Editor’s note: Energy prices spiked this week. If you've been watching the unfolding Iran conflict, you've been watching F08: From Energy Hegemony to Power Plurality play out in real time. We're starting there — with the signals — before unpacking the forecast underneath them.
In Bangkok, cash buyers streamed into forecourts spooked by rising diesel prices, hunting for second-hand EVs. One customer drove up in a Mercedes, ready to buy on the spot. Southeast Asia, already trending electric, is accelerating under oil shock pressure, pulled deeper into the Chinese EV ecosystem, into BYD’s Thailand factory, into a new set of dependencies, by the same conflict driving oil prices up.
In Brussels, the picture is more fractured. Europe responded to the Russia shock by accelerating renewable deployment at record pace. But more recently, some European leaders have responded to ongoing disruptions by weakening carbon tariffs, delaying emissions trading expansion, and slowing the phase-out of internal combustion engines. The same continent, pulling in both directions at once.
Same conflict. Different responses. Bangkok accelerates into one system. Europe is pulled between both. Neither is irrational. Both are locking in dependencies that will shape their exposure for decades.
That is dual exposure. And it is a defining condition of the 2020s.
The world is running on two energy systems at once. One is clearly being built. The other is contested: expanding in some places, being phased down in others, fought over everywhere. Both are fragile. Neither is completely separate, and there are dangers in the overlaps.
For a century, energy security meant access to fuel. Fields, pipelines, tanker routes. Control those, and you controlled leverage. That logic still applies. The energy transition has not yet replaced the old system’s vulnerabilities. It has added new ones. The new system runs on minerals (lithium, cobalt, rare earths) and on processing capacity, grid infrastructure, and manufacturing ecosystems. Most of those dependencies are no more diversified than the oil chokepoints of the old system. In some cases, less so.
Every time a conflict flares near the Persian Gulf, the world watches the oil chokepoints. In January, China tightened rare earth export controls on Japan within weeks of military rhetoric over Taiwan. Security language became supply chain action almost instantly. That is the new speed of mineral leverage, and it has nothing to do with shipping lanes.
Both systems are live. Both are fragile. A shock to either propagates through the whole. And the transition period, the period we are in right now, is the period of maximum exposure for everyone.
The Map is Changing
The old map sorted the world into oil producers and oil consumers. The emerging map is more complicated.
There are now electrostates, building leverage through clean energy surplus and manufacturing capacity. Petrostates, organised around scarcity rents from fossil reserves. Corridor states like Turkey and the Gulf nations, positioning as intermediaries between incompatible systems, investing across both fossil and clean architectures, hedging every possible future simultaneously. Mineral-leverage states, using export controls on critical inputs as a new form of embargo. And platform states, whose leverage comes not from what they extract or generate but from the infrastructure and algorithms that coordinate flows.
No major power has resolved its position. China is the world’s largest clean tech manufacturer and its largest oil and gas importer simultaneously. The EU has green targets it cannot meet without Chinese imports and LNG contracts locked in for the next decade. The current US policy direction has swung toward fossil production, creating structural consequences that will persist regardless of future shifts, even as state-level clean energy investment and market forces move the other way.
There has never been a single global energy transition. There have always been multiple transitions and additions, moving at different speeds in different places, shaped by local resources, politics, economics, and culture. What is changing is that these multiple pathways are being pulled in increasingly divergent directions by geopolitical forces, while the coordination mechanisms that were supposed to help manage across them are weakening. COP was built for this job. It is struggling to hold the room together, not because the wrong actors are present, but because the forces pulling actors apart are now stronger than the architecture holding them in.
That fragmentation may be the most dangerous dynamic in energy right now. Not because one side is right and the other wrong, but because the transition requires coordination across actors who see the world very differently: fossil and clean, supply and demand, incumbent and disruptor, developed and developing. Every fracture that widens between them slows the whole system down, at the moment when speed matters most.
Brutal Honesty, All Directions
If this forecast is going to be useful, it has to tell the truth to everyone, not just the people who already agree with each other.
Start with the fossil fuel industry. The record is documented and it is damning. Shell abandoned its 2035 carbon intensity target in 2024, just before it would have entered the company’s ten-year planning horizon, raising the obvious question of what any longer-dated commitment is worth if it can be dropped before it bites. BP retreated from offshore wind. Both shifted capital back to oil and gas after their share prices lagged US rivals who never pivoted. The market is currently rewarding delay and punishing early movers. That is a systemic incentive problem, and it needs systemic solutions: policy, regulation, investor coordination.
The broader pattern runs deeper. More than two billion dollars spent on climate lobbying in the US alone between 2000 and 2016. Systematic climate science denial dating to the 1970s. Documented revolving doors between industry and government. Lobbying groups founded specifically to obstruct international climate agreements. Ongoing campaigns to weaken regulation. Emissions keep rising. The gap between corporate commitments and corporate behaviour keeps widening. This has to stop, and it has to stop fast.
