Author: Gennady Kondarev
Gennady Kondarev is an author at Klimateka. He is an economist and expert in climate and energy policies with a focus on plans, strategies, economic programs and geopolitics in Bulgaria and Central and Eastern Europe. For nearly two decades, he has been working at the intersection of civil society, institutions and business, for solutions that combine environmental goals with social responsibility and economic logic. He is part of the team of the Black Sea Energy Research Center. He has worked and still works for organizations such as E3G, the association “For the Earth“ and CEE Bankwatch Network, with a focus on economics, sustainable heating and cooling, the efficient use of public funds and the inclusion of affected communities in the processes of change.
Geopolitical uncertainty around oil is becoming an unexpected driver of the energy transition. But only where the electrification economy is already working on its own.
The decisive factor is not the high price of oil, but its unpredictability: a raw material that doubles in price or halve in price in six weeks cannot be planned for and therefore begins to be avoided.
US actions in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and around Russian refineries can be read as a campaign to limit oil that moves without American permission.
Where the introduction of new technologies still relies on subsidies, the transition could slow down sharply if support is withdrawn.
I started writing this text in February, in the first hours after the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. My first thought was that this would not end quickly. The second was more personal: I changed my car to an electric one a year earlier than planned. Panicked, preemptively, and because of geopolitics. Not just because of the climate.
This is also the inconvenient argument of this text. Today, one of the unexpected drivers of the energy transition turns out to be not climate policy - which in many cases has been weakened or outright eliminated - but fear: the suspicion that oil is no longer a sufficiently predictable and safe foundation on which to build a business or personal life.
Four crises, one result
Read the passing year 2026 as a series of separate crises and it will seem like chaos. Read it as one campaign and the picture makes sense. I will clarify right away: the second reading is mine and is a hypothesis, the facts are verifiable, the connection between them is an interpretation.
In Venezuela, sanctioned tankers were blocked in December 2025, Maduro was captured and taken out of the country, and Washington already controls oil exports through licenses that it issues itself; in Cuba came the predictable consequences: a power outage and humanitarian aid from Mexico. War broke out in Iran, and the flow through Hormuz fell from 21.6 million barrels per day at the end of 2025 to 4.9 million in the second quarter of this year. In Russia, Ukrainian drones are methodically destroying refineries: in October, Kiev said it had disabled about half of them, and diesel production has fallen by about 30%. For the first nine months of 2026, Russian budget revenues from oil and gas were 17% lower than a year ago, although the price of Urals has doubled its pre-war levels.
Whether this is doctrine or improvisation cannot be determined from the outside. The result is one: increased American pressure on some of the oil flows and their ever stronger connection to geopolitical decisions.
Why oil is still a lever for influence
Many applications in modern life already have a substitute for oil. For military equipment, this is not yet the case, and the limitation is physics, not politics: batteries do not carry enough energy per kilogram to power a fighter jet or destroyer. The U.S. Department of Defense burned nearly 78 million barrels of fuel in a single fiscal year, and sustainable jet fuel was just 0.2% of global kerosene use in 2023.
So at least until the end of the decade, whoever controls the flow of oil also holds one of the key levers over the ability of others to conduct sustained military operations.
What this did to prices: Brent averaged $103 a barrel in March and reached nearly $128 on April 2. After the June memorandum between Washington and Tehran, it fell to 69 on July 2, and three weeks later it returned to 105. The US Energy Information Administration's forecast for 2026 was rewritten from 58 to 79, then to 96 and 87 dollars in a few months.
A commodity that doubles in price or halves in price in six weeks and whose official forecasts move by 60% in a month remains a strategic resource, but it also becomes a strategic risk.
And what is the closest dimension to us: on January 1, 2026, a liter of diesel in Bulgaria cost an average of 1.27 euros, and A95 - 1.25 euros. In mid-October, diesel was 1.90, gasoline 1.66 - an increase in price by about 50% and by a third in less than ten months.
The reading “buying time“
From here I enter the territory of interpretation, but not entirely. Trump talks about foreign policy as a card game and does so publicly: in February 2025, in the Oval Office, he told Volodymyr Zelensky “you have no cards right now“. If this is the dictionary, it is worth asking what cards are being stacked around oil.
It is possible that the US is trying to hold as many cards as possible regarding oil while making it unreliable enough for long enough that anyone contemplating war will think twice before starting one. Hormuz was closed first from the east, by Iran; it was followed by a demonstration that it could also be closed from the west: by the naval power that has spent forty years building up precisely this capacity.
