The Price of Fire: War, Oil, and the Climate

Or does it push them backward, toward coal and domestic fossil fuels, because those feel safer and more controllable right now?

Las dos cosas.

Both things.

Algunos países van al carbón.

Some countries go to coal.

Otros países van a las renovables.

Other countries go to renewables.

Depende del país.

It depends on the country.

Which is historically accurate and also kind of maddening, because you'd think a global crisis would produce a more unified response.

But it doesn't.

It produces a fork in the road, and different countries take different paths, usually based on what they already had in place before the crisis hit.

Alemania, por ejemplo.

Germany, for example.

Alemania cierra las plantas nucleares.

Germany closes the nuclear plants.

Es un error, creo yo.

It is a mistake, I think.

Oh, that is a debate that will outlast both of us.

Germany's Energiewende, their energy transition, was genuinely ambitious.

Shut down nuclear, scale up renewables.

The problem was the gap was filled partly by Russian gas.

And then Russia invaded Ukraine, Russian gas disappeared, and Germany had this terrifying moment of scrambling to keep the lights on.

They reopened coal plants, briefly, which was a climate disaster.

A self-inflicted one, critics would say.

Sí.

Yes.

La política y el clima van juntos.

Politics and climate go together.

No puedes separar las dos cosas.

You cannot separate the two things.

That's almost a thesis statement for the whole episode.

The climate conversation always sounds like it's about science, and the science is settled, but the actual decisions about what energy you burn are pure politics.

Who has leverage, who has alternatives, who can afford to wait, and who is desperate right now.

Los países pobres no tienen opciones.

Poor countries do not have options.

Usan carbón porque es barato.

They use coal because it is cheap.

And that is the cruelest part of the whole equation.

The countries that contributed least to the problem are the ones with the fewest options when prices spike.

I spent time in Indonesia in the late nineties, and the energy poverty there was real.

When oil goes to a hundred and forty dollars a barrel, a government in Jakarta or Nairobi is not thinking about long-term atmospheric carbon.

They're thinking about keeping people from going dark.

Exacto.

Exactly.

Y los países ricos dicen: usa energía verde.

And rich countries say: use green energy.

Pero la energía verde es cara al principio.

But green energy is expensive at the beginning.

Though that's changing, and faster than most people expected.

The cost of solar panels has dropped something like ninety percent in the last fifteen years.

Wind is comparable.

For the first time in history, in many parts of the world, building new renewable capacity is actually cheaper than running existing coal plants.

That is genuinely new.

That wasn't true in 2005, it wasn't even really true in 2015.

Pero el problema es instalar los paneles, construir las líneas eléctricas.

But the problem is installing the panels, building the power lines.

Eso cuesta mucho dinero ahora.

That costs a lot of money now.

The infrastructure gap.

Yes.

And that's where international finance becomes as important as the technology itself.

Building a solar farm in sub-Saharan Africa is technically feasible.

Getting affordable loans to do it, when your country's credit rating is battered and interest rates are high, that's the wall most of those projects hit.

Y ahora, con la guerra, los precios suben.

And now, with the war, prices go up.

Los bancos tienen miedo.

Banks are afraid.

No dan dinero fácilmente.

They do not give money easily.

Which is the vicious cycle nobody talks about enough.

A war drives up fossil fuel prices, which drives up inflation globally, which raises interest rates, which makes borrowing to build renewables more expensive, which slows the transition, which means more fossil fuel dependence, which gives oil producers more leverage.

You can go around that loop a few times and start to feel genuinely pessimistic.

Pero hay también buenas noticias.

But there is also good news.

China instala muchos paneles solares ahora.

China installs many solar panels now.

Muchos.

Many.

Los números son muy grandes.

The numbers are very large.

The China numbers are genuinely staggering.

They're installing more solar capacity every year than the rest of the world combined, at this point.

And that's not pure altruism, China has its own air quality crisis and its own energy security concerns, but the scale of it is reshaping global manufacturing and global pricing for the whole industry.

