The Iran War ate my condom! Or so says Reuters, listing all the things people depended on freedom of the seas for but never thanked the U.S. Navy. Whose new acting Secretary, a refugee from Communism, just uttered the immortal warning “To our enemies… you can run, but you’ll just die tired”. But we digress. Among the supposed consequences of trouble in the Gulf, Reuters-style, is “A warning of higher condom prices by the world’s top maker has gone viral in China with the hashtag ‘condom prices rising’ garnering more than ‌60 million views by Thursday on Chinese social media and stoking talk of stockpiling.” Anyone who passed sex ed will presumably be aware that if you hold onto the condom instead of using it, it rather defeats the purpose. As with oil and gas, the appropriate response would be to have a robust supply chain, not least because your contribution to global affairs goes beyond sanctimonious misguided verbiage. But not everyone passed economics either.

Some people seem to be doing remedial work. For instance Heatmap has noticed that “The Hormuz Closure Is Driving a Shortage of Battery Ingredients” and explains that shortages loom for a list of battery ingredients including aluminum, petrochemicals and, now, sulphuric acid. And if you’re thinking that you don’t actually put much of that stuff in your shopping cart, guess again:

“Sulfuric acid is used in refining and processing several metals and minerals key to the energy transition, including copper, cobalt, nickel, and lithium. Copper is used throughout EVs and other clean technologies, while nickel and cobalt are used in cathodes in lithium-ion batteries — which, of course, also contain lithium. Shortages or higher prices of sulfuric acid could lead to shortages or higher prices for batteries and electric vehicles, just as consumers flock to them to help mitigate the impacts of rising fossil fuel costs.”

But not everyone gets it. For instance, one chronic climate alarmist who actually is happy about the energy consequences of the war is David Wallace-Wells of the New York Times, who writes of a “green lining around a dark cloud”. He noted of early enthusiasts that this “mother of all energy crises” would “redraw the global energy map” that:

“Clean energy proponents saw the new map quite clearly: The war would supercharge the green transition, they believed, by making green energy look like an irresistible alternative.”

However, he adds a note of caution:

“The logic was, at a glance, inarguable. The war was the world’s third major energy disruption in less than a decade, after Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Suddenly, fossil fuels looked not only expensive and volatile in price but also subject to wild geopolitical swings and being periodically held hostage by malign actors. Renewables sparkled like an obvious alternative – in theory cheap, abundant and produced domestically, at least once you’ve gotten the infrastructure in place. Still, I was somewhat skeptical.”

Alas, the main cause of his skepticism wasn’t that renewables aren’t cheap or abundant. It was that in the short run people would scramble to cope in existing ways, even perhaps mining more coal. As he noted sensibly, “Crises don’t always generate orderly or rational responses”. True. But neither do lack of crises or imaginary ones.

Or bad economics. Because today he is older and happier, saying “First, any way you look at it, the war immediately boosted green energy.” Oh yes? Did the wind and solar plants crank up production? Um no. Not what he had in mind. Instead, in good Soviet-central-planning fashion, he looks at resources expended not results achieved:

“between February and March, the world didn’t just tighten its fossil fuel use; it spent money on new green stuff.”

And yes, China wins again:

“China’s solar, battery and E.V. exports grew 39 percent. The country’s solar exports alone more than doubled during that time. In South Korea, March saw new E.V. registrations double compared with the same time last year. In New Zealand, new registrations nearly doubled over two weeks. For the past five years, competition-minded trade economists have lamented Chinese ‘overcapacity’ – that one country was producing more clean energy tech than the world really wanted... As the economist Isabella Weber put it, ‘it turns out Chinese ‘overcapacity’ is the world’s largest buffer stock against a crisis like the one we face.’”

Yay far-sighted Communist economic planning. Boo short-time-horizon free enterprise. But the big issue isn’t whether governments can dump endless resources into projects to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. It’s whether you get the sunbeams.

He thinks we are, hailing the rise in renewables and how “the green transition has picked up speed”, and warns of “the risk of AMOC disruption” for good measure. But the problem is that it’s the same reasoning writ large: just because governments are giving a favoured kind of enterprise massive subsidies and those enterprises are growing, it doesn’t mean they’re actually efficient and outcompeting rivals by satisfying consumers.

Thus if, for instance, he were to look at, oh, say, the huge sums that American state governments in particular put into canals as the transportation system of the future from about 1820 through 1842, and considered what boosters would say about how they were winning the battle for Americans’ freight, he might be a bit less keen on a panicky response to a crisis involving buying massive amounts of something that wasn’t doing the job very well, spending other people’s money as if it were water, and in the end helping trigger an international slump.

We certainly should be.