The most likely target of such pressure is China: the country that is winning the civilian energy transition and remains hostage to its military dependence on oil. China’s clean power capacity already exceeds fossil fuels, with the country accounting for 63% of the world’s electric car sales in 2025. None of this helps, however, if you have to send a group of aircraft carriers: dependence on imported crude oil will remain around 70% until 2030, and a significant part of the supplies pass through strategic straits that China does not control: Hormuz is at one end, Malacca – at the other.
I don’t want to call this elegant: it passes through Iranian cities, Venezuelan deposits and ports, and the Cuban power regime, and people die in the process. And the bet could be lost: pressuring a country that believes time is against it is not a deterrent, but a detonator.
The “Trump“ paradox“
The man who generated most of this instability consistently produces the opposite of what he promises. He ran in 2016 on a promise to save coal. Carbon Brief’s analysis is unequivocal: about 57 GW of US coal capacity was shut down during his first term, compared with 48 GW during Obama’s two full terms. The reprieve coal has received recently comes from the demand for power for data centers. And that’s not about oil.
Trump has promised something else: to be the strongman who will restore Western dominance. For years he warned of the “enemy within”: his own countrymen who did not support him. Then he provided an enemy, himself, visibly from within: in a way that no foreign disinformation campaign has succeeded in: courts under pressure, institutions stripped bare, free speech rhetoric from people who restrict speech, open support for the European far right.
Authoritarian states have always preferred the West to cross the threshold of the irreversible half-asleep: slow erosion and in affluence, nothing abrupt enough to wake anyone up. Instead, Europe and America got a bitter taste that could prove to be lasting. The joint European defense debt did not come from a white paper.
With oil, the same pattern repeats itself with one additional ingredient. With coal, the alternatives simply became cheaper. In the case of oil, they are getting cheaper again, and at the same time, oil itself is becoming less reliable.
And here is the crux of the argument. Instability does something different than high prices. High prices attract new supply. Instability destroys planning. A shipper, an airline, a chemical plant, or a household can hardly plan their costs for a commodity that is being revalued because of a strait, and the response to such a resource is to reduce our dependence on it.
The most extreme version of the paradox: an administration hostile to climate policy in every detail may inadvertently push back much more future demand for oil than the Paris Agreement: by accident, by making the commodity it protects too risky to rely on.
What the data shows
Discipline is needed here, because the temptation to overdo it is strong. Globally, electric vehicles are on track to account for about 27-28% of new sales in 2026, up from 9% five years ago. But behind that number, two different things are happening.
Where price parity has been reached, the transition becomes significantly less dependent on political support. In some months, China, for example, sells more electric cars than non-electric ones. These markets do not back down when a subsidy ends.
Where parity has not been reached, the transition remains fragile. The US is the counterexample: the share of all-electric cars reached a record 12% in September 2025. That is the month in which federal tax credits expired, and then fell below 6% in each of the remaining months. Not a technological failure and not a consumer revolt: new technologies need support until they cross the parity line.
So the honest formulation is not that chaos itself accelerates the transition. The transition has become sustainable wherever it is driven by economics, not politics. And geopolitical risk widens the circle of places where this is true.
This is also true for our country. While Neftochim remains a living geopolitical entity: the parliament overcame a presidential veto to take over the refinery, while Lukoil sold off its European assets, Bulgaria enters the next decade with unclear ownership and dependence on decisions made elsewhere. Such countries will not only be left behind: they will pay for the same transition more dearly, because they will do it at the last minute and under pressure.
Electrification as Import Independence
Most people I know who work in the climate change field are exhausted. The goals have been abandoned, the subsidies withdrawn, the language of the green transition has disappeared from political discourse. However, this reading confuses the loss of a political argument with the loss of a material trend. The political channel has been lost, but the economic channel has survived, and in some places even strengthened, as has the security-related one.
Or as Finnish President Alexander Stubb says: “a good starting point for any analysis is to deal with the world as it is, not as we want it to be“.
In practice, this means that the argument for electrification today sounds better as import independence than as emissions, and that the effort is worth it especially where a given technology is one step away from parity.
None of this is a guarantee. The instability that works in favor of the transition today may hinder it tomorrow, and the window will not stay open forever. But while it is open, we should clearly draw inspiration from those we have always pointed to as a bad example: people who never miss the good opportunities that a crisis presents.