From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

Its Father Jupiter, not Mother Gaia, that the haughty Europeans should have prayed to.

European political and intellectual elites have spent the past few decades pushing the risk of imminent Climate Armageddon. Some of us can still picture the young Joschka Fischer, a Leftist of the Greens party who took oath of office as Environment Minister in the German state of Hesse wearing sneakers and jeans in 1985.

Since then — in the name of Gaia, the Greek Goddess of Earth – they have bludgeoned their citizens and straightjacketed their once mighty corporate titans that dominated the global chemical, automotive and precision engineering industries through most of the 19th and 20th centuries. Germany’s Energiewende, the EU’s Green New Deal and the UK’s Climate Change Act unleashed punitive green mandates and carbon taxes. The Obama and Biden administrations joined Brussels in setting virtuous examples of ‘climate leadership‘, a defining criterion of energy policy in Western Europe and the US with the significant exception of President Trump’s two administrations. China, India and Russia and others in the Global South went along with the virtuous ride, but only so far as necessary to benefit from the promise of climate finance and reparations.

Alas, the Western alliance bet on the wrong god. It’s not Gaia but Neptune, the Roman God of the Seas, that threatens Western Europe with Armageddon right now. Europe’s civilisational threat is not from a ‘climate crisis’ but from a crisis in supplies of essential fossil fuels and collateral products such as fertilisers shipped through the Strait of Hormuz – the very commodities demonised by the Gaia cult. To be fair, it’s not Neptune causing tempests for wind-sailed boats that is at fault. But once Mars, the God of War, invokes his passions over Neptune’s domain, it behoves us to pay attention and understand maritime chokepoints and physical geography.

The unprecedented Strait of Hormuz closure

The Strait of Hormuz, connecting the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world, has always been the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, carrying roughly one-fifth of global oil and LNG and delivering cargoes from Middle East producers mainly to Asia, with smaller volumes to Europe, the US and the rest of the world. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz is also affecting about a third of the world’s fertiliser trade, raising prices 30% to 40% and threatening food supply security around the world.

It also accounts for large shares of the global supply of sulphuric acid and helium, which are key to important chemical processes in fertiliser manufacturing, phosphate fertiliser production, metals refining, semiconductor fabrication and medical imaging. The Middle East accounts for 45-50% of global seaborne sulphur trade. Qatar alone supplies around 30-36% of global helium production.

Iranian officials have often made threats to the security of the shipping but the Government has never actually attempted to close the straits. The Strait of Hormuz thus has never been blockaded, although shipping traffic was badly affected during the ‘Tanker War’ phase of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. The spate of tanker attacks and vessel seizures in 2019 heightened the sense of vulnerability of Asian countries to disruptions of their oil and gas supplies from the Middle East. Japan’s chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga, for instance, stated in May 2019 after the tanker attacks in the straits that it is a “matter of life and death of our country in terms of energy security”.

The US-Israeli strikes on Iran that began on February 28th triggered an immediate cascade in global energy trade. Lloyds of London withdrew marine insurance, tankers turned away and maritime traffic traversing the strait collapsed by over 90%. Oil prices have surged more than 50% and the International Energy Agency and other analysts quantified the shock at 11-15 million barrels per day or roughly 10-15% of global supply. Analysts now forecast Brent between $150 and $200 under sustained disruption, especially if Kharg Island is hit. The energy arithmetic is merciless. Between 10-15% of world oil supply has effectively gone offline. Qatar’s Ras Laffan plant, the world’s largest gas liquefaction plant, with a capacity of 77 million tons per annum, lost 17% of its LNG capacity after an Iranian counterstrike, with repairs projected to take five years and costing $20 billion in lost revenue.

If there is no resolution to the war within the next few weeks, what could be a temporary and costly disruption to global energy and fertiliser trade would turn into a structural rupture in the fabric of the global economy with catastrophic impacts on people’s livelihoods around the world. The short-term pain will be manageable except for the most vulnerable countries, particularly some of the net energy-importing countries in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, which are already showing signs of stress .

But a longer-term scenario for the closure of the strait is catastrophic. As always, when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. The worst of its impact will fall on the most vulnerable in the poorer developing countries, dropping back into poverty and deprivation as energy and food prices soar. In the developed world, it is Western Europe and UK – already struggling with green policy-induced de-industrialisation, high energy prices and deficit financing of overly-generous social welfare states – that face devastation.

Having already literally burned their energy bridge with Russia (in the form of cheap piped natural gas via Nord Stream), they will now have to compete with rich Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea for spot LNG cargoes, facing eye-watering prices for all those without long term LNG supply contracts.

The collapse of the old energy order?

Just over 80 years ago, in 1945, Franklin Roosevelt sealed the foundational bargain with King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud aboard a US Navy destroyer in the Red Sea: American military protection for the House of Saud in exchange for secure Arabian oil flows to Western markets and the recycling of petrodollars into US Treasuries.

