The ecoterrorism is coming from inside the White House

President Donald Trump calls environmentalists "terrorists." Yet he is responsible for destroying more oil and gas infrastructure, and possibly more fossil-fuel demand, than the most optimistic ecoterrorist could in their wildest dreams.

By going to war with Iran, the president, who has been openly hostile toward the clean-energy transition, may unintentionally turn out to be one of its greatest allies.

At a White House event last week unveiling new agricultural initiatives (and a website called, for some reason, OnlyFarms), Trump railed against environmental regulations that, he said, had inflicted grave harm on farmers and the country. "The environmentalists, I mean, they are terrorists," he said. "They were terrorists. I call them the environmental terrorists."

Even as he spoke, dozens of oil and gas fields, pipelines, refineries and export terminals lay damaged across the Middle East, thanks to the war Trump and Israel launched more than a month earlier. This infrastructure will take years to fully restore.

Iran has responded to the war by also clamping down on the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off more than 20 million barrels per day of global oil and refined-products supply, according to my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Javier Blas, along with a fifth of the world’s supply of liquefied natural gas. Stockpile releases, rerouting oil through pipelines to the Red Sea and other emergency offsets have made up some of that shortfall. But the world is still 12 million barrels a day shy of the amount of dirty fuel to which its economy has grown accustomed.

The longer the war continues, the more economically painful the loss of those barrels will be. After governments have exhausted emergency relief measures, the next strategy is squeezing demand for oil. This process has already begun in Asian and African economies that depend most heavily on fuel from the Middle East. The Philippines has declared four-day workweeks. Pakistanis are watching cricket matches on TV instead of driving to them. South Sudan is rationing electricity.

Like the demand destruction that accompanied the outbreak of COVID, this will grow and spread around the world as long as the proximate cause — in this case, the energy shock caused by the Iran war — persists. The risk is another global recession.

And, just like COVID’s brief plunge in economic activity and greenhouse-gas emissions, the Iran war’s hit to energy demand won’t be permanent, unless we all agree to live in a donkey-cart-based economy. As long as oil and gas are still scarce, the next step is for people and governments to explore energy alternatives.

In many cases, unfortunately, they’ll fall back to burning coal, still an accessible and localized fuel. But in many other cases, they’ll turn to the renewable sources that are proliferating exponentially around the world. Far more of those are available, and at much cheaper prices, than during the oil crisis of the 1970s, which first shocked the world into recognizing the need for alternatives. And the economic security renewables provide in this world of uncertain geopolitics is sure to herald a new wave of investments into the sector in fossil-fuel-poor economies.

"The main message is that we’re going to get the energy transition forced on us in a very painful way that’s going to happen very quickly," Jeff Currie, chief strategy officer of energy pathways at Carlyle Group Inc., told Bloomberg News.

That can’t be the outcome Trump expected or wanted when he launched this war. More than simply calling environmentalists bad names, he spent the first year of his presidency vigorously attacking environmental regulations, clean energy and climate science. Every member of his cabinet sings loudly from the same hymnal, which holds that carbon emissions aren’t a problem and clean energy is a waste of money that makes all energy unaffordable.

The irony is that Trump’s war has revealed just how unaffordable fossil fuels can get, and how elusive his desired "energy dominance" is when a country remains yoked to globally traded fuels, as my colleague Liam Denning has noted.

It’s silly to talk of silver linings given the war’s cost in human casualties and economic and geopolitical stability, along with the lasting environmental scars inflicted by oil and gas burning across the region. In no way could you call this war "worth it," from a climate or any other perspective. Far better that it ends today. But if it must go on, then we have to hope that it will at least hasten a new global energy system that makes future wars over oil and other resources less likely.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal.