AI Library
The Age of Autonomous Scientific Discovery
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
AI Scientists and Self-Driving Labs
This book follows how AI scientists and self-driving labs are changing the way science generates and verifies claims. It covers literature-based discovery, natural-language protocols translated into robot commands, multi-agent research systems, closed-loop laboratories, materials search, the verification gap, chains of evidence, research harnesses, journal ethics, and legal responsibility.
AI Library
A New Era of Life Sciences Opened by Artificial Intelligence
Structural Proteomics, Genomic Foundation Models, Autonomous Laboratories, and Global Governance
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
This book is a research volume compiled with artificial intelligence. A human selected the materials and structured the work, while AI models drafted the sentences and cross-checked the facts.
AI Library
The Double Structure of Digital Sovereignty
Europe’s Departure from Palantir and the Chains of American Big Tech
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
This is a record of 2026, when European intelligence agencies and defense ministries began removing analytics tools from America’s Palantir. It covers the replacement decisions made by France’s General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI), Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), and the Netherlands Ministry of Defense; the incident in which US export controls severed an ally’s ac…
New English Edition
Artificial Intelligence in Horticulture
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Across five chapters and ten sections, this book examines computer vision for crop diagnosis, harvesting robots and autonomous field systems, smart greenhouses and digital twins, precision irrigation and supply-chain quality control, high-throughput phenotyping, and predictive breeding.
New English Edition
Artificial Intelligence in Food Crop Agriculture
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Across six chapters and eighteen sections, the book examines digital agricultural infrastructure, remote sensing, crop diagnosis, yield forecasting, precision irrigation, genomics, molecular breeding, agricultural robotics, climate-smart agriculture, and global food security.
New English Edition
The Future of Forestry and Agroforestry
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Driven by Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation
Across five chapters and fifteen sections, the book follows satellites, drones, LiDAR, digital twins, forest-specific language models, wildfire and pest forecasting, forestry robotics, agroforestry, timber traceability, and forest carbon markets.
New English Edition
Smart Livestock Farming: AI Enters the Barn
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Sensors listen, cameras watch, and artificial intelligence helps farmers decide.
Across five chapters and fifteen sections, the book follows precision livestock farming from animal health and reproduction to robotic milking, virtual fencing, digital twins, methane reduction, welfare, and data ownership.
Table of Contents
Han Dong-hoon, Busan Buk-gu Gap: A Record of the 100 Days Before and After the Election (Mar. 26-Jul. 3, 2026)
Kim Kyung-jin
Table of Contents and 13 sections
From March 26 to July 3, 2026, this record follows the spring after expulsion, the Busan Buk-gu Gap by-election, victory as an independent, and the first bill submitted in the National Assembly.
Table of Contents
Artificial Intelligence and Medicine
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
AI in clinical care, hospitals, education, and research
AI in medical imaging, risk prediction, treatment planning, hospital operations, education, and research, with patient safety, privacy, and accountability.
[AI Library] Chapter 32: The Decarbonization Paradox
The 2026 U.S.-Iran War and the Global Energy Crisis
Chapter 32: The Decarbonization Paradox
Kim Kyung-jin
The 2026 U.S.-Iran War and the Global Energy Crisis
Before writing Chapter 32, I will search for the latest relevant materials. The research is sufficient. Now I will write Chapter 32.
Chapter 32: The Decarbonization Paradox
32.1 Why a Single Oil Disruption Shakes the Age of Renewable Energy
In March 2026, on a day when Brent crude surpassed $126 a barrel, a strange scene unfolded in Berlin. In front of the German parliament, climate activists held a rally calling for the expansion of renewable energy, while just blocks away at the Ministry of Economy building, a minister held an emergency press conference announcing that the government would review restarting already-closed coal-fired power plants. Two scenes, on the same day, in the same city, close enough that people could have crossed paths, became the most honest self-portrait of Germany's 2026 decarbonization policy.
