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Some crises quickly cease to belong solely to the front where they were born. They emerge from the smoke, the gunfire, the military communiqués, and start circulating again within everything that holds everyone's material life together.
Hormuz belongs to this category. A huge proportion of the world's oil and gas passes through here, but the stakes are also elsewhere: this is one of the places where we can see, with almost brutal clarity, the extent to which the fossil fuel system continues to transform a war into something larger, more tenacious and dirtier. A conflict begins with bombs and continues in the markets, in insurance premiums, in shipping lanes, in the fears of those who govern. The climate, in the middle, takes the shock twice over.
The first weeks of war had already left a heavy bill. An estimate by the Climate and Community Institute puts emissions from the first 14 days of fighting, from February 28 to March 14, 2026, at 5.054 million tons of CO₂ equivalent (more than Iceland produces in an entire year). In almost two weeks, the war polluted as much as a million gasoline-powered cars and caused climate damage in excess of $1.3 billion (approx. 1.1 billion euros).
This figure includes destroyed buildings, burnt fuels, military fuel, lost gear, missiles and drones. War has an immediate, brutal, physical impact on the climate. Then comes a second phase, which almost goes unnoticed.
This figure also carries weight for another reason: it dismantles a convenient Western habit of treating war as if it were separate from the climate crisis. War consumes fuel, ignites fossil infrastructures, devastates entire cities, then requires cement, steel, transport and energy to rebuild. The document also points out that the estimate remains conservative, as data collected on a high-intensity conflict is marked by censorship, uncertainty and constant updating.
In the meantime, the picture has become even darker. On Monday April 13, 2026, Washington announced the blocking of shipping traffic to and from Iranian ports, following the failure of talks over the weekend. At the same time, tankers began to move away from the Strait of Hormuz, while Teheran once again raised its military stance. According to Reuters, the measure is aimed at stopping around two million barrels of Iranian crude bound for the world market a day, and comes at a time when several tankers have turned back or remained at a standstill.
Here, the climate issue changes scale. The damage is not confined to smoke from the explosions. It extends into the geography of oil. The Strait of Hormuz remains the planet's most delicate energy passage. In 2024, it handled an average of 20 million barrels a day, or around 20% of the world's liquid petroleum consumption. Before the war, almost a fifth of the world's oil and natural gas exports also passed through this route, most of them destined for Asia.
The U.S. threat to Hormuz is part of a well-established scenario: raising tension to force a de-escalation. A well-worn pattern, and all the more fragile for it. Yet the crude oil market continues to hope that it still works. As soon as the threat was back on the table, Brent crude climbed by around 8%. Since the beginning of April, only limited traffic has passed through the Strait, a far cry from pre-war levels.
As long as the story is told solely as a matter of price, we miss the most interesting part. Hormuz is the place where we see fossil fuel blackmail being reactivated, almost mechanically. Tension mounts, and the political system immediately goes back to protecting flows, barrels, shipping lanes and export infrastructures. The language changes rapidly: first war, then energy security, then economic damage limitation. The climate crisis, which should be at the top of the agenda precisely because these knots reveal the fragility of the model, is once again relegated to the sidelines. The scene remains the same, simply with nerves increasingly frayed.
The stability of the present remains suspended on the military capacity of a few fossil strangleholds that everyone knows are fragile, congested, exposed and easy to take hostage. Just look at the conditioned reflex. Tension mounts, and the world immediately starts thinking again as if oil were still the only language that could be understood in times of crisis.
(©GreenMe.it 2026 / Managing Editor : Selma Keshkire - The Press Junction / Picture : ©Unsplash)