Clean Energy in Times of War

The war disaster caused by Israel and the United States has led, as was to be expected, to a rise in fossil fuel prices. The bottleneck of the Strait of Hormuz concentrates in a single point the problems of fuel governance—an issue that will remain vital for many years. There ought to be a form of global justice capable of punishing the damage inflicted by a few upon the difficult lives of many. Egomaniacs have always existed. They have caused hardship to countless people. When the Azores trio—Bush, Blair and Aznar—grew emboldened on March 15, 2003, they shook the world. They primarily massacred the “alleged” possessor of weapons of mass destruction—Iraq—but also wounded the rest of humanity.

To understand these wars, one might recall that phrase attributed to Groucho Marx—a great tightrope walker of truth—who anticipated that “military intelligence is a contradiction in terms,” allegedly. Leaders who spend more on war materials than on social programs do not serve the people, as Martin Luther King explained. In a display of imagination inspired by these words, I would venture to say that ethics, too, is renewable, in the form of a vital energy that aspires to reduce inequalities. It must not be included in the black market of morality. This is evident in the forgotten sequence of the genocide in Gaza and Lebanon, or the war in Ukraine.

Personally, I believe that until a universal vaccine against human stupidity is discovered (whether permanent or temporary, individual or species-wide), “I prefer the wicked to the foolish, for the wicked sometimes rest,” as the politically controversial Ortega y Gasset is said to have remarked after his return to Spain in 1945. Of course, the problem expands if the foolish are also wicked. All of the above remains shrouded in a haze called presumption.

Today’s egomaniacs with great power spread their whims and misdeeds in cascading fashion; they quickly become universal. So much so that they must have reached even the indigenous peoples inhabiting the remote jungles of the Amazon or Borneo. Moreover, other world leaders laugh along with these unscrupulous figures who claim to be saving the world—without having been called upon by anyone. A great deal of moral and ethical harm seems to be taking place, according to pacifists, especially when we have political forces such as the Partido Popular or Vox nearby, which supposedly compete in demonstrating loyalty to those who have now turned on the war spigot. The political absurdity is evident in a report stating that the United States proposes lifting restrictions on Russian gas to reduce current prices, which will otherwise skyrocket unless Qatar decides—and is able—to resume pumping. The Strait of Hormuz must be freed from opacity.

All this brings us to the point that, in order not to depend on such actors in energy matters, Spain and Europe must reduce the amount of energy they import. They are on that path. Renewable energies accounted for approximately 30% of the EU’s needs for the first time in 2025; fossil sources made up 29%. This did not come out of any magician’s hat. It is the result of the European Green Deal, launched in December 2019. It was of great significance because it introduced key policies to drive the transition toward clean electricity. Alongside the group of European leaders who launched this initiative was the Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez, criticized for it by parties of the patriotic right.

Nor should we forget, in this effort, the transitional commitment of former minister Teresa Ribera. And I ask: is it patriotic to want to maintain energy independence so that we are less exposed to the vagaries of fossil-fuel-driven conflicts? Sánchez is now involved in opposing war, sensitive to global ethics and to the cascading rise in the cost of all everyday goods—the cursed inflation. We must keep an eye on what may happen with Cuba and Greenland, triggers that will undoubtedly complicate the energy issue, though perhaps not as much as the war in Iran. And what of ethics? It remains in deferred suspension.

Everything written here is mere conjecture. Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental. In truth, this is a fictional tale about heroes and villains, energetically intertwined in wars. Often, everything becomes uncertain; I lose my sense of perspective. Everyone knows that there is no apparent relationship between energy and wars (sic).