Electric vehicles enabled drivers to avoid oil consumption equivalent to 70% of Iran’s exports in 2025, and scaling up the full range of electrotech options would reduce fossil fuel importing countries’ dependency by the same margin, the UK’s Ember clean energy consultancy concludes in a report issued Wednesday morning.

That reality is now landing most powerfully on Asia, which imports 40% of its oil through the blockaded Strait of Hormuz, the report states.

“This is Asia’s Ukraine moment,” said Ember principal Daan Walter.

“Oil is the Achilles’ heel of the global economy,” he added. But “unlike the oil crises of the 1970s, there is now a better alternative. Electric vehicles are increasingly cost-competitive with gasoline cars. Oil volatility means EVs are a common-sense choice for countries wishing to insulate themselves from future shocks.”

That futureproofing won’t protect anyone on the front lines of the American/Israeli attacks on Iran, or of Iran’s retaliatory strikes.

But with three-quarters of the world’s population living in fossil-importing countries, those importers spending $1.7 trillion on fuels in 2024, and every $10 increase in the cost of a barrel of oil increasing the total by about $160 billion per year, “high prices hit the poorest hardest,” Ember writes. “Low-income households in the United States can spend as much as 20% of their disposable income on energy. Poorer economies like Namibia, Thailand, and the [Democratic Republic of Congo] spend over 7% of GDP on fossil imports. When supply tightens, the rich bid up prices to get the energy they need—and in doing so price out the poor.”

But the other option is already making a difference. “The global fleet of electric vehicles avoided oil consumption equivalent to 70% of Iran’s exports in 2025,” and a single year of new solar energy capacity in that year may have been enough to displace all the LNG exports through the Strait of Hormuz.

“Proven technologies can electrify over three-quarters of the global economy,” the report states. “Every country in the world has enough wind and solar potential to power that demand with homegrown energy,” and “for many, this is already cushioning the blow” of skyrocketing fossil energy costs.

With global armed conflicts on the rise, tariff and trade uncertainty “at their highest in decades”, and oil volatility increasing, Ember says the crisis in the strait will accelerate the energy transition that is already under way.

“Peak oil has been brought sharply forward,” the think tank writes. “The International Energy Agency has already cut its 2026 demand growth forecast, and the peak it previously put at 2029 may already be here.”