That pact, which underwrote Bretton Woods long after Nixon abandoned gold convertibility in 1971, is under increasing stress. The crossing of the global financial Rubicon occurred when the collective Western alliance expropriated half of the Russian Central Bank’s foreign exchange reserves held offshore – which had totalled some $630 billion – and blocked key Russian banks’ access to the SWIFT international payments system in 2022 upon the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war. For developing countries such as Brazil, India, China and South Africa among others in the BRICS+ bloc, they see an imperative to ensure they do not become the next victims of a globalising West wielding its dominance in international financial institutions. Today, for many leaders in the Global South, the “rules based international order” continually proclaimed by Western leaders might appear as cruel deception.

The petrodollar is fraying at the edges as Tehran’s gunboats, drones and missiles effectively convert the waterway into an IRGC-operated toll booth. Some 26 ships have been granted safe passage through the Strait by the IRGC, paying a reported $2 million per tanker fee predominantly in petroyuan, crypto or gold. According to Pepe Escobar writing for the financial blog ZeroHedge, IRGC-linked brokers run background checks on vessel ownership, flag, cargo and crew and approved tankers receive VHF clearance through a narrow five-mile corridor between Qeshm and Larak island. Each transaction bypasses SWIFT and trade sanctions simultaneously. What years of BRICS declarations could not achieve, a de facto chokepoint has delivered under fire. Multipolarity is being born in the Persian Gulf (and in Ukraine’s Eastern provinces), not in conference rooms.

Western Europe’s energy karma

Europe is the first developed regional energy domino to fall. For two decades the continent has pursued an ideological energy experiment: Energiewende, nuclear phase-outs, punitive carbon pricing and ever-escalating Net Zero targets that deliberately sever its access to affordable, dispatchable hydrocarbons. The latest EU Parliament commitment to 90% CO₂ cuts by 2040 is merely the latest chapter in that self-harm. The result, even before Hormuz, was Europe’s industrial base hollowing out, households paying the highest electricity prices on earth and an economy dependent on expensive spot market LNG cargoes (relative to long term LNG sales contracts). With a history of banning fracking, shutting down nuclear and coal power plants and marginalising the full potential of North Sea resources (with the non-EU exception of Norway), the EU and UK face their energy karma. Haughty Europeans are paying the price for their own energy folly.

Now the bill is due in full. Asia is already rationing, since 80% of the oil and 90% of the natural gas that normally flowed through the strait went east to Asia. Countries there are now rationing fuel, ordering workers to stay home two to three days a week and desperately shifting back to coal for power generation. Rich Asian nations such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore can still compete for remaining cargoes. Poorer ones — India foremost among the large developing countries — have already begun rationing petrochemicals and LPG. China has ordered its top refiners to suspend exports of diesel and gasoline, prioritising domestic demand and drawing down on its massive crude oil reserves. Japan, Korea and India have already announced a return to coal to offset the loss of 10-15 million barrels per day from global oil markets. Sub-Saharan Africa, lacking the financial firepower, slides toward energy shortages and the civil strife that follows.

The broader strategic shift is now unmistakable. The United States, the world’s largest oil producer and a net exporter of refined products, retains strategic depth; Europe possesses no such buffer. Washington retains leverage: shale output may have plateaued, but the US can still calibrate exports to shield domestic gasoline prices ahead of US mid-term elections. Geopolitically, Europe’s humiliation is total. Europe’s sanctions on Russia — intended to cripple Moscow — have boomeranged into a structural energy crisis for UK and Western Europe. The same policymakers bet the continent’s future on intermittent renewables now confront the logical endpoint of their strategy. Its leaders have burned every bridge to Moscow. Russia continues exporting oil as the US temporarily lifted sanctions in mid-March to alleviate the price impact on global oil markets.

The trillions of dollars spent globally subsidising renewables and EVs over the past two decade now stands exposed as the most expensive strategic misallocation in modern history. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has shown that access to affordable, abundant supplies of oil and gas remain critical to national survival. The green transition was never a transition. It was a self-imposed vulnerability that has left Europe strategically naked in a multipolar energy contest.

The physics of hydrocarbons

European policymakers speak of rationing, rolling blackouts and tighter border controls as though these can substitute for energy realism. They cannot. The rational course — lift sanctions on Russia, negotiate seriously over Ukraine, abandon the Net Zero dogma — is politically radioactive precisely because it requires admitting that their energy policy is Lysenkoism reborn. Yet the alternative is civilisational erosion: de-industrialisation, supply-chain collapse and the permanent loss of strategic autonomy.

History is rarely kind to civilisations that mistake ideology for physics. The Strait of Hormuz has delivered a corrective lesson written in energy geopolitics. Fossil fuels do not negotiate with virtue signals. Supply chains do not run on Brussels’s green slogans. And the haughty European ruling class that alienated hydrocarbon suppliers while betting the continent’s future on intermittent wind and solar is discovering the limits of its own propaganda. Europe’s Hormuz Armageddon is not merely an energy crisis. It is the moment the post-war geopolitical illusion ends — and the real multipolar world, cold, hard and unforgiving, begins.

A version of this article was first published in the Daily Sceptic (https://dailysceptic.org/2026/04/02/europes-hormuz-armageddon/)

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.