The latest war in the Middle East — with strikes on Iran, disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, refinery damage, and tanker threats — has sent oil prices surging past $100 a barrel and triggered genuine fuel shocks in many countries. Fuel prices in Australia are climbing sharply, and the pain is real for households, truckies, farmers, and industry.

Predictably, climate activists, UN officials, and green lobbyists have seized the moment. "This proves we must accelerate renewables," they declare. Sunlight and wind don't depend on vulnerable shipping lanes. Renewables will insulate us from geopolitical turmoil. The war, they insist, is the final wake-up call to ditch oil once and for all.

Sorry — no. The war does nothing of the sort. It highlights exactly why renewables cannot realistically replace oil and other fossil fuels anytime soon, and why pretending otherwise is dangerous opportunism.

The Scale Problem That Won't Go Away

Global primary energy consumption sits around 592 exajoules per year. Oil alone provides about 199 EJ — roughly one-third of the total. Add coal and natural gas, and fossil fuels still account for the vast majority. Renewables (mostly solar, wind, and geothermal, excluding traditional biofuels) contribute a mere 28 EJ. That's a tiny slice.

To deliver even modest prosperity worldwide — giving the projected peak population of 10.3 billion people just half the per capita energy Americans currently enjoy — total global energy production would need to roughly double, reaching 1,000–1,380 EJ. Efficiency gains might trim that a bit, but the direction is clear: humanity needs vastly more energy, not less.

Tripling or quadrupling nuclear, maxing out hydro and biofuels still leaves an enormous gap that solar, wind, and geothermal would have to fill — requiring a roughly 30-fold expansion from today's levels in just a few decades. That is not a policy challenge. It is a physical and logistical impossibility on any realistic timeline.

Scaling renewables at that level would demand an explosive increase in mineral extraction (lithium, copper, nickel, cobalt, rare earths) that would itself cause massive environmental damage — often in fragile ecosystems or unstable regions. Manufacturing, installing, and maintaining the vast arrays of panels, turbines, transmission lines, and backup storage would require enormous upfront energy input, much of it from… fossil fuels.

Intermittency, Density, and the Liquid Fuels Problem

Oil's great advantage is energy density and portability. It powers planes, ships, heavy trucks, mining equipment, and farm machinery in ways electricity struggles to match. A barrel of oil contains concentrated, dispatchable energy that works in all weather, 24/7, and can be stored easily for months or years.

Wind and solar are intermittent. They produce when the weather cooperates, not when society needs power. Replacing reliable baseload and transport fuels with variable sources requires massive overbuild plus storage — batteries, pumped hydro, or hydrogen — that are expensive, inefficient, and resource-intensive. Hydrogen electrolysis, for example, loses around 30% of the input electricity right away, with further losses in compression, transport, and reconversion.

The current crisis is hitting liquid fuels hardest. Renewables generate electricity, but much of the pain Australians feel at the bowser comes from diesel and petrol for transport and agriculture. EVs help in passenger cars under ideal conditions, but they don't solve aviation, shipping, or heavy industry. The war reminds us that modern civilisation runs on dense, storable chemical energy — not just electrons when the sun shines.

Opportunism Masquerading as Insight

UN climate officials and outlets like The Guardian and New York Times have rushed to claim the oil shock "strengthens the case for renewables" and proves fossil fuel vulnerability. Some even celebrate that renewables insulate countries from price spikes.

This is ghoulish cynicism. The same voices who downplayed energy security for years now exploit a genuine supply disruption to push their preferred ideology. They ignore that fossil fuel production (including oil, gas, and coal) continues to grow in absolute terms and still dominates the mix. Renewables are adding to the energy pile, not displacing fossils at anything like the required scale.

Australia, with its vast distances, mining-heavy economy, and export orientation, feels these shocks acutely. We import most of our refined fuel. Turning the current pain into a slogan for rapid "net zero" risks making us even more vulnerable — by undermining reliable baseload power, discouraging new gas and oil exploration where needed, and pouring resources into intermittent sources that require fossil backups anyway.

Realism Over Fantasy

Energy transitions happen gradually through technology, economics, and innovation — not through crises or mandates that ignore physics and arithmetic. Fossil fuels aren't going anywhere soon because they remain unmatched in density, reliability, and versatility for many critical uses. Someday, better options (advanced nuclear, next-generation geothermal, or genuine breakthroughs in storage and synthetic fuels) may displace them. That process could take decades or centuries, not the politically convenient 2030 or 2050 deadlines.

The Middle East war should prompt honest reflection: diversify supply chains, maintain strategic reserves, invest in domestic refining and gas, keep nuclear on the table, and pursue realistic innovation. It should not become another excuse for magical thinking that wind and solar will magically replace the 199 exajoules of oil currently powering the world.

Pretending this crisis proves renewables can take over is not serious energy policy. It is using human suffering and economic pain to advance an agenda that the numbers simply do not support. High-energy civilisation demands abundant, reliable, affordable energy. Oil and its fossil cousins still deliver that better than any realistic alternative on the horizon.

The war exposes vulnerabilities in concentrated oil chokepoints. It does not magically solve the deeper engineering reality: renewables, for all their niche successes, are not ready — and may never be — to fully replace oil in the way their loudest advocates claim.

https://amgreatness.com/2026/04/01/no-sorry-the-war-doesnt-mean-renewables-will-replace-oil/