Pero China también usa mucho carbón.

But China also uses a lot of coal.

Los dos cosas al mismo tiempo.

Both things at the same time.

Both things at the same time, which is the honest answer and also the one that drives climate activists crazy.

China is simultaneously the world's largest installer of renewables and the world's largest consumer of coal.

They are sprinting toward the future and keeping one foot very firmly in the past, because they have four hundred million people in provinces that still need cheap, reliable electricity today, not in 2040.

La India también.

India also.

La India crece mucho.

India grows a lot.

Necesita mucha energía para todos.

It needs a lot of energy for everyone.

India is maybe the most consequential climate story of the next twenty years, and it doesn't get nearly enough attention.

They've made real commitments on renewables and they've actually hit some of their solar targets ahead of schedule.

But their population is overtaking China's, their economy is growing fast, and the per capita energy demand is going to rise.

Whether that rise is met by coal or by renewables is going to matter more than almost anything Europe does.

Y Europa habla mucho del clima pero a veces no hace mucho.

And Europe talks a lot about climate but sometimes does not do much.

Es un poco hipócrita, no.

It is a bit hypocritical, no.

You're going to get letters for that one.

But you're not entirely wrong.

There's a real gap between the ambition of European climate rhetoric and the actual emissions trajectories, partly because of the gas crisis after Ukraine, partly because of economic pressures, and partly because some of the most aggressive climate policies have run into serious political backlash.

The farmers protests across Europe in 2024 and 2025 were, in part, a revolt against green regulations that felt punishing to rural communities.

Sí.

Yes.

La gente normal paga el precio.

Ordinary people pay the price.

No las empresas grandes.

Not the big companies.

That is the political fault line under all of this.

The distributional question.

Who bears the cost of the transition?

If it's cheap energy for the wealthy and expensive energy for people who can't afford electric cars or better-insulated homes, you're going to build a political coalition against climate action that becomes very hard to defeat.

France had a preview of that with the yellow vest protests in 2018, which started over a fuel tax.

Exacto.

Exactly.

Y este año, las protestas del Primero de Mayo son iguales.

And this year, the May Day protests are the same.

La gente tiene miedo del precio del petróleo, no del clima.

People are afraid of the oil price, not of the climate.

Which is a real challenge for the climate movement, because they've spent years trying to make the long-term crisis feel immediate and personal, and then an actual immediate crisis arrives, a war, spiking fuel costs, and the public energy goes into that rather than into carbon targets that feel abstract by comparison.

El clima es un problema del futuro para muchas personas.

The climate is a future problem for many people.

El precio del gas es un problema de hoy.

The gas price is a problem of today.

And I think that's honest.

I've talked to climate scientists who will tell you the future is already here, in the form of floods and droughts and fires.

But for someone filling up their tank this morning and watching the number on the pump, the abstraction of atmospheric carbon concentration is genuinely harder to feel than the forty euros they just spent to go half a tank.

En España, el verano es muy caliente ahora.

In Spain, the summer is very hot now.

Más caliente que antes.

Hotter than before.

Eso sí lo siente la gente.

That people do feel.

The heat is the one thing that's cut through in a way that other climate signals haven't.

I was in Madrid two summers ago, and the temperature hit forty-four degrees.

You cannot pretend that is normal.

Your body won't let you.

And that kind of direct physical experience, repeated summer after summer, is actually shifting public opinion in southern Europe in ways that policy papers and intergovernmental reports haven't managed to.

Sí.

Yes.

Cuarenta y cuatro grados es muy difícil.

Forty-four degrees is very difficult.

Los viejos y los niños tienen muchos problemas.

The elderly and children have many problems.

The 2003 European heat wave killed somewhere between thirty and seventy thousand people, depending on the methodology, and most of them were elderly people living alone in cities without air conditioning.

France was the worst hit, and that event genuinely shocked the French public and changed how the government thought about infrastructure, about social isolation, about what you owe your elderly citizens in a warming world.

Y ahora, los veranos son más calientes cada año.