Over the past twenty years, Germany has conducted the world's boldest decarbonization experiment under the banner of Energiewende. It poured over 570 billion euros into solar and wind power, raising renewable energy's share of total electricity generation to more than half. Politicians declared that a new era of energy independence, liberated from oil and natural gas, had begun. But in spring 2026, with the Strait of Hormuz blocked, the shell of that declaration was stripped away.
The problem stems from a single, deceptively simple number. According to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), electricity currently accounts for roughly 20 percent of global final energy consumption. The remaining 80 percent is not electricity. Natural gas burned directly in industrial boilers, diesel moving trucks and ships, jet fuel lifting aircraft, methane turning fertilizer plants. No matter how many solar panels are laid out or wind turbines erected, this 80 percent of the world that electricity cannot reach still cannot function for a single day without the physical combustion of fossil fuels. The advance in renewable energy that climate activists hail and cite is, strictly speaking, a transformation occurring within one-fifth of total energy consumption.
To understand why the 20-to-80 ratio does not shift easily, one must consider the physical properties of electricity as an energy form. Electricity is difficult to store. It cannot be placed in tanks and shipped anywhere in the world like liquid fossil fuels. Despite advances in battery technology, the energy density of lithium-ion batteries remains at one-fortieth to one-fiftieth that of gasoline. Against this wall of physics, the electrification of large container ships and large aircraft is not a feasible option at the technology level of 2026. Shipping, which moves 80 percent of global trade, still burns bunker C fuel, and commercial aviation, which sends hundreds of millions of people skyward each day, cannot rise a single step without jet fuel.
A more fundamental vulnerability lies in the structural dependency created by the intermittency of renewable energy. When the wind stops and clouds cover the sky, renewable energy cannot generate power. To fill this gap, modern grids must always maintain backup power that can be switched on and off instantly. Many European countries closed coal plants due to high carbon emissions and ideologically shut down nuclear plants as well, choosing instead to plug the gap with natural gas. As a result, the grid appeared focused on solar and wind and environmentally friendly, but its final safety net was liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipped in from Qatar or the United States.
Qatar is responsible for roughly one-quarter of global LNG exports. The Ras Laffan complex is the world's largest single LNG production facility, and most of its cargo passes through the Strait of Hormuz bound for Europe and Asia. When the 2026 Iran war blocked the strait and the risk to Ras Laffan's operations became real, Europe's spot natural gas prices spiked more than 30 percent within days. This is why factories in Germany and France, which had positioned themselves as leaders of the energy transition, had to consider shutdowns. Even as solar panels and wind turbines covered rooftops and coasts, it was Persian Gulf natural gas that sustained the grid when the wind died at night.
Digging into the roots of this paradox, one encounters the fact that energy policy was designed in the language of politics, not physics. Net-zero by 2050, 45 percent renewable energy by 2030. These figures are both the minimum demands set forth by climate science and simultaneously political numbers born on the stage of election promises and international treaties. No prime minister told their constituents: "The energy transition will take decades, and during that process electricity prices will rise and industrial competitiveness may temporarily decline." Instead, politicians illuminated only the dramatic growth curve of renewable energy while quietly burying the reality that electricity accounts for 20 percent of total energy consumption.
Professor Vaclav Smil has long warned of this reality. Looking at the history of energy transitions, it has always taken fifty to one hundred years for dominant energy sources to be replaced, from wood to coal and from coal to oil. Nor did new energy push out existing energy. Humanity burns far more coal today while using oil than it did at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Energy is not replaced but added. Yet the declaration to reduce fossil fuels to several percentage points of total energy supply by 2050 means overturning the entire energy infrastructure at a speed history has never shown.
According to 2026 IEA analysis, on the current trajectory, fossil fuels' share of global energy supply is projected to fall from 80 percent to 73 percent by 2030. Seven percentage points. A change produced by two decades of effort and tens of trillions of dollars in investment. Within those seven percentage points, when the Strait of Hormuz is blocked, the global economy still suffers severe shock. Even in a world where renewable energy supplies 37 percent of the grid, when a single fossil fuel supply chain falters, the entire remaining system triggers a chain reaction. This is why renewable energy growth does not fundamentally eliminate fossil fuels' vulnerability. Rather, by prematurely suppressing investment in fossil fuel infrastructure, spare capacity within supply chains has shrunk, creating a paradox where even small shocks cause steeper price swings.
