“As the Strait remains closed, producers are shutting down, and this isn’t like turning off a tap that can be quickly restarted,” Krugman explained. “There’s apparently a real nonlinearity here: a two-week closure of the Strait has much more than twice the adverse impact on global oil supply as a one-week closure. If this goes on for multiple weeks... oil prices, which retreated slightly off their highs early this morning, could go much higher.”
I post this less so because I think THIS is the moment of collapse, though it certainly may be, and more because it is a real world measurement of fragile global systems are when they depend on fossil fuels.
THIS is why we need green energy, fossil fuel infrastructure is far too brittle.
also see https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/09/iran-war-oil-prices-stagflation-global-economy
The oil shock resembles those seen in the 1970s, when conflict in the Middle East resulted in surging prices and dragged advanced economies into persistent slumps, according to David Bassanese, chief economist at BetaShares. “If oil does stay above $100 a barrel and this disruption continues, then we may face a stagflationary moment in the first half of the year: weak growth, but central banks unable to do much about it because of the high level of inflation,” he said.
another related, timely article https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-09/us-israel-iran-war-oil-price-surge-share-markets/106432166
Rabobank's senior global strategist Michael Every believes a critical mass of traders are finally starting to appreciate the "quite terrifying" threat America and Israel's Iran adventure poses to the global economy and the companies that rely on it for their profits.
"This is now starting to look like a potential combination of the 1973 post-Yom Kippur War oil shock, the 2022 Russia-Ukraine War commodity shock, and the 2020-21 COVID supply chain shock," he warns.
"The longer this goes on, the more exponential the damage becomes, in a domino effect, which is exactly what oil is now showing to a market that saw some takes last week that 'things could be a lot worse'. Well, now they are."
There is actually a report that does a deep dive into some of these details:
https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-technology-perspectives-2024
Warning, this is a svelte 400-page report!
I was mentioning this because of the content of Chapter 5 & 6.
In summary, in Chapter 5 the case is made that the global supply chains for the renewables economy require an order of magnitude more shipping because most of the resources are very material intensive. For example, we will need much more dry bulk ocean freighters to transport ore, metals, coal and so on.
In Chapter 6 on the strategic considerations, it turns out that multiple new shipping lane chokepoints will be created, many of them in socially unstable and dangerous areas. In some of these areas huge ships will be passing through 100s of times a day. The location of these chokepoints shifts dramatically from the fossil fuel paradigm.
The report concludes that the "just in time" fossil fuel markets are more susceptible to short term disturbances, but the post-carbon economy will be vastly more reliant on massive massive transport supply chains with lots of lower density materials. Where already installed energy systems are not disturbed in the short term, the supply chain will be exponentially more vulnerable to shocks and there are much larger attack surfaces.
The report analyses 10 marine shipping chokepoints starting at page 385. In the charts that follow, you can see how a lot of petro shipping passes through one or more chokepoints, but the cleantech will have 3X more chance of the shipping supply chain passing through chokepoints. Solar, EVs, batteries and heat pumps are the tech that is particularly vulnerable to passing through these chokepoints.
Whenever a shipping lane is disrupted, ships have to take longer journeys to bypass the issues, and longer voyage times has the same effect as reducing the total amount of ships available globally. It also raises costs and creates domino effects in supply chains.
In summary, the cleantech economy is a massive increase in supply chain complexity. I really don't think most people understand how much low density material will need to be moved around the globe in the future. Cleantech is a much more intense global industrial supply chain.
This comment is nonsense bordering on disinformation.
The argument that renewables will require MORE shipping than fossil fuels is comically absurd.