Every major net zero strategy on earth shares the same unstated assumption: that economic growth continues at historical rates while technology delivers decarbonization. Every major climate movement of the past decade shared a different but equally fatal assumption: that the public could be scared or disrupted into action without being asked to consume less. Both assumptions are collapsing under the weight of evidence, and the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis has accelerated the reckoning.
The real tension in global energy policy is not between oil and renewables. It is between growth and limits. The 2026 Hormuz crisis laid bare what was already structurally true: geopolitical fragility keeps pulling governments back toward fossil dependence, AI-driven electricity demand is rewriting projections faster than planners can model, and the climate movement spent a decade alienating the public without ever naming the trade-off it was asking them to make. Until policymakers, executives and activists confront the question of demand, not just supply, the gap between net zero commitments and physical reality will continue to widen.
The Growth Question That Predates The Crisis
The intellectual architecture for this argument has existed for half a century. It traces from Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's 1971 demonstration that economic processes are subject to the laws of thermodynamics and cannot generate infinite growth on a finite planet, through Ivan Illich's critique of counterproductive modern institutions, André Gorz's prescient warning that capitalism would attempt to absorb ecological constraints through "green capitalism," and Cornelius Castoriadis's insight that the economy has colonized the space once occupied by meaning-making.
Tahir Karakaş, a philosopher at Munzur University in Turkey who has traced the degrowth movement’s evolution from fringe academic critique to a force reshaping French political discourse, frames the fundamental tension precisely. The real obstacle to addressing the ecological crisis, Karakaş argues, is not technological inadequacy but the colonization of the collective imagination by the ideology of limitless growth, a faith shared equally by capitalist and socialist traditions, which makes it nearly impossible for societies to conceive of prosperity without perpetual material expansion.
This is not an abstract philosophical claim. A landmark 2023 study in The Lancet Planetary Health by Jason Hickel and colleagues examined the 11 high-income countries that achieved absolute decoupling of consumption-based CO₂ from GDP. At their achieved rates, these countries would require over 220 years to reduce emissions by 95%, emitting approximately 27 times their remaining 1.5°C carbon budget. Decoupling rates would need to accelerate tenfold. No historical precedent exists for such acceleration.
The IPCC's own sixth assessment estimated that demand-side measures could deliver 40 to 70% of required emissions reductions by 2050. That potential remains, in the IPCC's framing, "politically sidelined." The question is why. The Hormuz crisis supplies part of the answer.
Hormuz: Where Theory Meets $126 Oil
On March 8, Brent crude hit $126 a barrel. The Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of global oil and LNG normally flows, had shut down after Iran's retaliatory closure following U.S.-Israeli strikes. Maersk, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd suspended all transits. Qatar's Ras Laffan complex declared force majeure after drone strikes. European natural gas prices nearly doubled in a week, surging from €30 to above €60 per megawatt-hour.
The largest-ever coordinated release from strategic petroleum reserves, more than 400 million barrels across 32 IEA member countries, bought perhaps 20 days of breathing room against a 15-million-barrel-per-day shortfall. European leaders called for massive new nuclear investment. Washington faced pressure to fast-track drilling permits as a national security priority.
None of this is irrational. When household bills spike and supply chains fracture, long-term climate models become temporarily irrelevant. But the crisis illuminated a contradiction that predates it. The same governments building LNG terminals with 30-to-40-year operational lifespans are simultaneously legislating carbon neutrality by 2045 or 2050. Germany's planned permanent LNG import capacity of roughly 73 billion cubic meters per year exceeds by 50% what it previously imported from Russia.
The AI Demand Surge That Compounds Everything
While Hormuz dominates headlines, a structural shift compounds the problem. Global electricity demand grew 4.3% in 2024, adding roughly 1,100 terawatt-hours, the largest single-year increase ever recorded outside post-recession rebounds. Data centers and AI consumed approximately 415 TWh globally in 2024, about 1.5% of world electricity, and the IEA projects this more than doubles to 945 TWh by 2030.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta are collectively contracting for tens of gigawatts of new power capacity, much of it from natural gas because renewables and grid infrastructure cannot scale fast enough. The same societies debating whether to leave oil in the ground are building digital infrastructure that demands more electricity than many mid-sized nations consume. If people cannot let go of asking AI about their personal problems or generating cat videos with generative models, the conversation about ecological limits never reaches the starting line.
Why Climate Activism Failed On Its Own Terms
Just Stop Oil, the UK group that threw soup on Van Goghs, announced in March 2025 it was "hanging up the hi-vis," claiming victory after the Labour government ended new North Sea licensing. The BBC's climate editor concluded the group's wider aim had "manifestly not been achieved." Research in Nature Sustainability confirmed the "radical flank effect": Just Stop Oil's disruptions increased support for moderate organizations while the group itself achieved 64 to 68% unfavorability in UK polling.
The deeper failure was intellectual. The headline demand was always "stop drilling." It was rarely "consume less." The disruptive actions targeted supply — oil licenses, pipelines, fossil fuel companies — not the consumption patterns that drive demand. Asking the public to fly less or insulate homes never generated a soup-on-Van-Gogh moment.
To be clear: the primary responsibility sits with corporations, and it is not close. One hundred companies have produced 71% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. Tech firms building AI infrastructure are locking in decades of new gas-fired generation while rarely disclosing energy costs to users. Microsoft's emissions rose 29% between 2020 and 2024 despite its carbon-negative pledge. But targeting corporate supply without questioning the demand model that makes that supply profitable changes the supplier, not the system. The degrowth critique is not a consumer-blame argument. It says the entire architecture of perpetual expansion — corporate-led, state-subsidized, consumption-sustained — is incompatible with planetary boundaries. Addressing only one leg is why net zero strategies keep failing.
The Policy Incoherence At The Core
The UK's 2025 Spending Review committed £14.2 billion to Sizewell C nuclear, £9.4 billion to carbon capture, and £9.6 billion to GB Energy, while allocating £13.2 billion over five years for the Warm Homes Plan, the principal demand-side program. Supply dwarfs demand in every major framework. The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, before its partial dismantling, directed roughly 20 times more to clean energy production than to efficiency. Global energy intensity improved approximately 1% in 2024. The IEA's net zero scenario requires 4%.
Polling shows roughly 60% of UK voters still back the 2050 net zero target, and only 4% of Labour-to-Reform switchers cite climate as their reason. But that same public opposes policies imposing visible personal costs. A majority of UK net zero supporters say keeping bills down matters more than reducing emissions.
The Strait of Hormuz will reopen. Oil prices will stabilize. The structural mismatch between what net zero requires and what growth-dependent economies will tolerate will not. The question is whether any political system can sustain the required transition pace while no leader, no corporation, and no mainstream movement is willing to name what the degrowth tradition, and the physics underlying it, have been saying for fifty years: that the assumption of perpetual material expansion is one the planet will override, whether or not politics catches up.