After British troops had beaten German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s tank forces at the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt on November 4, 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”

The same might now be said about humanity’s struggle to defeat the dire threat of global climate change caused by our never-ending burning of fossil fuels. The illegal war of aggression on Iran, abruptly launched on February 28, 2026, by the governments of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, has indeed provoked a global energy crisis of a unique kind. The Iranians, of course, responded by imposing a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz that promptly removed about 11% to 13% of all petroleum from the world market, day after day, week after week, setting off a cascade of steeply rising prices for diesel fuel, gasoline, and natural gas.

Donald Trump’s brilliant idea of joining the blockade of that Strait should be considered the equivalent of coming to the aid of a strangulation victim by pressing a pillow over his or her face. The shortages hit first in Asia (particularly reliant on fuel flows from the Strait of Hormuz) and Africa and then in Europe. The German air carrier Lufthansa only recently cut 20,000 summer flights for fear of fuel shortages (and it will undoubtedly prove all too typical). Nor will the U.S., despite having its own supplies of oil, escape such negative developments. While there have been oil price crunches before, as in the 1970s and 1980s, this one is different. It’s a watershed moment globally, heralding the Ragnarök — the Norse “twilight of the gods” — of petroleum.