In spring 2026, even after Brent crude surpassed $126 a barrel, renewable energy generators worldwide continued running. Wind turbines in the North Sea off Denmark turned in the wind that day, and California's solar farms converted afternoon sunlight into electricity. Yet a chemical factory in Tokyo stopped its lines for lack of naphtha, a hydrocarbon from oil refining and raw material for plastics and synthetic fibers. A fertilizer plant in Bangkok halted shipments as ammonia feedstock ran out. An airline in Mumbai cut routes as jet fuel prices doubled. This is the reality of why the age of renewable energy shakes at one move of oil. Changing the way electricity is produced and overturning the entire material foundation that modern civilization rests upon are completely different orders of task.
32.2 Where Oil Is Still Necessary
On the morning of March 5, 2026, a research team at a securities firm in Yeouido, Seoul distributed an urgent report. Its title was "The Strait of Hormuz Blockade and the Chain Crisis of the Petrochemical Industry." The report's opening sentence read: "Half of the sulfuric acid needed to produce one lithium-ion battery for a modern electric vehicle passes through the Strait of Hormuz." This is why Lotte Chemical and LG Chem's stock prices plummeted in tandem that day.
To understand why this sentence matters, one must follow the material world of manufacturing a single electric vehicle. The key battery materials for electric vehicles, cobalt and nickel, are mined mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia. Refining these ores into pure metals for batteries requires large quantities of sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid is made by burning sulfur, more than half of which is produced as a byproduct in the crude oil and gas refining processes of Middle Eastern oil states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, then shipped through the Strait of Hormuz to Asia. If the strait is blocked, sulfur supply is cut, sulfur supply cut means sulfuric acid prices rise, sulfuric acid prices rise means battery mineral refining costs increase, and ultimately electric vehicle prices go up. The electric vehicle, a symbol of decarbonization, is inextricably linked to fossil fuel supply chains that are regarded as the opposite of decarbonization.
The four pillars of modern civilization identified by Professor Vaclav Smil, namely ammonia, plastic, steel, and cement, each in its own way prove this paradox.
First, ammonia. More than half the food consumed by eight billion people on Earth is produced thanks to nitrogen fertilizer. Ammonia, the raw material of nitrogen fertilizer, is made by the Haber-Bosch process, which combines nitrogen and hydrogen from air under high temperature and pressure, with nearly all the hydrogen extracted from natural gas. A substantial portion of global ammonia production comes from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Oman. When these countries' natural gas is blocked, fertilizer prices rise, when fertilizer prices rise farmers reduce usage, and when usage drops yields fall. Global fertilizer prices jumped more than 40 percent following the Hormuz blockade in spring 2026 because of this chain.
Plastic is more direct. The foundation of all plastic products we use daily is naphtha and ethylene. These substances come from crude oil refining. Ethylene is the starting point for the entire petrochemical industry and the foundation of virtually all plastic products, from plastic bags to PET bottles, packaging, pharmaceuticals, auto parts, and electronics housings. Ethylene is produced through the "cracking" process, which decomposes naphtha at high temperature, and this process likewise consumes enormous energy, that is, more fossil fuels. In a world without oil, we cannot produce replacement materials for current plastics at the same scale with present technology.
The reality of steel and cement is harsher. To make pure molten iron from iron ore, one must burn coke, a solid carbon mass made from processing coking coal, in a blast furnace. The heat from this process exceeds fifteen hundred degrees Celsius. While it is technically possible to maintain this temperature with electricity, replacing all of the world's annual steel production of 1.9 billion tons with electricity at current technology and cost levels is not a practical option. Cement is the same. Cement kilns that decompose limestone to produce calcium oxide must reach up to fourteen hundred fifty degrees Celsius, and the primary fuels producing this heat are coal and petroleum coke. Because cement production itself releases carbon dioxide during the thermal decomposition of raw materials, replacing the fuel with electricity still makes complete elimination of carbon emissions impossible.
