Welcome and Bonus Format

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Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode two hundred and sixty-seven of the Climate Confident Podcast. This is another bonus episode of Climate Confident Plus. My name is Tom Raftery. Before I get into today's topic, a quick word on what these bonus episodes are and why I'm doing them. Up until recently, one of the benefits of subscribing to Climate Confident Plus was exclusive access to the back catalog of episodes. I've changed that. Those older episodes are now open to everyone, including Google, which will make the podcast far more findable. So the value of subscribing now shifts to something I think is actually more useful and frankly more valuable. Exclusive bonus episodes like this one every two weeks where I dig into timely developments, major trends, and breaking stories that matter right now. The interview episodes aren't going anywhere. They'll continue to drop on Wednesdays as usual. But these bonus episodes let me do something different. They let me respond in real time. They let me join the dots while the dots are still moving.

Fossil Fuels Mean Instability

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And today I want to talk about something that should be obvious by now, though. Apparently, the world insists on relearning it the hard way every few years. Fossil fuels are not just dirty, they are expensive, volatile, and destabilizing. And renewables, storage, electrification on stronger grids are no longer simply climate solutions. They are economic strategy, they are energy security strategy, they are resilience strategy. War is always tragic. It's especially tragic when it's so unnecessary. The killings, the injuries, the destruction, the trauma. None of that is abstract. None of it is acceptable. And in this case, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that this war is reckless, destabilizing, and utterly needless. I'm angry about it. I think a lot of people are. But moments like this also clarify things. They strip away comforting nonsense. They expose what is fragile and what is durable. They show us brutally what kind of energy system we've built and what kind of energy system we still need to build. Because when conflict erupts around fossil fuel supply routes, the damage doesn't stay local. It ripples outward into inflation, into electricity prices, into transport costs, into industrial competitiveness, into food and fertilizer, into public finances, into politics. And that's the point. Fossil fuels are not just polluting, they are instability in a bottle.

Resilience Needs Infrastructure

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Now, to be clear, I am not making the childish argument that renewables create resilience by magic. They don't. You do not get energy security just by scattering a few solar panels around and calling it a strategy. You need grids, you need storage, you need transmission, you need flexibility, you need digital controls, you need planning reform, you need faster permitting, you need better market design. All of that is real. But here's the crucial difference. Those are infrastructure problems. They are serious, sometimes messy, occasionally political, and often underfunded, but they are problems that you can solve with engineering, investment, and policy. Fossil fuel dependence is different. It keeps reintroducing the same exposure over and over again. Every time a tanker route is threatened, every time a cartel squeezes supply, every time a war erupts in the wrong place, every time politicians decide somebody else's oil and gas is a sensible foundation for your economy, that's not resilience. That is recurring vulnerability with good PR.

Europe’s Price Shock Numbers

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Let me put some numbers on this. The EU Energy Commissioner has warned Europe to prepare for a long lasting energy shock. Not a blip, not a bad week in the markets, a long lasting shock. The EU is reportedly assessing everything from reserve releases to potential fuel rationings if things deteriorate further. And an FT report came out yesterday saying that in just 30 days the war has already added 14 billion euro to the EU's fossil fuel import bill. Oil and gas prices in Europe, according to that same report, had risen 60 and 70% respectively since the conflict started. Think about that for a second. That is money leaving economies, money that could have gone into grids, storage, transport, domestic industry, or resilience. Instead, it is being burnt quite literally into a fossil fuel import bill. And the problem is not just the price level, it's the unpredictability. Physical crude cargo prices for immediate delivery surged to their highest level since 2008, with dated Brent hitting more than $141 per barrel. Oxford Economics cited a six-month interruption through the Strait of Hormos could leave 13 million barrels a day gap in global oil supply and potentially trigger a worldwide recession. That is what fossil fuel dependence means in practice. It means your cost base can be battered by events thousands of kilometers away. It means your national energy strategy can be held hostage by a choke point. It means your business plan is only as stable as the next geopolitical shock. And this is not just a European problem. The fallout is global,

