When President Donald Trump returned to office last year, he moved to steer the U.S. energy system away from renewables and toward oil and other fossil fuels, undoing climate-focused policies carried out under President Joe Biden. As crude prices pushed above $100 a barrel and gasoline prices moved toward $4 a gallon, the war in Iran became a test case for that strategy, experts said—especially because the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for global oil shipments, was “effectively blocked” as Iran targets traffic through it.
Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, said the war’s biggest short-term burden would fall on U.S. oil and gas consumers as energy prices rise. Tyson Slocum, energy director at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said that fossil fuels have their own supply risks and that, in his view, the administration had “no answers” for the problem.
Slocum added that Trump had promised during his campaign to cut energy bills in half, but has instead presided over price spikes as electricity demand from data centers grew. “Now we are seeing higher gas prices, and nobody knows where it’s going,” Slocum said, as consumers began seeing the effects at the pump.
The timing also matters politically, with U.S. lawmakers and analysts pointing to affordability concerns ahead of a midterm election year. Republican Sen. Mike Rounds said, “We’re always concerned when gas prices go up,” while Sen. Thom Tillis said, “Gas drives the affordability issue,” linking fuel costs to household pressure.
Trump has described the conflict’s impact as limited. He called it a “very small price to pay” after years of what he described as terror from Iranian leadership, and he predicted oil prices “will drop like a rock” once the war ends. Speaking at a White House event with Japan’s prime minister, he said he knew oil prices would go up and “the economy will go down a little bit” as a result of the war, while also saying, “I thought it would be worse — much worse, actually.”
As motorists tracked changes in prices, AAA reported that the national average price for gasoline had jumped to about $3.88 per gallon as of Thursday, after Trump said in his State of the Union address last month that gas prices were below $3. The contrast sharpened the debate over whether a fossil-fuel-heavy approach can better withstand shocks or whether it can make consumer costs more sensitive when disruptions emerge.
Trump’s energy agenda has centered on expanding oil and gas while blocking clean-energy projects and fast-tracking fossil-fuel permitting. The administration has also moved to reverse climate-related policies from the Biden era, including a landmark regulation that would have required coal-fired power plants to capture smokestack emissions or shut down, and legislation that included nearly $375 billion to boost clean energy—policies Democrats had described as the biggest climate spending in any nation’s history.
Critics of the reversal cite shifts such as undoing what the administration described as the Endangerment Finding related to the risk of climate change to public health and the environment. Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, said the country now has “an administration that has said, quite literally through reversal of the Endangerment Finding, we shouldn’t worry so much about climate change.”
Seeking to ease price pressure, Trump has taken steps that officials said were intended to stabilize supplies, including releasing millions of barrels from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve and temporarily lifting sanctions on some Russian oil shipments already at sea. Officials were also considering whether to use the U.S. Navy to escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, along with negotiations to form a coalition to police the waterway where about one-fifth of the world’s traded oil normally flows.
Despite those efforts, energy prices remained high, and analysts warned of continued pressure. Gregory Brew, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group, said the world was experiencing what he called “the largest oil supply disruption in history,” and he said that the Iranian strategy of applying pressure to the United States would continue while Trump faced sustained effects.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright acknowledged prices were likely to remain elevated for weeks, but said the situation required “short-term pain to solve a long-term problem” as the U.S. and Israel try to “defang” Iran. Wright told ABC News on Sunday: “There’s no guarantees in wars at all.” He framed the challenge as short-term disruption on the way to a better outcome.
Internationally, the diplomatic fallout has also fed into the climate debate. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the turmoil in the Middle East shows that “the fastest path to energy security” is to speed up a just transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy, adding: “There are no price spikes for sunlight and no embargoes on the wind.”