Oil Shock: The War That Just Exposed the Energy Fantasy

For years we have been told the same story.

The age of fossil fuels is ending.
Oil is yesterday’s energy.
Renewables will soon power the world.

Politicians repeat it. Activists chant it. Much of the media reports it as settled fact.

And then reality intrudes.

This week, as tensions in the Middle East erupted into open conflict involving Iran, global markets reacted instantly. Oil prices surged. Energy stocks jumped. Shipping insurance rates spiked. Stock markets wobbled.

Why?

Because the entire modern world still runs on oil.

Not partially. Not occasionally.

Completely.

The World Still Runs on Fossil Fuels

Despite decades of promises about a rapid transition to green energy, the global economy remains overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels.

Oil powers transportation.
Gas fuels electricity generation and industry.
Coal still produces vast amounts of power in developing nations.

Remove those fuels suddenly and modern civilisation would grind to a halt.

Planes don’t fly on solar panels.
Container ships don’t cross oceans on wind turbines.
Steel plants and cement kilns cannot run on good intentions.

The reaction of the markets to the Iran crisis tells us something the climate narrative prefers to ignore:

Oil is still the lifeblood of the global economy.

And it will remain so for decades.

The Renewable Revolution That Wasn’t

None of this is to deny that renewables are growing. Governments have poured trillions of dollars into solar panels, wind farms, subsidies, and mandates.

But after all that investment, fossil fuels still supply the vast majority of the world’s energy.

The uncomfortable truth is that renewables have not replaced fossil fuels.

In many places they have simply been added on top of them.

When the wind stops blowing or the sun sets, the grid still relies on gas, coal, or nuclear power to keep the lights on.

The result?

Higher energy costs.

Across Europe and parts of the developed world, electricity prices have surged as governments attempt to force the transition faster than technology and infrastructure allow.

And who suffers the most?

Not wealthy activists.

The poor.

The Hidden Cost to Developing Nations

The push to rapidly abandon fossil fuels has had another damaging consequence: it has made energy more expensive for the countries that can least afford it.

Developing nations desperately need reliable, affordable power to lift millions of people out of poverty.

Factories. Hospitals. Water treatment plants. Transport systems.

All require energy.

Yet international financial institutions and climate activists increasingly pressure these nations not to build fossil fuel infrastructure.

In effect, the richest countries in the world are telling the poorest:

"You cannot use the same energy sources we used to become wealthy."

It is a policy that borders on moral arrogance.

The Climate Debate Needs Some Honesty

The climate debate has become dominated by apocalyptic language and unrealistic timelines.

We are told the world must abandon fossil fuels within a decade or face catastrophe.

Yet every real-world signal tells a different story.

Energy demand continues to grow.
Oil consumption remains near record highs.
Natural gas demand is expanding.
Coal usage in Asia continues to rise.

Even the most optimistic projections show fossil fuels remaining a major part of the global energy mix for many decades.

Pretending otherwise does not change physics, economics, or engineering reality.

A More Realistic Path Forward

None of this means innovation should stop.

Cleaner technologies should continue to develop.
Renewables will play a growing role.
Energy efficiency should improve.

But decarbonising a global industrial civilisation is not a ten-year project.

It is likely a century-scale transformation.

Until then, the world must prioritise energy reliability, affordability, and economic development.

And that means acknowledging an obvious truth.

The Reality Check

Every time geopolitical tensions threaten oil supplies, markets panic.

Not because traders are foolish.

But because they understand something the climate debate often ignores.

The modern world still runs on fossil fuels.

Until someone invents a scalable, reliable, affordable alternative capable of replacing them completely, that reality is not going away.

The sooner policymakers admit it, the sooner we can begin having an honest conversation about the future of energy.

And about how to manage climate risks without crippling the very economies that keep the world running.

Weekly Roundup - Top Articles and Commentary from Week 11 of 2026

 

Here are links to some selected articles of interest and our posts from this week.

• Iran War Reveals Where Everyone Stands
• International Law Is Not A Suicide Pact

• Bill Maher Drops Truth Bombs On The Left
  
• The Media's Moral Inversion
  
• New Hope For Those With Alzheimer's
  
• Iranian Woman Sends A Message to the American people, must see

• Oil Shock: The War That Just Exposed The Energy Phantasy

We welcome all feedback; please feel free to submit your comments or contact me via email at grappysb@gmail.com or on X at @grappysb

New Hope For Those With Alzheimer's

For decades, Alzheimer’s disease has been treated as one of medicine’s most frustrating mysteries. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to remove the amyloid plaques that accumulate in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Yet despite enormous effort, the results have been disappointing. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Alzheimer’s drug trials—more than 99 percent—have failed to produce meaningful results.

