Donald Trump entered his war of choice against Iran without consulting global allies, but as he weighs an exit from the conflict, he is making it clear that he is expecting the world to help him fix the unintended damage that it has caused.
Trump is taking an increasingly annoyed tone toward Europe’s lack of support for the U.S.-Israeli war effort. He also is giving short shrift to the fact that his decision contributed to disrupting the flow of oil to global markets through the crucial Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has managed to largely choke off even as Trump insists that Iran has been “decimated.”
While high oil prices are a great incentive to go with renewables instead, a sudden spike in oil prices like we have seen over the past few weeks does not really give people time to respond. Instead they just have to accept paying for higher prices for everything (give it a few months before the high price of energy will have trickled down to virtually everything you buy)
Sure, but the same happened in the 70s. Europes’ response was to demand much better fuel economy from cars, and insulating homes much more to save on heating. If this is drawn out long enough we’ll likely see a similar response with people moving to electric vehicles and dropping gas an oil for heating.
IIRC that same crisis also spurred funding for some of the key initial research that eventually culminated in lithium ion batteries. Considering the various stops and starts in that timeline, battery tech could easily be a decade or two behind where it currently is if not for the oil crisis.
This is a fair analysis, but remember: Europe today is much, much less competent than in the 70s. Folks like Starmer and Merz don’t strike me like the “every crisis is an opportunity” type.
They’ve already had about six years to respond since the supply chain disruptions during covid, not to mention decades of warnings by climate scientists before that.
Society chose to be short-sighted. It doesn’t get to cry “We don’t have time to respond to such a sudden and totally unpredictable spike in oil prices!”