Beyond these four, the number of things that cannot be made without oil is difficult to count.
Wind turbine blades are made from epoxy resin and polyester resin, petrochemical products based on ethylene extracted from naphtha. EVA film, ethylene-vinyl acetate, used as the key encapsulation material in solar panels, is also a product of petrochemical processes. The synthetic rubber in electric vehicle tires comes from oil, and the asphalt that paves the roads those tires travel uses bitumen, the residue from crude oil refining, as its primary raw material. Hospital disposable syringes, IV tubes, and surgical gloves are plastic, and those plastic molecules came from crude oil. Even inside the clean rooms where smartphones and semiconductor chips are made, many cleansers and specialty chemicals are products of petrochemical processes.
In an article for IEEE Spectrum, Professor Smil calculated the materials needed to manufacture a single five-megawatt wind turbine. One hundred fifty tons of steel in the foundation concrete, two hundred fifty tons of steel in the nacelle and hub, five hundred tons of steel in the tower. To make this steel requires a blast furnace burning coke. The composite materials needed to make three blades over sixty meters long contain roughly one hundred seventy gigajoules per ton of energy equivalent in crude oil. To build sufficient wind power capacity worldwide by 2030, the equivalent of ninety million tons of crude oil's energy must go into manufacturing those installations. This is why Smil calls the wind turbine a "pure embodiment of fossil fuels."
In spring 2026, as the Strait of Hormuz blockade extended into its second and third weeks, naphtha shortages became a tangible reality. At Korea's petrochemical complexes, the warning lights came on for ethylene cracker feedstock procurement. As Korean petrochemical companies found it difficult to meet domestic demand, the government had to urgently review releasing stockpiled naphtha. Helium, essential for semiconductor manufacturing, also faced supply disruptions. Helium is a byproduct from natural gas extraction, and Qatar is the world's third-largest helium exporter. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix attempted to substitute helium supplies with American sources, but U.S. helium volumes were already insufficient to meet global semiconductor factory demand.
All these facts point to a single conclusion. Oil is, before all else, a fuel we burn away, but a material that constitutes modern civilization. Oil as fuel can potentially be replaced by electricity. But oil as the raw material for ammonia, plastic, steel, cement, asphalt, synthetic rubber, and lubricants has no replacement substance at the same scale at current technology levels. No matter how quickly the energy transition toward decarbonization advances, unless we sever this material dependency, disruptions in the oil supply chain will always strike at the arteries of civilization. While it is free to declare an age of renewable energy, until that declaration becomes reality we still rest a substantial part of our lives on one waterway out of twenty-one miles.
32.3 The Speed of Energy Transition and the Gap with Reality
In March 2026, two types of documents circulated simultaneously in the corridors of the European Parliament in Brussels. One was a "Green Deal Implementation Progress Report" prepared by the commissioner in charge of climate policy, and the other was an internal memo from a closed meeting hastily convened by energy ministers. The former reported smooth progress toward the 2030 renewable energy goal. The latter had one sentence marked in bold: "If the current situation persists for more than four weeks, natural gas supplies to parts of industrial regions in Germany and Italy could enter crisis stage before June."
The gap between the speed of energy transition and reality lies in just such a difference of one document. The space between the speed of declaration and the speed of physical reality,this gap appears each time crisis strikes.
The reality of grid infrastructure most clearly shows why this gap exists. According to IEA analysis, to achieve carbon neutrality goals, more than double the current transmission infrastructure must be built by 2030. This is work of laying cables, building substations, and stabilizing the grid. Yet the actual pace of this work lags far behind the pace of solar and wind installation. Analysis suggests that 1,650 gigawatts of renewable energy installations have been completed worldwide but cannot operate due to lack of transmission lines and sit waiting. This exceeds five times Germany's entire installed generation capacity. The generators exist but the lines do not.
