Your Bill Is a Foreign Policy Instrument

Brent crude is sitting at $112 a barrel. LNG prices in Japan and South Korea are up 48%. The IEA has called this the largest supply disruption in the history of global oil markets — worse, on some measures, than 1973. And somewhere right now, a government energy minister is explaining that the surge in your electricity bill is an unavoidable consequence of war.

That explanation is half true. The war is real. The Strait of Hormuz closure is real. What isn't true is the word unavoidable.

This crisis was designed in. Not by generals or mullahs — by energy economists and market architects, over forty years, in boardrooms and policy papers and trading floors that your elected representatives largely chose not to question.

§ The Mechanism

Here is the mechanism. In most electricity markets across Europe and Australia, the price paid to every generator is set by the most expensive generator needed to meet demand at any given moment. For most of the last two decades, that most expensive generator has been a gas-fired power plant. Every wind farm, every solar panel, every nuclear station — all of them receive the same price as the gas plant, regardless of what it actually costs them to generate.

This is called marginal pricing. It was designed in an era when gas was cheap and abundant, when the logic was that the marginal plant should set the market-clearing price to ensure enough capacity always showed up. The architects of that system were not stupid. They were solving a real problem.

The problem is that the world changed and the system didn't.

Solar generation in Australia costs roughly three cents per kilowatt-hour to produce. Wind in Europe averages around four cents. But the electricity bill you receive charges you thirty, forty, sometimes fifty cents per kilowatt-hour — because a gas plant somewhere in the system set the clearing price, and every other generator collected the windfall.

Now the gas plant is directly exposed to a war in the Middle East. And so are you.

§ What The War Exposed

The 2022 Ukraine gas crisis was supposed to be the wake-up call. Europe scrambled to replace Russian pipeline gas with LNG from Qatar, the US, Australia. The dependency didn't disappear — it relocated. From one geopolitical risk to several.

That's not a quote from an activist pamphlet. That's the Bruegel Institute — Brussels' most establishment economic think tank — writing in March 2026, as Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG facility went dark and European gas storage sat at 30% capacity entering the crisis.

Europe thought it had fixed the vulnerability. It had merely rerouteed it.

The physics of the problem is straightforward. The wind blowing over Denmark doesn't care what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz. The sun hitting a rooftop solar panel in Adelaide doesn't fluctuate with the Brent crude price. A heat pump running on domestically generated renewable electricity is not a foreign policy instrument.

Your gas boiler is.

§ The Forty-Year Bet

The architecture that created this exposure wasn't an accident or an oversight. It was a choice — repeated across forty years of energy policy in every major Western economy — to keep generation centralised, keep fuel imported, and keep pricing set at the margin by the most expensive source in the system.

Each of those choices was defensible on its own terms. Together, they built a system with a single, catastrophic design flaw: it requires a continuous supply of combustible fuel from geopolitically unstable regions to function normally.

The incumbents of that system — fossil fuel producers, gas traders, network owners, capacity market participants — have spent forty years ensuring the system works exactly this way. Not through conspiracy. Through rational self-interest, exercised consistently and at scale, while the rest of us watched our electricity bills and wondered vaguely why they kept going up.

§ The Exit Already Exists

Here is what doesn't appear in the crisis coverage. Countries and communities that moved early on electrification, distributed generation, and household-level energy ownership are not insulated from the Hormuz closure — nothing fully insulates against a shock of this scale — but they are structurally less exposed than those still running on imported gas.

Norway's hydropower grid means its households are not paying spot gas prices. Uruguay's 98% renewable electricity system means its industrial sector is running on locally generated wind and solar. The cities that moved hardest on heat pump deployment in the 2020s are discovering that their gas exposure is limited to the residual fraction still connected.

The exit always existed. It was never blocked by technology or economics. The cost curves on solar and wind have been falling since 2010. The physics of heat pumps has been understood since the 1850s. The engineering of battery storage is mature. What was blocked — consistently, deliberately, through market rules, planning restrictions, network pricing, and political inertia — was the transition of ownership from centralised fossil infrastructure to distributed renewable generation.

You built the grid. You paid for the grid. Now you're paying for the war that flows through it.

The 90 days that follow this crisis will determine whether governments draw the correct lesson — that the structural dependency needs to be dismantled, household by household, community by community — or whether they reach for the familiar comfort of emergency reserves, diplomatic pressure, and the promise that things will return to normal.

Normal is what built this.

The campaign to change it starts here: Fossil Free in 90 Days →