Global Rationing Fallout

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and it hits hardest where import dependence is high and fiscal space is limited. An FT piece on the global wave of energy rationing describes governments from Asia to Africa imposing emergency fuel saving measures. In the Philippines, for example, the government moved to work from home policies to cut fuel demand. Across multiple economies, the result has been weaker growth, strained public finances, and in some cases outright rationing risk. That piece cites an OECD downside scenario in which global GDP is half a percent lower by the second year of the shock, with Europe and Asia Pacific hit even harder. And again, that is the broader point. Fossil fuel systems do not merely emit carbon, they export vulnerability. They import inflation. They reward whoever can outbid everyone else. Ember's recent report on energy security makes this plain. It says three quarters of the world's population live in net fossil fuel importing countries. Net importers spent 1.7 trillion US dollars on fossil fuel imports in 2024. And for every $10 per barrel increase in oil prices, global net import costs rise by about $160 billion US dollars a year. That's not a side effect. That is the business model, and it's a terrible one.

Clean Energy as Ownership

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Now, unlike previous oil shocks, we do actually have alternatives that are real, scalable, and cost competitive. Not theoretical alternatives, not pilot project alternatives, not sometime in the twenty forties alternatives, real ones. Wind, solar, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps, demand flexibility, grid upgrades, electrification. And what is striking is that these are not merely cleaner, they are structurally different. A fossil fuel system depends on continuous extraction, continuous shipping, continuous imports, and continuous exposure. Every cargo has to arrive, every barrel has to be bought again, every pipeline flow has to continue, every new shock gets transmitted through prices. By contrast, a clean energy system shifts more of that risk into upfront capital assets. A solar panel doesn't invoice you every month for sunlight. A wind turbine doesn't care whether a maritime choke point is under pressure this week. A battery doesn't suddenly triple its fuel bill because a war broke out somewhere. Once you build clean energy infrastructure, you own productive assets. You are no longer renting your energy system from global chaos. Now, one fair criticism of this argument is that clean energy does not eliminate dependency, it shifts it. Instead of depending on oil and gas exporters, you can end up depending on battery supply chains, grid equipment, power electronics, transformers, critical minerals and manufacturing capacity, and that is true up to a point. But the distinction still matters. Fossil dependence is a recurring dependence. You have to keep buying the fuel every day, forever. Every shipment is a fresh exposure. Clean tech dependence is much more front loaded. You buy the panel, the turbine, the battery, the charger, the cable, the transformer, and then you own an asset that keeps producing value for decades and decades. Ember makes a version of this argument very well. It's the difference between renting and owning. That doesn't mean clean energy is geopolitically neutral, of course it doesn't. Minerals, manufacturing concentration, trade restrictions, and industrial policy still matter, but it does reduce one of the most dangerous forms of exposure, the need to keep importing and burning volatile fuels whose price can spike at every crisis. And that's a very big deal.

UK Wind Solar Savings

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We're already seeing what this looks like in numbers. Carbon Brief reported that the record wind and solar generation in Great Britain in March 2026 avoided the need for gas imports worth one billion pounds sterling in a single month. Wind and solar together generated eleven terawatt hours of electricity that month, and that clean generation displaced the equivalent of twenty one terawatt hours of gas imports. Gas fired electricity generation fell twenty five percent year on year to the lowest March level on record. Now, one month doesn't prove an entire system is finished. Britain is not fully insulated. Europe still has fossil fuels setting electricity prices too often, but that's precisely the point. Even with an incomplete transition, more wind and solar already mean fewer gas imports, less gas burn, and less exposure. Imagine what that will look like when it's paired with more storage, stronger grids, more interconnection and more electrification. This is not symbolism. It's not green branding, it is not corporate mood music, it is hard cash. A billion pounds not spent on imported gas in one month. That's resilience. That is energy security. That is the economic case for renewables made in the bluntest possible language. Less fuel bought, less exposure carried, less money burned. And the Financial Times reported that the countries which have replaced more gas generation with renewable power are less exposed to fossil fuel price shocks, pointing specifically to Spain as an example. It also cited Broughl saying that scaling non fossil generation is the only structural way to decouple electricity prices from fossil fuel shocks. Only structural way. That matters.

