Oil Crisis? How about we Reduce Demand? Here's How [View all]

With Trump Administration missteps allowing Iran to control the strait of Hormuz—the globe’s fossil-fuel superhighway—the world may be looking at medium or long-term interruption of oil supplies. Energy hysteria is rising along with prices at the pump. We went through this when Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions scrambled the oil and gas supply chain. Trump illegally took over Venezuela’s oil infrastructure pursuant to his inexplicable and irrational embrace of empire. What does he have to show for it? Certainly nothing of help in this rapidly developing quagmire

Trump has taken Iran’s support of bad actors around the world and turned it into a bombing campaign justified to allow the U.S. to “take” Iran’s oil, while somehow inducing a popular uprising and destroying its nuclear capacity. Thus military adventurism has rapidly turned into a fiasco that has unnecessarily but perhaps inevitably (given who is in charge) turned into a global oil crisis, the likes of which we have not seen since the 1970s.

The emergency Trump created demands the pumping of more oil, he and the fossil-fuel apologists say, whatever the effect on the oceans and Alaska’s wildernesses. And switch on those costly, smoke-billowing coal plants!

Trump’s choices (and urging from Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu) have induced Asian countries starved of Middle Eastern oil to restart obsolete coal plants—but also induced them to take immediate efficiency steps like shortening showers, restricting driving, supporting greater work from home, shifting appliance use to off hours, and setting air conditioners at warmer settings. It is notable that China suffers little in the current crisis because it has doubled down on efficiency, solar, and electric cars.

https://www.postalley.org/2026/05/05/oil-crisis-how-about-we-reduce-demand-heres-how/