In Europe, building a single new high-voltage transmission line takes an average of ten to fifteen years. Environmental impact assessments, community approval, administrative permits, legal challenges, construction, completion. This chain does not accelerate even with sufficient funding. Local residents do not want high-voltage transmission towers passing in front of their homes. This is the NIMBY, Not in My Back Yard, phenomenon, and it appears more strongly the more advanced a democracy is. Even in countries with high public support for renewable energy, local opposition to transmission tower construction is strong. Even the strongest renewable energy advocates oppose high-voltage transmission towers crossing their own backyards.
A more fundamental gap beyond grid expansion lies in energy storage technology. Large-scale energy storage is essential to overcome the intermittency of solar and wind. It is true that battery storage system costs are falling rapidly, but building battery infrastructure on a scale sufficient to store several days' worth of national electricity demand is nearly impossible at 2026 technology and cost levels. This is why Germany, despite raising renewable energy's share of generation above 50 percent, must still operate coal and gas plants when the dark, windless winter condition of "Dunkelflaute" arrives.
Another gap created by energy transition is the replacement of the target of geopolitical dependency. In the fossil fuel era, threats to energy security were Middle Eastern oil producers and Russia. In the renewable energy era, the threat is the supply chain of critical minerals. China currently controls sixty to ninety percent of global supply of lithium, cobalt, and graphite, used in electric vehicle batteries, and rare earth elements, the raw material for permanent magnets essential in wind turbines and electric motors, their mining and processing. Accelerating decarbonization directly leads to deepening dependence on China. The energy transition undertaken to escape Persian Gulf oil creates geopolitical dependency on another single supplier.
The 2026 crisis became a stage that proved the real-world meaning of this gap. Looking at the response of the Global South,developing countries in Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America,it becomes even clearer. For these countries, the top priority of energy policy is not carbon reduction but escaping energy poverty. Where hundreds of millions still lack sufficient electricity, demands that developing countries apply the carbon neutrality schedule set by advanced countries wholesale ignore reality. For developing countries, the fastest and cheapest means of supplying energy is still coal or natural gas. To build renewable energy infrastructure, capital procurement costs reach double those of advanced countries, and obtaining permits and skilled personnel is far more difficult. Under these conditions, China and India continued building new coal-fired power plants in 2026. Between the language of climate goals and the physics of energy reality, what they chose was electricity arriving.
The oil shock of the 1970s, the Russia-triggered energy crisis of 2022, and the 2026 Hormuz crisis all repeat the same lesson: excessive dependence on a particular energy source makes the entire economy vulnerable in the face of external shocks. Yet the remedy this lesson demands is not completed by simply increasing renewable energy quickly. Decarbonization of industrial processes supporting the modern economy, breakthrough in energy storage technology, massive grid expansion, diversification of critical mineral supply chains, and securing base load power inevitably necessary during the net-zero transition. All these tasks must proceed simultaneously.
Climate science correctly identifies the necessity of energy transition. But the pace of energy transition is determined not by scientists' reports but by actual transformer delivery times, transmission tower construction permitting periods, and the production cost of green hydrogen needed to electrify blast furnaces and fertilizer plants. This gap between the dates politicians declare and the dates when physical infrastructure is built cannot be filled with slogans.
The bitterest lesson left by the 2026 crisis is this: by hastening renewable energy transition while simultaneously hostile to investment in fossil fuel supply chains, the world met crisis from the middle of the most precarious transition period, neither old system nor new. Having removed coal and nuclear power as stable base load, the world placed its economy atop an unstable triangle of solar, wind, and gas, and then blocked that gas's final refuge.
The direction of energy transition is right. The speed and path must be set within the bounds that reality allows. The world of 2026 paid for ignoring that boundary and prioritizing ideals alone. It paid in three forms: $126-a-barrel oil, empty Manila streets, shuttered German factories. The oil age's final warning was not a call to eliminate oil, but to understand the weight of everything we must prepare to eliminate it.
Kim Gyeong-jin, Attorney and AI Specialist
Expert in AI Law and Policy · Former Member of the National Assembly · Author of Multiple Works
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Kim Kyung-jin
Attorney · Former Member of the National Assembly · AI Policy Researcher
© 2026 Kim Kyung-jin. All rights reserved.