Six weeks into the worst energy crisis in modern world history, the case for energy sovereignty is being written in real time — in the price of every barrel of oil, every cargo of liquefied natural gas, and every elevated energy bill arriving for households from Tokyo to Turin. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has removed more supply from global markets than any single event since petroleum became the lifeblood of the industrial economy.

And the full consequences have only just begun to arrive.

Energy crises, like climate change, operate with a lag. The barrels that didn’t ship through Hormuz in March don’t hit markets immediately. They show up as gasoline shortages in April, diesel shortages in May, and then fertilizer price spikes, just as farmers across the Northern Hemisphere are planting.

The International Energy Agency has called this the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. The Dallas Federal Reserve estimates it could shave nearly three percentage points off global GDP growth this quarter. These effects will ripple from energy into food, plastics, chemicals, and shipping — touching industries and consumers who may never have heard of the Strait of Hormuz.

This crisis came from decades of underinvestment in alternatives to a system built on the assumption that oil and gas would always flow freely through a handful of chokepoints. That assumption has now been disproven in the most expensive way imaginable.

Consider Spain and Italy, two European economies with similar climates and industrial profiles. Spain has spent the last several years building out solar and wind, adding over 40 gigawatts since 2019. Italy has stayed heavily dependent on imported gas. The result: Gas now sets Spain’s wholesale electricity price in only about 15% of hours, but 90% in Italy, as the energy think tank Ember has documented. Spain’s forecast average power price for the rest of 2026 is around €66 per megawatt-hour. Italy’s is nearly double that. Same shock, very different outcomes.

When this conflict ends, the world will not go back to where it was. Three shifts are already underway.

First, in domestic hydrocarbons: Every country with even modest oil and gas resources will explore their options for increasing output — see Argentina or Mexico, for example. Second, in renewables and storage: This will be the bigger story. Solar and wind require no imports from unstable regions, no transit through chokepoints. Every energy minister on earth grasps this now in a way they did not nine weeks ago. Third, in firm, clean baseload: Nuclear, geothermal, and long-duration storage will continue to attract the sustained commitment they need. Existing nuclear plants, including in Asia, will see life extensions, complicating the long-term outlook for LNG. The bipartisan case for nuclear has only gotten stronger. Sovereign, sustainable baseload is a strategic necessity, full stop.

Policymakers, corporate boards, and investors must internalize what we might call a sovereignty premium. Every unit of energy produced domestically carries a strategic value that goes well beyond its levelized cost. That value is resilience.

We are living through the largest energy disruption in modern history. The temptation will be to treat it as temporary — release strategic reserves, negotiate ceasefires, wait for the price to come back down. But the notion that fossil fuel supply chains will return to frictionless operation is wishful thinking. The risks that materialized in the Strait of Hormuz exist in other chokepoints, other regions, other conflicts we haven’t yet imagined.

The countries and companies that come out of this strongest will be the ones that commit now to building energy systems rooted in what they have at home: sun, wind, uranium, geothermal heat, and, where geology allows, hydrocarbons. The age of assuming someone else’s energy will always be available, at a price we can afford, through a route we don’t control, is over.

There are two serious counterarguments. The first is that clean energy just trades one set of chokepoints for another — that we’d be swapping Gulf oil dependence for Chinese solar panel dependence. The second is that you cannot build the energy transition without the very fossil fuels and industrial commodities this crisis is disrupting. Extracting copper from oxide ores, for example, requires sulfuric acid, and roughly 45% of the world’s seaborne sulfur trade originates from Gulf refineries now operating at reduced capacity or shut down entirely.

On the former point, the facts are more encouraging than the skeptics realize. The United States now has over 65 gigawatts of solar module manufacturing capacity, up from eight gigawatts in 2022. For the first time in more than a decade, every major link in the solar supply chain is being produced domestically.

The latter, meanwhile, reinforces the case for the transition rather than undercutting it: These chokepoints exist precisely because the mining and refining supply chains for transition minerals remain entangled with the same fossil fuel infrastructure the transition is meant to replace. The answer is not to abandon the transition because its supply chains are vulnerable today. The answer is to extend the same diversification logic — domestic production, redundant sourcing, reduced import dependence — to the critical minerals and industrial chemicals that the transition requires.

There is also a fundamental asymmetry that gets lost in this debate. The mineral intensity of the energy transition is front-loaded; fossil fuel dependency is permanent and recurring. Once a solar farm or battery is built, it produces power or stores energy for 25 to 30 years without needing new copper or lithium. A gas plant needs gas every single day it operates.