EVs Cut Oil Exposure

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And this is not just about electricity. Transport matters too a lot, because oil sits right at the heart of this crisis, and here again, electrification changes that equation. Ember estimates that the global EV fleet in 2025 avoided 1.7 million barrels per day of oil consumption. That's roughly 70% of Iran's oil exports. That's remarkable. In other words, EV adoption is already acting as a geopolitical shock absorber. Every electric vehicle on the road is not just a lower emissions vehicle, it's a small act of oil demand destruction. Now scale that across millions of vehicles and suddenly you're not just decarbonizing transport, you are weakening the grip of oil volatility on household budgets and national economies, and consumers are getting this. The Financial Times recently reported a surge in electric vehicle interest. BYD advert views in the UK were up 77% year on year. Searches for used BYD vehicles were up more than 375%. Renault saw EV model inquiries rise 24%. Kia said requests for EV test drives were up eighty-four percent. We're now seeing pump anxiety replacing range anxiety because it captures something important. The real risk was never the battery. The real risk was the pump. Now, again, let's be honest, this does not mean every sector is solved tomorrow. Aviation, shipping, fertilizers, high temperature industry, and parts of heavy transport remain harder to decarbonize and harder to electrify. Fossil fuels still have a grip in those sectors, but that's not an argument for slowing down where electrification already works. It's an argument for moving faster to power cars, vans, buses, buildings, and low temperature heat so that the remaining challenge gets smaller, not larger. You don't deal with the hard bits by dragging your feet on the easy and medium bits.

Business and Policy Playbook

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That's also why business leaders need to stop treating energy transition as a compliance issue. It's not. It is a resilience issue. It's a financial issue, it's a procurement issue, it's an operating cost issue, it's a strategic risk issue. If you run a business, the questions are practical now. Can you lock in clean power through a power purchase agreement? Can you put solar on your sites? Can you add storage? Can you electrify fleet vehicles? Can you switch fossil heating to heat pumps where feasible? Can you build demand flexibility into operations? Can you reduce oil and gas linked volatility in your supply chain? Because the old model wait, hope the markets settle down, assume the next shock will pass is not a strategy. It's denial with a spreadsheet. And for policymakers, the priorities are not mysterious either. Speed up permitting for renewables, invest in grids, deploy storage, support EV charging, accelerate heat pump adoption, reward flexibility, electrify transport and low temperature heat. Reform market rules where needed. Reuters reported this week that India is accelerating clearances for wind power plants and battery storage systems as gas supply disruptions are starting to bite. This is exactly the sort of response that this moment should trigger. So

Final Takeaway and Outro

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the real scandal at this point is not that we lack evidence. We have the evidence. It's not that we lack technology, we have the technology. It's that too many governments and too many firms still behave as if managed dependence on fossil fuels is safer than building out the infrastructure of electrification. It isn't. It's merely familiar. And familiarity is doing a shocking amount of work in energy policy. So the sentence that I want you to remember from this episode is this Fossil fuels are not just polluting, they are instability in a bottle or in a barrel. While renewables and electrification can structurally reduce that exposure and give us cleaner, steadier, more affordable foundation if we do the hard work of building the grids, storage, flexibility, and the systems they require. That is the shift. Away from fossil dependence toward electric independence. If you found this episode useful, please share it. Send it to a colleague, send it to a policymaker, send it to someone in your organization who still thinks the energy transition is mostly about ESG reports and nice looking slides. And if there are topics you'd like me to cover in future bonus episodes, drop me a note. Tom at tomraftry.com. And just a reminder, the next regular episode of Climate Confident drops as ever next Wednesday, 8th of April. And on that one, I will be talking to Rob Atkin, who's the founder and chief scientist of PERTA. Thanks as always for subscribing, and until the next time, stay safe, stay informed, and keep pushing for the future we actually need. Thank you.