But a new line of research is challenging the assumptions that have guided Alzheimer’s science for years.

Instead of focusing primarily on plaques, researchers are now looking at something deeper: the brain’s energy system.

A recently published study highlighted in the video below suggests that Alzheimer’s disease may be closely linked to a breakdown in the brain’s energy metabolism. At the centre of this discovery is a molecule called NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), a compound present in every cell of the body and essential for producing cellular energy. When NAD levels fall, cells struggle to generate the energy they need to function properly.

And that may be particularly dangerous in the brain.

The Alzheimer’s Paradox

One of the longstanding puzzles in Alzheimer’s research is that many people have large amounts of amyloid plaque in their brains yet remain cognitively normal. In fact, studies suggest that as many as 20–50% of people with significant plaque show no dementia symptoms at all.

Why?

The new research points to NAD as a possible explanation. People whose brains maintain higher NAD levels appear to be more resilient, continuing to think clearly even when typical Alzheimer’s pathology is present.

Remarkable Results in the Laboratory

To test this theory, scientists conducted experiments using established mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease. As the disease progressed in these animals, their NAD levels steadily declined. But when researchers used a compound that boosts NAD production, the results were striking.

According to the study:

• Memory deficits were prevented and even reversed

• Learning ability improved

• Brain inflammation dropped

• The integrity of the blood-brain barrier improved

• Key markers of Alzheimer’s pathology were reduced

Even more surprising, these improvements occurred even when treatment was started at later stages of the disease, challenging the long-held belief that Alzheimer’s is inevitably progressive and irreversible.

What About Humans?

While animal studies don’t always translate directly to people, the researchers also examined human brain data. They found a similar pattern: individuals with Alzheimer’s disease tend to have significantly disrupted NAD metabolism, with lower production and higher breakdown of this key molecule.

In contrast, individuals with high plaque levels but normal cognition tended to maintain higher NAD levels, strengthening the idea that NAD may act as a kind of metabolic shield for the brain.

A New Direction in Alzheimer’s Prevention

Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of this research is that it points toward practical strategies that may help support healthy NAD levels. These include lifestyle factors already associated with good metabolic health, such as:

• Regular physical exercise

• Maintaining muscle mass and cardiovascular fitness

• Intermittent fasting or ketogenic metabolic states

• Reducing chronic inflammation

• Maintaining good sleep and nutrition

None of these are silver bullets. Alzheimer’s is a complex disease. But this research suggests we may have been focusing too narrowly on plaques while overlooking a more fundamental issue: the brain’s energy supply.

If these findings continue to hold up, they could open an entirely new frontier in Alzheimer’s prevention and treatment—one focused not simply on removing damage, but on restoring the brain’s metabolic resilience.

That’s a hopeful shift.

The video below explains this fascinating research in more detail.

VV

The Media's Moral Inversion

If you want to understand the strange moral fog that now hangs over much of the Western media, you need only watch the reaction to the recent military action against Iran’s Islamist regime.

Within hours of the strikes by the United States and Israel, much of the commentary class had reached its verdict. The headlines warned of “dangerous escalation.” Television panels spoke solemnly about the “risk of widening war.” Editorial writers fretted about the stability of the region.

What was strangely absent from this sudden outbreak of concern was any serious reflection on why the strikes occurred in the first place.

Just weeks earlier, the same regime had brutally crushed its own people. Iranian citizens protesting the tyranny of the Islamic Republic were met with bullets, prisons, and executions. Thousands were arrested. Many were murdered in the streets. Families still do not know where their sons and daughters have been taken.

Yet the reaction from many Western commentators was little more than a shrug.

No wall-to-wall coverage.
No anguished editorials about “escalation.”
No emergency television panels about the rights of Iranian citizens.

But the moment action is taken against the regime responsible for that brutality, suddenly the airwaves fill with concern.

Concern not for the victims.

Concern for the regime.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is not some misunderstood regional power. It is a revolutionary theocracy that has spent decades exporting terror, funding proxy militias, threatening the destruction of Israel, and suppressing its own population with extraordinary cruelty.

