Note: This article was originally shared in SACE’s free newsletter, “Wired In,” which includes relevant articles, media clips, and actions to take. Join us to receive Wired In once a month in your inbox, and see March’s full newsletter here.
As I write this, the Strait of Hormuz — a narrow waterway through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil passes every day — is effectively shut down. The U.S. is at war with Iran. Ships are burning. Oil has surged past $100 a barrel. Gasoline prices at the pump have jumped by $1 in a matter of weeks, and diesel is closing in on $5 a gallon. The International Energy Agency has called this the greatest global energy security challenge in history.
And here we are. Again.
While this is the largest fossil fuel supply disruption the world has ever experienced, it is far from the first. In 1973, Arab oil producers embargoed the U.S. during the Yom Kippur War, sending prices up 300% and leaving Americans fuming in gas lines that stretched for blocks. In 1979, the Iranian Revolution knocked millions of barrels off the market, triggering a second oil shock that plunged the global economy into stagflation. During the 1980s Tanker Wars in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. Navy was escorting oil tankers through these same contested waters. In 1990, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait lit the region’s oil fields on fire. And in 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent energy prices spiraling across Europe and beyond.
The pattern is unmistakable: our dependence on fossil fuels leaves us perpetually vulnerable — to wars, dictators, geography, and the whims of global commodity markets. Fossil fuels are scarce, volatile, and dangerous. They must be extracted from a finite number of places on Earth, shipped through a handful of chokepoints, and traded on markets that can be weaponized at any moment. And they are the primary reason our home planet’s atmosphere and oceans are being thrown out of energy balance — because the physics of burning carbon is non-negotiable. When you trap heat, the climate responds, regardless of who occupies the White House.
But here is what physics also tells us: the sun delivers more energy to Earth in a single hour than all of humanity uses in a year. Solar power, wind power, and battery storage do not lend themselves to supply chokepoints and international blackmail. No one can embargo the sun. No one can blockade the wind. No army can shut down the photons streaming to your rooftop.
The clean energy we need cannot be sanctioned, torpedoed, or held hostage in a narrow strait. It is already produced here, distributed here, and consumed here — in communities across the Southeast and across the nation. And as our featured stories this month make clear, clean energy is also the cheapest option available. While methane gas prices swing wildly with every geopolitical crisis, the cost of solar and wind just keeps falling. While families across our region watch their utility bills climb — driven by the very fossil fuel volatility we’re seeing right now — clean energy offers stable, affordable power with no fuel cost and no emissions.
This month in Wired In, we dig into what’s really driving your energy bills (hint: it’s not solar panels), why Duke Energy’s proposed IRP risks pushing those bills even higher, why the war hasn’t changed the fundamentals of methane gas pricing so much as revealed them, how EV sales keep rising across the Southeast despite political headwinds, and why your members of Congress just voted to strip away programs that help families make their homes more energy efficient.
It’s time to stop the war on our climate and stop warring with each other over resources that belong to the past. It’s time to work with the forces of nature, not against them — to power our lives with the abundant, clean energy that no geopolitical crisis can take away.
As part of one Clean Energy Generation, let’s keep fighting for the affordable, safe, clean future our communities deserve, until it’s our reality.
Join the Clean Energy Generation
To view the full March 2026 “Wired In” newsletter with featured stories and ways to take action, click here.
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