Chuck Baclagon

Before the markets tick upward and the analysts begin their grim arithmetic, there are funerals. There are parents in Iran scanning the sky, children in Israel ushered into shelters, families across the region calculating which road might still be safe. As strikes escalate between the United States and Israel on Iran—and as Iran answers back—each missile redraws not just a strategic map but the intimate geography of someone’s life.

War is often narrated in the language of deterrence and doctrine. But its true ledger is kept in hospital corridors and darkened apartments. Every escalation widens the circle of harm, and it is civilians—unarmed, unconsulted—who stand closest to the blast radius.

350 Pilipinas joins the growing global call to halt the violence and prevent further escalation. For the sake of those who did not choose this conflict, whose homes and futures hang in the balance, we must insist: security cannot be built on the bodies of ordinary people. In times of war, it is always they who pay the highest price.

When bombs fall in the Middle East, oil prices rise in Manila.

The escalating strikes between the United States and Israel on Iran—and Iran’s retaliation—are not isolated eruptions. They are tremors along a fault line that has run through the fossil fuel age for more than a century.

Oil has been more than fuel; it has been a prize. Beneath the sands of the Gulf, it has shaped alliances and rivalries from Tehran to Washington to Tel Aviv. In this long entanglement of energy and power, sea lanes are patrolled, pipelines guarded, and security strategies quietly orbit the flow of crude—an undercurrent in regional conflict, even when the causes of war are more tangled than any single resource.

For the Philippines, this is not abstract geopolitics—it is the price at the pump. When global tensions push oil prices higher, the effect ripples through jeepney fares tomorrow morning, the cost of rice and fish at the market, and electricity bills at home. We import most of our fuel from a region perpetually on edge; when those supply chains shudder, our economy shudders with them. And when oil spikes, it is the poorest Filipinos who absorb the shock—families already stretched thin by inflation and by a climate crisis we did little to create.

This is the deadly bargain of fossil fuel dependence: we tether our livelihoods to distant conflicts over resources that are destabilizing the planet. We are told this is the cost of development. But what kind of development depends on war? What kind of prosperity rides on the back of a tanker navigating a militarized strait?

There is another path. We can feel it already in the sun that beats down on our rooftops, in the wind that crosses our islands, in the quiet hum of electric vehicles on city streets. Renewable energy is not merely a technical fix; it is a peace strategy. Solar panels do not require aircraft carriers. Wind turbines do not demand invasions. Locally produced power means locally controlled futures.

For a country like ours—vulnerable to typhoons, exposed to volatile oil markets, and burdened by inequality—the transition to renewables is not optional. It is the surest way to insulate ourselves from foreign conflicts and from the next inevitable oil shock. It is how we turn energy from a commodity dictated by empires into an essential public good.

The war machines of the fossil fuel age promise security but deliver only instability. A renewable future offers something quieter—and far more radical: resilience. Affordable, locally generated power. Cleaner air. Transport systems that combine electric vehicles powered by the sun and the wind with safe streets for walking and cycling, inclusive mobility for all, and public transit that responds to the needs of communities rather than fossil fuel markets. This is a future where energy and movement are tools of liberation, not instruments of conflict.

History will record this moment not only for its violence but for the choice it forced upon us. We can remain hostage to oil—its price spikes, its wars, its carbon—or we can step decisively toward a system that serves both people and the planet.

The bombs may be falling far away. But the answer is right here. End fossil fuel dependence. Build the renewable future now.