But here is a distinction that matters enormously, and getting it wrong has consequences. The problem is not that fossil fuel actors are present in transition processes. The problem is that some have used their position to capture institutions and processes: to slow, weaken, and redirect the transition to protect existing revenue. That is institutional capture, and the response is transparency, accountability, and structural reform.
Framing mere presence as the problem is a different move, and a counterproductive one. It pushes every actor in the fossil fuel system, including those genuinely working on hydrogen, carbon capture, grid modernisation, and managed decline of legacy infrastructure, toward the actors who are actively obstructing. It collapses the difference between a Gulf sovereign wealth fund investing in solar and LNG and a political operation dismantling clean energy subsidies. Between a gas company exploring hydrogen pathways and a coal lobby fighting regulation. Foresight is supposed to identify leverage points for change. Treating an entire sector as a monolith eliminates them.
Now the uncomfortable truths for the clean energy side. The new system’s supply chains are geopolitically fragile in ways that haven’t been stress-tested. Critical mineral dependencies are concentrated, not distributed. Energy transition and energy security have always been in tension, held in what the World Energy Council calls the Trilemma: security, equity, sustainability, permanently needing to be balanced. In some places, that balance is genuinely being found: regions where local renewable energy is delivering cheaper, more secure, cleaner power simultaneously. But at the global and geopolitical level, the alignment between transition and security that briefly held is fracturing. Strategies that assumed global convergence need updating, even where local convergence is real.
And for everyone: the old system has to be managed down safely. Fossil energy systems designed to grow behave dangerously when they shrink. Pipeline pressure drops. Refinery economics collapse. Maintenance workforces thin out. Unmanaged decline triggers the price spikes, grid instability, and workforce dislocations that turn public opinion against the transition itself. You cannot just walk away from a natural gas grid. The people who understand how to operate these systems are the ones who need to manage their decline.
The full picture is: parallel building of new clean energy systems by new actors (real, accelerating, one of the most important economic stories in the world), AND managed transformation of incumbent systems using infrastructure and expertise that currently sit inside fossil fuel companies, AND safe decline of what is being replaced, AND honest confrontation of institutional capture wherever it occurs. All at once. That is the actual complexity of the transition, and any framing that simplifies it to heroes and villains makes the work harder.
Three Trajectories
The forecast maps three directions from here. None is inevitable. All are worth planning for.
Managed Plurality. Major powers stabilise around distinct but partially interoperable energy stacks. Clean and fossil coexist under geopolitical management rather than coordinated transition. Climate goals survive in modified form. The question: are you inside a stack that will remain functional, or dependent on interoperability that may never arrive?
Frozen Transition. Political headwinds stall decarbonisation. Fossil systems persist beyond their economic logic. Clean investment fragments into incompatible regional architectures. The question: how much of your strategy depends on a transition pace that political reality no longer supports?
Cascade Failure. A major shock before any stack achieves self-sufficiency triggers simultaneous failures across both systems. The question: which of your dependencies could you replace locally if global supply chains broke for a year?
Poll: One Hard Question
Tell us why in the comments.
What This Asks of You
Wherever you sit in this system, the forecast is asking something of you.
If you lead an organisation, map your dual exposure. Which of your assumptions depend on energy access you haven’t stress-tested?
If you work in climate or clean energy, build the coalitions across the full energy system that the transition needs for its hardest stretches, and account for the geopolitical fragility of your own supply chains.
If you work in the fossil fuel and energy industry, this is not a reprieve. It is a window. The engineering capacity, infrastructure knowledge, and capital you control are genuinely needed: for hydrogen, for carbon capture, for grid modernisation, for managed decline. Deploy them. But the credibility to play that role has to be earned. Dropping targets when they become inconvenient, shifting capital to extraction when markets reward it, lobbying against the regulations that would create incentive structures for diversification: the world can see it, it is eroding the trust that collaboration depends on, and the structural shift coming will not be reversed by lobbying. The companies that move first and genuinely will shape what comes next. The ones that use turbulence as cover for delay will be left behind.
If you work in development or community resilience, the people you serve may be caught in the gap between systems, unable to access either reliably. Map their specific exposure and advocate for their inclusion in architectures being designed without them.
If you are an engaged citizen, resist the pull of false simplicity. The fossil fuel system is both the source of the problem and part of the pathway to the solution. Clean energy is both essential and geopolitically fragile. Institutional capture is real and must be confronted, and the transition still needs infrastructure and expertise that sit inside incumbent companies. The transition does not need more people choosing sides. It needs more people who can see the whole system and push every part of it to move faster.
Too many people still think the most important question in the energy transition is whose side you are on. It isn’t. The question is whether we can build enough honest coordination across all sides to manage the transition without the fragmentation becoming the failure.
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