There's a Small Upside to Clogged Strait of Hormuz

There's a very slight green lining to the Iran war, and it's for the planet, not the average consumer's wallet. Carbon Brief projects that climate-warming pollution from fossil fuels will edge down by roughly 0.5% in 2026, largely because the US-Iran conflict has disrupted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and sent oil and gas prices soaring. The International Energy Agency now expects 2026 oil demand to fall 2.4% from 2025 instead of rising, and has flipped its outlook on gas from growth to decline.

The news is not all rosy for tree-huggers, with coal use forecast to climb 1.2%, but the resulting emissions are seen as more than canceled out by falling demand for oil and gas. The crisis is also accelerating electric-vehicle adoption and prompting some governments to lean harder into domestic clean energy, raising the odds that at least some of the lower demand sticks, and prompting the Street to proclaim, "The Hormuz crisis just did what climate summits couldn't" in "quietly moving a number nobody expected to move this decade."