The light that left Proxima Centauri this morning (14 April 2026) will hit the Earth on the 10^th of July in 2030. I use variations of this calculation, in many different settings, to illustrate the idea of a “future that’s already happened” – but we don’t need to travel 25 trillion miles to make that point today, because the Strait of Hormuz is only 7,400 miles (as the tanker sails) from the Chinese port of Qingdao (which is the largest single recipient of those deliveries).

Perhaps, though, I should say that Qingdao was the largest recipient of Hormuz-transiting oil – because this is a week when a “future that’s already happened” is going to hit the planet, with an impact far more painful than mere starlight. “The final ships to clear the strait before the Iran war began on February 28 are expected to reach their destination in Malaysia and Australia by April 20,” estimated Jamie Smyth in yesterday’s Financial Times, with cascading effects that will wrap around the planet like a tsunami. Smyth continued,

With Asian refineries responding by buying up a record number of crude oil cargoes that would normally have sailed to Europe and the US, analysts said refiners in some of the world’s wealthiest countries may soon also face shortages. “It will hit the west in a month when all the Asian cargoes bought leave the Atlantic basin,” said Nic Dyer, an analyst at Energy Aspects.

This will come, it appears, as a shock to people who thought that U.S. status as a “net exporter of oil” would insulate U.S. energy prices from what’s happening on the other side of the planet. Yes, I mean that almost literally: the Strait of Hormuz is about 155º of longitude east of Lebanon, Kansas, the centerpoint of the Lower 48 states. That may seem like a safely decoupling distance, but Hugh Daigle of the University of Texas debunked that delusion in an interview on NPR.

The simple part of the problem, as Daigle outlined, is logistics:

Refineries in California generally are processing crude oil that comes from the Middle East and Asia. And you might ask why, you know, if we’re producing all this oil in the U.S. And the reason is that there’s just not enough pipeline capacity to move oil produced here in Texas over to California where it could be refined.

The harder part of the problem is chemistry, or perhaps I should say chemical engineering:

You can think of crude oil like a cookie batter. So it’s got all kinds of different chemicals in it. And when we put that into a refinery, it’s like, we want to get the eggs back out, we want to get the flour back out. And so depending on what the composition of that crude oil is, what chemicals are there to start with, you’re going to use different types of refining processes to get those end products out. We’re set up to refine a particular type of crude oil that comes from places like western Canada and Venezuela and Mexico… When you look at supply versus demand, you know, we’re bringing oil in here, we’re refining it, and then we’re sending those products overseas, or maybe we’re keeping those products at home. You can’t just say, well, the stuff that we produce here, we just keep it here. Just - that’s not the way the market works.

If “uninvestable” was the word of the year (with reference to Venezuela), then perhaps “that’s not the way the market works” will turn out to be the motto. Some would even say it’s the epitaph, as suggested in this month’s assessment from Samantha Gross at the Brookings Institution:

The perceived risk in oil markets will change after the conflict; the world can’t go back to the time before the war. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Iran, and Iraq export most of their oil through the Strait of Hormuz, although Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, the UAE and Iran have pipelines that avoid the strait. In all, the world is missing about 11 million barrels per day (mbd), or 11%, of crude oil supply, compared to the roughly 20 mbd that transited the strait before the conflict. Additionally, the oil market considers spare production capacity to understand supply risk, but nearly all the world’s spare capacity is in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Finally, it’s difficult to imagine Saudi Arabia continuing to be the secure marginal supplier of oil so long as Iran can harass traffic through the strait.

Putting this all together, I’m reminded of the maxim that “all politics is local,” most commonly attributed to Phillip (“Tip”) O’Neill – holder of the record for longest continuous service as the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. I’m “reminded” in the sense of “it’s opposite day,” because the time-delayed connections described above will have planet-encompassing effects – despite what might seem the localized events in roughly 5,000 square miles of waterway.

The future that’s already happened has many aspects yet to be seen – and every organ of society will soon be coming to terms with the time lags yet to come, with responses in coming months and years that will have profound climate-affecting consequences. But when the wave function collapses, which reality will we be in?

• Will renewable-energy transition happen more quickly? Or, will “emergency” relaxation of mitigation mandates increase the risk of “tipping point” effects?

• Will “never again” reaction to single-point-of-failure shipping routes result in more dispersed, more resilient energy supply chains? Or will dominance of solar-power and smart-grid technologies make China the next era’s controlling player?

You can break apart a fully assembled jigsaw puzzle in seconds, but it may take hours to reassemble it – and it will likewise take years to repair the costly and complex damage that’s been done in the past several weeks. That means starting the work of repair before the breakage is impossible to ignore.