Do We Only Build the Ark When the Flood Is Already Here?
Yes. Always. The ark is never built preventively. It is built when the water is already rising. That is not a consolation — nor a counsel of despair. It is the observable pattern of human civilisation. And sometimes it is just enough.
I. The Third Oil Crisis
In March 2026, the International Energy Agency published a report whose sobriety is chilling: the shortfall of around 15 million barrels of oil per day caused by the Iran war is the largest supply disruption in the history of oil markets. Larger than 1956, when Egypt blocked the Suez Canal. Larger than 1973, when Arab OPEC states threatened Western supporters of Israel with an embargo. Larger than 1979, after the Islamic Revolution. We are in the middle of the third oil crisis.
The IEA recommends: work from home instead of commuting. Lower speed limits. Switch from cars to buses and trains. Form carpools. Avoid flights. That sounds like 1973. It is 1973. Only this time the alternatives already exist.
II. What 1973 Really Triggered
The first oil crisis was less dramatic in its immediate effect than it appears in memory. Oil did not actually run scarce. Petrol prices remained modest. The four car-free Sundays in November and December 1973 were symbolic — economically they achieved little.
But they achieved something else. They triggered a shift in perspective that nobody had planned. The VW Golf, launched in 1974, became a lifeline for the financially endangered Volkswagen works — not because it was particularly good, but because fuel-efficient cars were suddenly in demand. In Copenhagen, 1973 is regarded as the turning point from which the city grew its cycling share from ten per cent to become the modern cycling city par excellence. Tinkerers began working on wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars — because of the oil shock, not because of political foresight.
Nobody planned it. No ministry decided: now we will build the ark. The shock released energies that had not previously existed. The crisis achieved what decades of awareness campaigns had not: it caused people to act differently.
The 1973 oil crisis did not change energy policy. It changed consciousness. And shifts in consciousness are slower and more lasting than shifts in policy.
III. The Pattern
1973 was no isolated case. It is the pattern. The steam engine was not developed from scientific foresight, but because coal mines were flooding and the water needed to be pumped out. The internet was not born from visionary technology policy, but from the military fear that a centralised communications network might be knocked out by a nuclear strike. The COVID mRNA vaccines were not developed from precaution — the platform technology had existed for years, but only the shock of the pandemic mobilised the necessary resources and approvals at record speed.
Human beings act preventively only within narrow limits. We buckle our seatbelts when we sit in a car — because the danger is immediate and concrete. We do not build an ark when the sky is still blue. We build it when we get wet feet.
This is not a character weakness. It is an evolutionary programme that functioned well in a world of slow change. In a world where crises build faster than the human capacity to respond, it becomes dangerous.
IV. The Difference From 1973
2026 is not 1973 — and this time that is an advantage. The ark is already finished in the harbour. It no longer needs to be invented.
Electric cars are not experiments — they are in mass production. Photovoltaics are no longer more expensive than fossil energy — they are cheaper. Wind power covers Germany’s entire electricity demand on good days. Heat pumps exist in the millions. The technologies that were still decades away in 1973 are available today. What is missing is not the technology. What is missing is the pressure to deploy it.
The third oil crisis could be that pressure. Not because policy has thought ahead — it has not. But because the price shock at the petrol station is immediate, concrete, felt daily. And immediate pain is the strongest motivator evolution knows.
V. What the Emerging Economies Show
It is the emerging and developing countries that are responding fastest in March 2026 — not because they are wiser, but because they have less buffer. Sri Lanka is rationing petrol, capping tank fills at 15 litres. Pakistan is lowering speed limits. Thailand is banning filling jerry cans. Vietnam is calling for home working. Myanmar has introduced alternating driving bans by number plate.
These are exactly the measures the IEA also recommends for wealthy countries — and which meet resistance there because the pain is not yet great enough. But when the pain becomes great enough, wealthy countries act too. Germany demonstrated this in 1973: 111 days of speed limits, car-free Sundays, a national rethinking.
VI. The Open Question
The real question is not whether we build the ark when the flood is here. We will. The question is whether we build it quickly enough. And whether the shock this time is strong enough to do more than treat symptoms — fuel rebates, price caps, strategic reserves — and actually shift the energy base.
The answer in 2022 was sobering. The gas throttling after the Russian attack on Ukraine led in the short term to enormous growth in renewable energies in Germany — and in the medium term to a return to coal. The ark was half built and then dismantled again because the water had temporarily subsided.
2026 is different — because the third oil crisis strikes a world in which the alternatives are cheaper than the original. A speed limit today no longer saves money at the fuel tank — it saves nerves and emissions. An electric car today is cheaper to run than a combustion engine. Working from home is today technically straightforward for millions of people.
The pain at the pump could this time be the final impulse that the transformation needed. Not because we have grown wiser. But because the ark is already finished — and the water is rising.
The flood is not a failure. It is sometimes the only architect to whom human beings listen.