And now, summers are hotter every year.

No es una cosa especial.

It is not a special thing.

Es normal el calor extremo.

Extreme heat is normal.

The normalization of the abnormal.

Climatologists have a phrase for it: shifting baseline syndrome.

Each generation grows up treating whatever conditions they experienced in childhood as normal.

So if you're twenty-five years old, forty degree summers in Madrid feel like they've always been there.

You don't have the memory of the milder decades to compare against.

And that makes it harder, not easier, to build political urgency.

Los jóvenes tienen mucho miedo del futuro.

Young people are very afraid of the future.

Los jóvenes en las protestas hablan mucho del clima.

Young people in the protests talk a lot about the climate.

And I think that fear is rational.

If you're twenty now, the world you're going to retire into, four or five decades from now, is genuinely uncertain in ways that weren't true for my generation.

We worried about nuclear war, which was terrifying but had a geographic logic.

Climate change is diffuse, slow-moving, and everywhere at once.

It's a different kind of fear to carry.

Pero la guerra en Irán termina pronto, quizás.

But the Iran war ends soon, perhaps.

Y el precio del petróleo baja.

And the oil price goes down.

¿Es bueno para el clima?

Is that good for the climate?

Honestly, it's complicated in both directions.

Cheaper oil removes one of the near-term incentives to switch to alternatives.

When petrol is cheap, people buy bigger cars, drive more, the economics of the energy transition get a little worse.

On the other hand, the crisis revealed, again, in very concrete terms, how geopolitically exposed fossil fuel dependency makes you.

Whether governments act on that lesson or just exhale and go back to the old patterns, that's the question.

La historia dice: vuelven a los viejos patrones.

History says: they go back to the old patterns.

Siempre.

Always.

You are not wrong.

After 1973, there was a genuine push toward efficiency and alternatives.

Then oil prices fell in the mid-eighties, and a lot of that momentum evaporated.

The United States basically dismantled its nascent solar program.

Reagan took the solar panels off the White House roof, literally.

That is not a metaphor.

¡Dios mío!

My God!

¿Es verdad eso?

Is that true?

¿Los paneles del tejado?

The panels from the roof?

Carter had them installed in 1979 as a symbol.

Reagan had them removed in 1986.

Carter said they were a symbol of the future;

Reagan apparently thought they were a symbol of something he didn't want the country to be.

The panels ended up in a college cafeteria in Maine.

I've always thought that story was a better summary of American energy politics than any policy document.

Increíble.

Incredible.

Bueno, Fletcher, antes de terminar.

Well, Fletcher, before we finish.

Yo digo una palabra antes: «quizás».

I said a word before: 'quizás.' In Spanish we use that word a lot.

En español usamos mucho esa palabra.

You did.

And I know 'quizás' means maybe or perhaps, but I've also heard you say 'tal vez' for the same thing.

Are those the same word?

Because in English we'd just say maybe for all of it.

Sí, son iguales.

Yes, they are the same.

'Quizás' y 'tal vez' significan lo mismo.

'Quizás' and 'tal vez' mean the same thing.

'Quizás termina la guerra.' 'Tal vez termina la guerra.' Los dos son correctos.

'Maybe the war ends.' 'Maybe the war ends.' Both are correct.

So Spanish just gives you two ways to say maybe, and they're interchangeable.

That actually explains something I've been confused about for a while.

I kept thinking 'tal vez' was more formal or more uncertain somehow.

No, no.

No, no.

Los dos son normales.

Both are normal.

Hay también 'a lo mejor', pero ese es más informal.

There is also 'a lo mejor,' but that one is more informal.

Es como el lenguaje de todos los días.

It is like everyday language.

Three ways to say maybe.

I'd say that's excessive but I grew up in a country where we use 'perhaps,' 'maybe,' 'possibly,' 'conceivably,' and 'it could be' without blinking, so I'll keep my mouth shut.

Exacto.

Exactly.

El inglés no es más simple.

English is not simpler.

Solo es diferente.

It is just different.