As the war in Iran enters its fourth messy week, a few facts prevail. The first, and most obvious, is that things don’t seem to be getting any better for its promoters. Attacks and counterattacks targeting energy infrastructure in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have only worsened the fuel crisis fueled by Iran’s ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. For its part, the Trump administration seems increasingly at sea about the goals and objectives of the war, and correspondingly eager to get things done.
When Trump issued one of his patented Social Truth Fatwas late Saturday night (March 21), demanding that the strait be reopened within 48 hours or else he would authorize the bombing of Iran’s power plants – Another war crime itself, but who’s counting anymore? — was simply the clearest display of panic from a president who had spent the past week vacillating between “Mission Accomplished” and “Please someone, anyone, help us,” sometimes in the space of a single social media post. Its war partners, Israel, on the other hand, briefly halted the extension of their offensives in Lebanon on Friday, to declare that Iran’s missile capabilities had been destroyed. Iran responded by launching a ballistic missile at the Diego Garcia base in the Chagos Islands the next day – the longest-range Iranian missile attack ever recorded.
The Chagos attack underlined how much of the chaotic miasma of the wider war can be seen in miniature within Britain itself. Again, it put the UK armed forces directly in Iran’s line of fire as partners in a war that much of the country’s press and all parties to the right of Labour, are condemning the government for failing to play a bigger role, and which 70 percent of British voters oppose playing any role at all. To their left are the Greens, who have long been criticized as frivolous idealists for their policies on an accelerated green transition and disengagement from America’s defense umbrella; both now seem a more reasonable mite in the face of another war being waged over fossil fuel security.
Amidst the horror and devastation of a conflict most famous for the killing of 175 schoolgirls, any attempt to follow its course is difficult. A war waged by the most expensive army ever assembled, without controllable reason, without coherent goals, and waged without moral seriousness or, apparently, tactical competence. However, it already has severe economic consequences for an entire planet, which some commentators are increasingly keen to make clear.
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A look at the timelines of people who watch oil charts for a living does not, to put it mildly, make for happy reading. Everything I know about Brent futures and WTI crude oil can be fitted along a single complex hydrocarbon string, so I’ll admit that the past week has been a learning time for me. My casual understanding of the situation prior to this past weekend might have read something like this: we are headed for a “bad shock,” one in which fuel prices will rise at the pump, air travel will become more expensiveand our energy bills will go up with an estimated £300 this summer. These are not minor interruptions, by any means, but they are such a minor part of the current crisis we are in that the next few paragraphs have been very little fun to research on your behalf.
To take just Hormuz by itself — leaving aside the disruption caused by attacks on various other refineries and gas fields across the gulf last week — the strait normally traffics about 20 percent of global oil liquids, 95 percent of which has now stopped moving. As a result, according to Canadian energy analyst Rory Johnston, we’ve spent the last two or three weeks with a reduction in global oil supply equivalent to about 24 million barrels per day. As with anything measured in millions – or, indeed, barrels – the exact nature of this loss is difficult to quantify, but one way to put it into context might be to think back to the last time we “went without” anything this much oil for a sustained period.
In April 2020, the planet’s oil market saw “demand destruction” of 18-20 million barrels per day amid global pandemic lockdowns – meaning the entire planet used much less oil than usual for all uses and needs. A quick look at this figure may reveal something disturbing. Our current loss of 24 million barrels per day, for the past three weeks, has far exceeded the amount we did not have during the height of the Covid lockdowns. So even if we got through those three weeks with every single plane on the ground grounded, cars barely moving, 90 percent of offices, millions of factories, and all public buildings closed, we’d still have a significant fuel debt to cause the dreaded “bad shock” I mentioned above. Attentive readers may have noticed that we haven’t, so what we’re really up to is something much, much worse; one of the worst economic shocks in human history.
If you can’t feel it yet, that would be because the last tankers that left the strait while it was fully operational won’t arrive at their final destinations for another week. Those of us watching from the sidelines are not, then, the road runner, galloping to the bottom of this crisis through a swift and clinical conclusion. We’re Wile E Coyote, suspended in mid-air, and it’s a week before we realize that the path below us has been an open canyon for quite some time. The prospect, for all of us, is so terribly dire that our immediate future would be somewhat catastrophic, even if the war were to end with handshakes and smiles sometime in the next few hours. Since that doesn’t seem very likely, we have to adjust those dire expectations down, and further down, for every day this mess continues.
The lessons to be learned will be many. More immediate: on the behavior and competence of the supposed leaders of the free world, and the warmongering, reactionary bluster to which European leaders are willingly wedded, and on the logical consequences of trusting so much military might and diplomatic prowess to allies whose every pronouncement. can be meaningfully compared to those of a serial killer. But more existentially, and perhaps overdue, there will be a re-examination of the seriousness of any military or environmental policy that continues to balance the world economy on the fossil fuels that are now literally and figuratively choking the planet to death.
(Further reading: The world energy friend is coming)
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