The case for coexistence: What Hormuz teaches us about energy absolutism

The Strait of Hormuz crisis did not begin as an energy story. It began as a military conflict. But within days of the escalation at the end of February 2026, it became something far more instructive: an unplanned, real-world examination of where the global energy system actually stands today, as opposed to where a decade of transition rhetoric had suggested it might be. Ship transits through the strait collapsed from around 130 per day in February to just six in March, a near-total halt of one of the world's most critical energy arteries. What followed was not an argument for fossil fuels. It was an argument against energy absolutism of any kind.

There is a strand of thinking, prominent in certain green energy circles, that frames the transition as a moral project in which fossil fuels have been definitively condemned and their continued use constitutes a form of policy failure or even bad faith. This framing is understandable as advocacy. It is considerably less useful as analysis. When around 25 percent of the world's seaborne oil trade and roughly 20 percent of global liquefied natural gas transited the Strait of Hormuz in 2025, those flows were not representing an energy system in transition. They were representing the energy system as it exists today, the one that keeps manufacturing lines running, fertilizers moving, and electricity reaching households across South and Southeast Asia. Disrupting those flows did not accelerate the green transition. It caused economic contractions, currency depreciations, and a compression of living standards in countries that have contributed least to the emissions driving climate change.

The crisis illustrates something that a more ideologically flexible and empirically grounded reading of energy policy has long held: different energy sources are not competing in a zero-sum tournament where one must be eliminated before the other can meaningfully advance. They are, for the foreseeable future, part of the same system. In many producer economies, fossil fuels still account for over 50 percent of fiscal revenues or export earnings. Renewable capacity in those same economies remains nascent and heavily dependent on imported technology and capital. The infrastructure for a clean grid does not materialize through policy declarations; it is built over decades with financing that many developing countries still cannot reliably access. During that construction period, fossil fuels and renewables must function alongside each other, not as adversaries, but as components of a transitional energy mix managed with deliberate sequencing.

Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India imported almost two-thirds of their total LNG via the Strait in 2025. In Bangladesh, gas-fired generation accounts for roughly half the electricity supply mix. These are not the outcomes of policy negligence; they are the outcomes of energy poverty, capital constraints, and the simple arithmetic of where countries are on the development curve. For a government managing rolling blackouts and industrial shutdowns, the relevant policy question is not whether fossil fuels are morally acceptable in the long run. It is how to keep the lights on and the economy functioning while the infrastructure for a cleaner system is built. Dismissing that question as ideologically inconvenient does not make it disappear; it simply ensures that the governments and people asking it are excluded from the transition conversation entirely.

The more productive framing recognizes that the Hormuz shock makes the strongest possible case for accelerating renewable deployment, precisely because it reveals how dangerous concentrated fossil fuel dependence is. The IEA has described the combined impacts of the disruption as the greatest threat to global energy security in history. Diversified energy systems, with significant renewable generation alongside managed fossil fuel use, would have been meaningfully more resilient to this kind of geopolitical shock. Countries with substantial solar and wind capacity in their domestic grid were insulated, at least partially, from the worst of the price transmission. The argument for renewables, properly constructed, is not that fossil fuels are inherently evil but that structural dependence on any single, geopolitically concentrated source represents an unacceptable long-term risk. The Hormuz crisis proved that particular argument more forcefully than any recent policy paper.

What the crisis also revealed is that global merchandise trade growth is now expected to decelerate sharply in 2026, with developing economies bearing disproportionate financial stress as currencies weakened and borrowing costs rose. The people absorbing these consequences did not create the geopolitical conflict, and they did not design the fossil-fuel-heavy energy architecture that made them vulnerable. That asymmetry should inform how the transition is structured, not as a phase-out imposed from above, but as a build-out supported from below, with serious capital flows toward distributed renewable infrastructure in the countries most exposed to the next Hormuz-type shock.

The energy debate will be better served by analysts and advocates who can hold two things in mind at once: that the continued burning of fossil fuels carries genuine long-term environmental and geopolitical costs, and that an energy system cannot be wished into transformation faster than its physical and financial infrastructure allows. Coexistence, managed honestly and with clear direction toward a cleaner system, is not a compromise of the transition. It is the only credible path through it.

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