It has financed terrorist groups across the Middle East.
It has armed militias that attack American forces.
It has openly called for the annihilation of Israel.

And inside Iran itself, the regime rules through fear.

Women are beaten for showing their hair.
Students are jailed for speaking their minds.
Protesters disappear into prisons.

Most recently, the regime demonstrated once again that it will kill its own citizens to stay in power.

Yet when the United States and Israel act to confront that regime, many Western commentators suddenly rediscover their passion for peace.

The moral inversion is astonishing.

But perhaps the most revealing images have not come from television studios or newspaper columns.

They have come from the streets.

Across the Iranian diaspora — and even inside Iran itself — videos have appeared of people celebrating the strikes. Iranian expatriates waving flags. Crowds chanting in support of action against the regime. Messages of thanks directed to the United States and Israel.

For many Iranians, this conflict is not about geopolitics.

It is about liberation.

They know the regime better than any Western journalist ever will.

They have lived under it.

They have watched friends disappear into its prisons. They have watched daughters beaten by morality police. They have watched a once-great civilisation reduced to rule by clerical tyrants.

So when they see the regime finally challenged, their reaction is not horror.

It is hope.

And that is perhaps the greatest disconnect of all.

While many Western commentators lament the fate of the regime, many Iranians are quietly praying for its end.

History has a way of exposing moral confusion.

Sometimes it reveals who stands with freedom.

And sometimes it reveals who instinctively sides with those who crush it.

Here is how Iranians have reacted to the attack on the Islamist regime and the death of the Ayatollah inside Iran.

And around the world.

 

Bill Maher Drops Truth Bombs on the Left

For years the political Left has portrayed itself as the defender of reason, tolerance, and enlightenment. Anyone who questioned its dogmas was dismissed as ignorant, reactionary, or worse. But lately something interesting has been happening: some of the most devastating critiques of the modern Left are coming not from conservatives, but from people who have spent most of their careers inside the liberal camp.

One of them is Bill Maher.

Maher is hardly a conservative. In fact, for decades he has been a reliably liberal voice on American television. But unlike many on the contemporary Left, Maher has retained something increasingly rare in modern political discourse: the willingness to say uncomfortable truths.

In the short clip below, Maher delivers what can only be described as a one-minute demolition of several fashionable progressive narratives.

His starting point is the growing hostility toward Western civilization now fashionable in universities and activist circles. As Maher bluntly observes, many young people have been taught to think that “Western” simply means “white” and therefore automatically “bad.”

That caricature ignores reality.

Maher reminds his audience that brutality, conquest and oppression are hardly unique to Europeans. History is filled with examples across every culture and continent—from imperial Japan to Genghis Khan’s Mongol empire. The darker chapters of history are part of the human story, not the property of one race or civilisation.

But what critics of the West conveniently forget is the other side of the ledger.

The same civilisation now casually dismissed as irredeemably oppressive also gave the world many of the principles that make modern life possible: the rule of law, democratic government, minority rights, and scientific inquiry.

Those ideas did not emerge by accident. They grew out of centuries of philosophical, legal and cultural development in the Western world.

Maher’s critique becomes even sharper when he turns to a troubling trend among younger activists: a reflexive embarrassment about their own country. Surveys show large numbers of young Americans saying they are ashamed of the United States, despite living in one of the most prosperous and free societies in human history.

Maher’s response is simple: perspective matters.

No country is perfect. America certainly isn’t. But compared with most of the world—especially on the progressive issues young activists claim to care about—it remains far ahead of many societies.

Women own millions of businesses. Gay citizens can marry and build lives openly. People from every background can start companies, buy property, and express dissent under the protection of the law.

And that leads to Maher’s central question: how does a generation raised in extraordinary freedom and prosperity become so hostile to the very system that created it?

It’s a question worth asking.

Because when a civilisation begins teaching its young people that their own society is uniquely evil, something has gone badly wrong in the education system.

And when activists cheer symbols of movements that would happily extinguish the freedoms they enjoy, the problem is no longer merely academic—it becomes cultural and political.

Maher’s point is not that America—or the West—is perfect. His point is something far more basic: before you tear something down, you should at least understand what it is you are destroying.

That simple truth, delivered in less than a minute, is enough to leave much of the modern Left looking distinctly uncomfortable.

Watch the clip below.

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If you'd like, I can also give you 5–8 punchy title ideas for this post (your blog titles tend to be sharp and provocative).