Energy transition is a fragmented, crisis-driven transformation

In early 2022, Jason Bordoff and Meghan O’Sullivan cautioned in a Foreign Affairs article titled ‘Green Upheaval’ that “talk of a smooth transition to clean energy is fanciful,” adding that “the process will be messy at best”. Four years and three crises later – COVID-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the current war in the Middle East – and that warning reads less like foresight and more like a diagnosis. Each crisis has stress-tested the global energy system and revealed a central truth: the energy transition is not unfolding in a vacuum of climate ambition, but in a world shaped…