The climate movement spent two decades framing decarbonisation as a moral imperative. Donald Trump and a cost-of-living crisis broke the popular mandate. Iran has now achieved what we environmental advocates could not. A solar farm cannot be blockaded. A battery cannot be torpedoed in the Strait of Hormuz. Each new barrel of oil costs more than the last; each new solar panel costs less.

Energy-as-national-security commands the regulatory weight and public spending the moral case never could. America’s finances, military and politics have paid for the principle for eighty years. This was always an odd bargain: the United States, now the world’s largest oil and gas producer and a leading LNG exporter, policing an energy hub half a world away.

As the bargain unwinds and supply chains fracture, expect gas exploration to return to the policy agenda. But decarbonisation will overtake it on economics. A growing list of economies will go all-in on renewables, as Pakistan has done with cheap solar, or pair green and nuclear investment, as France is doing. Nothing else compounds security, supply and cost advantage in the same way.

If Washington treats energy security less as a public good and more as someone else’s problem, the cost will move straight to the private sector. Boards now need a framework for geopolitical fragility: conflict scenarios, higher risk premia, volatile import prices, and fractured supply chains. A framework built for this world already exists, and most large businesses commission it each year, even if their boards rarely treat it as one: double materiality.

The exercise starts with the general and ends with the specific. Sectoral megatrends first; the structural forces no government can stop or significantly alter. Then the company’s value chain as a map of dependencies. From those dependencies come the stakeholder impacts and financial risks and opportunities, weighted and consolidated into a short list of priorities to execute. A typical assessment at a large listed business opens with 100 to 150 candidate impacts, risks, and opportunities, narrows to 60 to 90 above the threshold for material information, and closes with three to five core priorities.

Most boards and executive teams do not recognise this as enterprise strategy. It arrives dressed in sustainability jargon and gets read as compliance. That misreading costs them the most valuable instrument they commission each year.

The work sits in a data table. Each row carries a megatrend link, a value chain position, a time horizon, a severity-and-likelihood score, evidence citations, and a map of what it depends on and what it amplifies. Every row is mapped to reporting standards in one pass, which is what the regulator and the auditor will eventually ask for. That table is the spine of everything that follows: it sets priorities, shapes the strategy refresh, anchors targets and reporting, and surfaces the real trade-offs the executive team must resolve. It also surfaces unresolved management decisions: tensions in the business model the evidence has revealed but cannot settle. Those insights evolve materiality from disclosure to strategy.

The plumbing of a well-constructed priority might read like this. Large language model training is driving a data centre boom. That demand strains a grid that cannot build renewables fast enough, just as the Iran war keeps fossil fuel prices high. Wholesale electricity prices climb; emissions from marginal generation climb with them. A first generation of college-educated workers is watching its future jobs get automated. Tell those young people their power bills must rise to fund their own obsolescence, and political instability looms. Meanwhile, the batteries and transmission needed to firm new demand depend on critical minerals. Ninety per cent are refined in China, even as Beijing restricts exports for geopolitical leverage.

A technology opportunity has become an affordability, environmental, political, and national security exposure. It also remains a productivity windfall: cheaper firming as the grid takes on more renewables and storage, domestic refining jobs as production is onshored, and potential productivity gains that fund the transition. None of this cascade appears in the five-year plan, any more than Iran did.

The data table runs on chains of evidence, not assertion. Rebuilt each year with fresh insights, it stays current as conditions shift. That discipline, grounded in a clear-eyed view of the world as it changes, distinguishes the table from the conventional plan whose assumptions expire halfway through.

In 1965, the average company on the S&P 500 stayed on the index for thirty-three years. Today, fourteen. By 2030, roughly half the current index will have turned over. Companies survive when their boards can see compounding shocks as a connected system. Most boards cannot. Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls that design property anti-fragile: a system that gains from disorder.

Double materiality produces the map. A board that has plotted its risks and opportunities can act on a shock while its competitors are still describing it. The energy security reframing that opened this essay appears on a well-run materiality data table. It shows as impacts, risks and opportunities linked across the energy transition and geopolitical fragmentation megatrends. It does not appear on a conventional strategic plan.

The hard lessons of the Iran war will keep arriving. Every large firm will be asked, within the decade, to produce a strategy that answers compounding shocks rather than one that assumes them away. The instrument is already inside the company. It sits unnoticed as a disclosure exercise, filed for compliance, yet is the most valuable thing the board could commission each year. Most file it and forget. The few that treat it as anti-fragile strategy will compound that advantage with every shock that follows.

About the Author

Luke Heilbuth is CEO of sustainability strategy consultancy BWD Strategic, and a former Australian diplomat.

On Substack, Luke writes about the systems we’re breaking and the blindness that lets us — from climate and geopolitics to AI and the future of work. Read & Subscribe on Substack here.