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John Rapley is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. He is an author and academic whose books include Why Empires Fall and Twilight of the Money Gods.

Could Donald Trump, the climate-denying, windmill-hating “drill, baby, drill” warrior, be the best thing to have happened to the energy transition?

After all, his war on Iran has done more to cut oil use than any carbon tax, with the International Energy Agency now forecasting global demand to drop this year for the first time since the pandemic owing to what it calls “the most severe oil supply shock in history.” And despite expectations that electricity utilities across the world would ramp up coal-generation to make up for lost gas and oil, instead, all the shortfall has been made up by increased output from renewables.

There will be a lot more of this, simply because nothing makes the case for the energy transition like an oil shock. Quite apart from the renewed interest in EVs, solar panels and heat pumps among consumers and businesses alike, three-quarters of the world live in fossil-fuel importing countries. For individuals, businesses and most especially governments there, the beauty of renewable energy is that you eliminate your vulnerability to such supply shocks.

China is leading the way. President Xi Jinping has responded to the energy shock by calling on the country to accelerate its transition to renewable energy. Coal use will ramp up over the short term, but the long term favours the country’s electrification using renewable energy. And across the developing world, where most of the world’s new electrical capacity will be installed in the coming decades, the abundance of renewable resources, like sunlight in Africa, is encouraging countries to follow China’s lead, often in partnership with it.

Opinion: Global conflict is making the case for renewables that climate politics couldn’t

In Canada, where the oil patch is having a moment, it’s tempting to conclude that happy days are back. But while both fossil-fuel and renewable energy companies are benefiting from the war in the Gulf, renewables look to be in higher demand where security is critical, because they are locally produced.

Furthermore, while Canada can present itself as a safe, reliable partner to fuel importers, that will probably confer at best a short-term advantage in a post-Trump world. After all, the United States was a safe, reliable partner, until it wasn’t. Given the choice between local supplies and imports, a country that wants to build its resilience will choose to source locally. Because once renewable-energy capacity is installed, nobody can stop your sunlight or wind.

And while it’s true that the energy transition has chokepoints similar to the Strait of Hormuz – not so much in the mining of critical minerals but in their processing, which China largely controls – is a crucial difference. Once imported renewable technology is installed, the need for further imports drops off dramatically, not least since recycling can extend the life of many components. So sudden cutoffs, if they happened, would slow investment for their duration but would not raise energy prices. Only if the chokepoint was closed permanently would it have a major impact, and that would be prohibitively costly to the exporter.

Most importantly, the world has changed since the 1970s energy crisis. Then, there was no real alternative to fossil fuels in energy generation, and the only solution to reduced supply and soaring prices was improved efficiency, such as greater home insulation and the shift to fuel-efficient cars. Today, though, there is a substitute which is cheap and abundant. A recent paper by a team of engineers at Stanford University found that switching the global energy system to electricity based on wind, water and solar would reduce the cost of energy while creating a net positive employment effect.

Moreover, not only has renewable energy become cheaper – both in the efficiency of its production and in the lower cost of mining critical materials than fossil fuels – it also reduces social and environmental costs, such as health damage owing to pollution and costly feedback loops like wildfires or extreme weather.

At the moment, these aren’t factored into the up-front cost of fossil-fuel energy but they are increasingly showing up at the back end. For instance, the rapidly rising cost of electricity in the U.S. isn’t being driven primarily by AI data-centre demand, as often supposed, but by the need of utility companies to upgrade their infrastructure against worsening weather events.

Canada faces both opportunities and challenges in this emerging landscape – short-term opportunities in the windfall that will come to the country’s oil and gas sector, but long-term challenges in that the economics of energy will increasingly militate against it. In the current scenario, Canada is one of the few countries that will suffer a net employment loss in the transition away from fossil fuels.

Therefore, the sensible thing would be for the country to use its windfall to help build its emergent renewable sector and not double down on a declining one. The world of the future will look very different from the present one.