The United States’ war on Iran could fundamentally alter how countries consume and generate energy and hamper international progress in combating climate change, a panel of energy experts said today.

Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan natural resources and environment think tank, sponsored the panel in conjunction with its new report, “Global Energy Outlook 2026: How the World Lost the Goal of 1.5°C.”

“We may not have a functional Strait of Hormuz coming out of this situation,” said Sarah Ladislaw, one of the panelists and founding director of the New Energy Industrial Strategy Center in Washington, D.C. “And that’s not a small issue.”

The 104-mile strait connects the Middle East with the open seas and is critical for oil shipments. Iran has largely closed the waterway since the U.S. and Israel began bombing the country on Feb. 28.

“We’re going to have to think about strategic [energy] stockpiles in some new configurations,” Ladislaw said. “We’re going to have to see over the next few weeks how it pans out.”

Energy supply disruptions are becoming more frequent, lasting longer and causing more upheaval, Ladislaw said. But many economies are also becoming better positioned to weather such unpredictability.

Countries with diversified energy sources, especially renewables, are more resilient “in the face of the shock,” said Billy Pizer, president and CEO of Resources for the Future. “We’re going to see increased attention to these things through a security lens, and more policies directed in that way.”

Global temperatures have already blown past the 1.5 degree Celsius benchmark set 10 years ago as part of the Paris Agreement on climate change. “It has become clear that achieving this goal is no longer plausible,” the RFF report says.

Small island nations, threatened by rising seas, don’t have the option to abandon that target, said Jennifer Havercamp, a law professor at the University of Michigan. “I have a lot of trouble picturing the small island states willingly giving up that one and a half degree target, which for them is existential. Maybe some years from now, after we get past the Iran war and the Trump administration and figure out just how big an issue AI is for electricity demand.”

Although average temperatures could temporarily recede due to the Earth’s natural fluctuations, climate forecasters predict a super El Niño will arrive mid-summer, potentially bringing record heat to some parts of the world.

The only way to stabilize global temperatures, Pizer said, is to achieve net-zero emissions. Given the voracious energy demands of data centers, this could be difficult. RFF analyzed modeling conducted by several groups, including the International Energy Agency, ExxonMobil and the Institute of Energy Economics. Some modeling showed that getting to net zero would require global emissions to fall by 13.4 percent annually.
For context, said Emily Joiner, senior research associate for RFF, emissions fell by 5 percent in 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the largest single-year decline this century.

Modeling cited in the report shows greenhouse gas emissions are forecast to peak from 2030 to 2035, and then could level off, but there is significant uncertainty based on how energy-hungry countries choose their fuels.

China is reducing its reliance on coal in favor of renewables and nuclear energy, according to the report, while India’s use of fossil fuels is increasing. In the U.S., the Trump administration has been “aggressively supportive of coal,” according to RFF, but that fuel is still more expensive than natural gas.

RFF expects the consumption rate of natural gas, a potent source of planet-warming methane, will grow 8 percent to as much as 56 percent above 2024 levels through mid-century.

One “very bright exception,” according to the report: solar. As costs of deploying solar energy have fallen more rapidly than predicted, its growth has surpassed expectations. World solar electricity generation has risen by more than 35 percent annually, “far outpacing even the most ambitious projections,” the report says.

Global conflicts and technology disruptions will require new international alliances, diplomacy and energy agreements, Ladislaw said.

“When you think about the technology disruptions that we’re absolutely going to go through over the next decade, it is not a world we’re going to recognize. Maybe that’s OK, as long as we can figure out what some of the guardrails are,” she said. “It’s going to be something that emerges from the bottom up as opposed to the top down, because I just don’t think we get to put the world back together the way it was.”