How the Iran war came for elevator rides, street lights, and even butter chicken

These are wartime policies, even though none of these countries are actually fighting a war.

All of them, however, are caught in the blast radius of one being fought thousands of miles away.

That’s because the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, triggered by the US-Israeli strikes on Iran that began on February 28, has detonated a crisis that reaches into kitchens, classrooms, hospitals, and fields across the Global South.

Twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point, before the war, the Strait carried 20 percent of global oil, 20 percent of liquefied natural gas (LNG), a third of seaborne fertilizer, and nearly half of the world’s sulfur exports.

Commodity shipments have fallen by 95 percent.

The Strait is, in effect, closed, and the consequences are cascading through the lives of an estimated 3.2 billion people in countries now subject to some form of fuel rationing, power cuts, or energy restrictions.

The food crisis

The Gulf produces roughly a third of the world’s exports of urea, a key ingredient in fertilizer, and the closure hit at the single worst moment in the agricultural calendar — just as Northern Hemisphere farmers need to apply fertilizer for spring planting.

Bangladesh has shut down four of its five state-owned urea plants.

Nepal, which produces zero chemical fertilizer domestically, has seen urea prices jump 40 percent ahead of its critical paddy season.

In Brazil, sugar mills are diverting their new harvest toward ethanol — which is more profitable, with oil above $100 a barrel — which could tighten global sugar supplies for months.

The World Food Programme warns that 45 million more people globally could be pushed into acute food insecurity — an increase of 15 percent on current hunger levels.

As if that’s not enough, the closure of the strait has stranded vital United Nations food aid in warehouses in Dubai, crippling the ability of relief agencies to get supplies where they’re needed most.

A scary climate

The disruption of relatively clean LNG supplies has triggered a coal resurgence across Asia and beyond.

Japan is planning to lift rules that required its oldest, dirtiest coal plants to run at less than 50 percent capacity, which means more carbon dioxide and other pollution spewed into the air.

South Korea removed its own seasonal cap on coal power and delayed the retirement of three coal plants.

Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia are all expanding coal operations.

And in Europe, Germany is reviewing whether to restart mothballed coal plants.

Coal companies — whose product is the single-biggest contributor to climate change — are reaping the benefit.

Australia’s Yancoal is up 40 percent since the war began, while Pennsylvania-based Core Natural Resources is up 30 percent.

And once turned on, coal plants can be politically difficult to shut down again, which would risk a longer-term carbon lock-in.

And it’s not just about climate change.

In India, the government has formally permitted restaurants and hotels to burn wood, dried crops, and cow dung — undoing years of clean-fuel progress and putting more lives at risk in the process in a single directive.

If you squint, there could be an eventual silver lining to all of this.

In Nepal, over 70 percent of new car sales are already electric.

Electric rickshaws are selling out in Pakistan.

The Chinese electric car maker BYD is now projecting overseas sales to be 15 percent higher than they were expected before the war.

One energy analyst called this “Asia’s Ukraine moment” — a shock that could accelerate the shift to renewables the way Russia’s invasion pushed Europe toward wind and solar.

Hastening the clean energy transition, however, won’t put food on the table for billions of people throughout the Global South, and more coal and other dirty fuels in the short term will endanger more lives around the globe.

The world’s poor may not be fighting the Iran war, but they are surely suffering from it.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter.

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