Chuck Baclagon

Before markets tick upward and analysts begin their grim arithmetic, there are funerals. Parents in Iran scanning the sky. Children in Israel ushered into shelters. Families across the region quietly 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 only a strategic map but the intimate geography of someone’s life.

War is usually explained in the language of deterrence and doctrine. Yet its true ledger is kept elsewhere: in hospital corridors, in darkened apartments, in the long wait for news that may never come. Every escalation widens the circle of harm, and it is civilians—unarmed and unconsulted—who stand closest to the blast radius.

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

Yet the consequences of this violence do not stop at the borders of the Middle East. When bombs fall there, oil prices rise in Manila.

The strikes and retaliations unfolding between the United States, Israel, and Iran 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 long been more than fuel; it has been a prize. Beneath the sands of the Gulf, it has shaped alliances and rivalries stretching from Tehran to Washington to Tel Aviv. In this entanglement of energy and power, sea lanes are patrolled, pipelines guarded, and security strategies quietly orbit the flow of crude.

For the Philippines, this is not abstract geopolitics—it is the price at the pump. When global tensions push oil prices higher, the effects ripple quickly through everyday life: jeepney fares the next morning, the cost of rice and fish in the market, the electricity bill waiting at home. The country imports most of its fuel from a region perpetually on edge. When those supply chains shudder, the economy shudders with them. And when prices spike, it is the poorest Filipinos who absorb the shock—families already stretched thin by inflation and by a climate crisis they did little to create.

This is the deeper danger of fossil fuel dependence. Our livelihoods remain tethered to distant conflicts over resources that are destabilizing the planet itself. We are told this is the price 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. It is visible in the sun that falls on our rooftops, the wind that crosses our islands, and the growing presence of electric vehicles on city streets. Renewable energy is not only a technical solution—it is also a strategy for peace. Solar panels do not require aircraft carriers. Wind turbines do not demand invasions. Power generated locally allows communities to shape their own futures.

For a country like the Philippines—vulnerable to typhoons, exposed to volatile oil markets, and burdened by deep inequality—the transition to renewable energy is not optional. It is one of the clearest ways to shield ourselves from distant conflicts and the next inevitable oil shock. It is how energy can shift from a commodity controlled by powerful interests into a public good that serves communities.

The fossil fuel age promised security but has delivered instability. A renewable future offers something quieter and far more durable: resilience. Affordable power produced close to home. Cleaner air. Transport systems that combine electric vehicles powered by sun and wind with safe streets for walking and cycling, inclusive mobility, and public transit designed around people rather than oil markets.

History may remember this moment for its violence. But it will also remember the choice it placed before us. We can remain hostage to oil—its price spikes, its wars, its carbon—or we can move decisively toward an energy system that serves both people and the planet.

The bombs may be falling far away. But the answer begins here: end fossil fuel dependence and build the renewable future now.