But between February and March, the world didn’t just tighten its fossil fuel use; it spent money on new green stuff. China’s solar, battery and E.V. exports grew 39 percent. The country’s solar exports alone more than doubled during that time. In South Korea, March saw new E.V. registrations double compared with the same time last year. In New Zealand, new registrations nearly doubled over two weeks.
For the past five years, competition-minded trade economists have lamented Chinese “overcapacity” — that one country was producing more clean energy tech than the world really wanted, flooding the market with cheap products that prevented other countries from even competing. As the Carnegie Endowment’s Noah Gordon put it over the weekend, the response to the Iran war makes it look like this analysis had it more or less backward: the problem wasn’t Chinese overcapacity, it was constrained demand everywhere else in the world. As the economist Isabella Weber put it, “it turns out Chinese ‘overcapacity’ is the world’s largest buffer stock against a crisis like the one we face.”
Around the world, new clean energy policy — which had mostly stalled out or retreated over the past few years — is now following suit. In recent weeks, new clean energy investments and initiatives have been declared by France, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Turkey — and many others. The president of the E.U. Commission called for an expedited rollout of grid improvement and electrification plans. Jigar Shah, a former Biden administration official and a liberal energy guru, says he expects monthly global clean energy spending to double by the end of this year.
Perhaps this seems like rosy spin, given the context. It may even strike you as perverse to celebrate the clean energy silver lining of an illegal, punishing and chaotic war. To be honest, I agree. Still, I’ll take the good news where I can find it.
Two big new reports offer long-term perspective — and are packed full of optimism.
Today’s green momentum is not exactly a dramatic break so much as an extension of a pre-existing pattern, as I wrote a few months ago. This is true no matter what we think the re-election of Donald Trump or his effective coup d’état in Venezuela and his war on Iran might signal.
In its exhaustive annual global electricity review, the energy think tank Ember found that, in 2025, renewables provided sufficient power to meet all new electricity demand worldwide. In fact, new renewable generation exceeded the rise in electricity demand, which meant that fossil fuel generation actually fell. The I.E.A.’s Global Energy Review found the same — that the year’s green energy explosion managed to reduce worldwide fossil fuel use in electricity generation, even as demand grew. Carbon emissions from energy rose very slightly in 2025, the I.E.A. found, but the bump was small enough that it isn’t unreasonable to think of it as a plateau. The report also found that clean energy efforts averted an additional 3 billion tons of emissions annually.
For a long time, climate people have wondered when the green transition would actually eat into fossil fuel generation rather than just supplementing dirty energy with the cleaner stuff. The effect wasn’t large yet last year, but it was there. According to Ember, in 2025 renewables overtook coal as the world’s primary electricity source for the first time in the modern era.
Solar is booming, and batteries are catching up fast.
In 2025, Ember found, solar alone met 75 percent of all new electricity demand, which is both an eye-popping figure and not surprising. Total global output of solar power has doubled since 2022; it has grown more than tenfold since 2015, when the Paris agreement was negotiated. Last year’s was the largest increase on record, and more electricity was generated by new solar than could be produced by all the gas that passed through the Strait of Hormuz last year.
Batteries are growing fast, too — with 46 percent more storage capacity added in 2025 than in 2024. And globally, utility-scale battery capacity has grown 12-fold since just 2019, which makes sense, given both the way that batteries flatten out the problem of intermittency for cheap solar and the fact that battery costs fell 20 percent in 2024 and then 45 percent in 2025. Even in Trump’s America, batteries are being added everywhere.
You can see the Trump effect, but you have to squint.
The world’s four largest carbon emitters are, in order, China, the United States, India and the E.U. (if counted as a single country). Last year, energy emissions and coal use fell in three of those four places. Only in the U.S. did they go up.
Even so, the story that the return of Trump heralded a major pivot back to fossil fuels seems a bit overstated — as does the increasingly common shorthand that the U.S. is now operating like a “petrostate” while China looks more like an “electrostate.” In 2025, the U.S. installed more than nine times as much clean power capacity as it did fossil fuel kit. This year, the Energy Information Administration reports, 93 percent of all new planned American energy capacity will be green. And last month, for the first time, the U.S. got more electricity from renewables than from gas, typically the biggest American source. The share of electricity generation from renewables was more than twice as large as that of coal. In California, batteries are eating more and more of peak demand, with battery storage capacity growing more than 2,000 percent since 2019 and completely transforming the state’s energy mix in the process.
But energy and climate remain two different stories.
As the green transition has picked up speed, it’s displaced an awful lot of talk about climate change, such that you tend to see more talk about numbers like these than about carbon concentrations, temperature targets or global emissions. You also tend to hear more of the relatively good news from the fast-moving electricity sector than news about the limited progress in industry and infrastructure, agriculture and land use. Public opinion hasn’t shifted much: 44 percent of Americans say they worry a great deal about climate change, which is just a point or two below the moments of peak alarm in 2017 and 2020. But the leadership class has moved on: five years ago, world leaders talked about warming in self-consciously apocalyptic terms; now they talk about the green transition as though climate weren’t part of the story at all.
All the while, the warming has continued, as have its effects. The Los Angeles fires in the winter of 2025 gave way to record-setting burning across the United States this spring. The heat wave which swallowed much of the American West last month, judged now to be a once-in-500-years event, was made 800 times more likely by warming.
And last week a group of researchers published a worrying new analysis of the ocean circulatory system known as the AMOC, as Kate Aronoff noted, reflecting on the alarming research about the likelihood of its collapse and the uninterested political environment into which that news arrived. The AMOC, which distributes heat around the North Atlantic and in so doing stabilizes a large share of the planet’s climate, is one of those big uncertainties hiding in the climate future which some scientists have called the “monsters behind the door.” There is still considerable debate about the current’s future, as Aronoff acknowledged, but a true collapse could mean a plunge in European temperatures and sharp expected impacts on Africa’s agriculture and India’s monsoon season.
The energy transition is a marvel. But the same things that terrified many of us into climate action almost a decade ago are still true — indeed, many of them, like the risk of AMOC disruption, probably more so. In the decades to come, it looks increasingly likely that we’ll be celebrating the marvels of abundant clean energy — and wrestling with many of those monsters, too.
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