The Only Good News From Iran

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David Wallace-Wells

Opinion

The Only Good News From Iran

April 22, 2026,

3:22 p.m. ET

Credit...

Ibrahim Rayintakath

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By

David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

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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.

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