The images from Tehran continue to dominate the screens: vast plumes of black smoke rising from the Shahran oil depot and other fuel storage sites in the Iranian capital, ignited by strikes carried out jointly by American and Israeli forces as the conflict enters its second week.

Credible reporting from outlets including Sky News, BBC, CNN, France 24, The New York Times, AP and Reuters confirms that these attacks, which began targeting energy infrastructure in earnest over the weekend of 7-8 March 2026, have set alight depots holding millions of litres of refined products. The fires are not brief flares. They burn with the intensity that turns night into an orange haze, releasing hydrocarbons directly into the atmosphere in quantities that dwarf everyday calculations of domestic emissions.

A single large oil storage tank, when breached and ignited, can release tens of thousands of tonnes of petroleum products into combustion within hours. The combustion is unforgiving. Each tonne of fuel burned produces approximately 3.1 tonnes of CO2.

Eyewitness footage and satellite observations suggest multiple tanks at Shahran and nearby facilities were compromised, with fires spreading across infrastructure linked to the Revolutionary Guard. Conservative estimates, drawing on the known capacities of these depots (often in the range of hundreds of millions of litres) and the visible scale of the blazes, place the immediate CO2 release from one night's strikes in the order of 50,000 to 200,000 tonnes or more.

This figure excludes additional emissions from associated refining complexes damaged in the campaign, as well as the black carbon and other short-lived climate forcers carried aloft by the smoke.

The military operations themselves compound the damage. The United States has deployed carrier-based aviation from the Abraham Lincoln strike group in the Arabian Sea, launching waves of F/A-18 Super Hornets and F-35 Lightning IIs. Israeli squadrons of F-35 Adirs and F-15s have conducted long-range strikes, supported by aerial refuelling tankers.

Each fighter sortie consumes between 5,000 and 15,000 litres of jet fuel, each B-2 or refuelling mission several times that. Aviation kerosene emits approximately 2.53 kg of CO₂ per litre when burned. A single Super Hornet combat sortie therefore generates 15-40 tonnes of CO2... a B-2 mission more than 60 tonnes.

With hundreds of sorties flown since 28 February, when the joint operation began, the cumulative fuel burn from aircraft alone already exceeds 35,000 tonnes of CO2 in the conflict’s first week, according to preliminary assessments modelled on similar campaigns. Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from US warships add further emissions, as do the logistics flights ferrying munitions and personnel across the region. The Pentagon’s own historical data show that modern warfare is among the most carbon-intensive activities on earth. In fact, the US military alone accounts for a larger annual emissions footprint than many entire nations.

When these direct releases from targeted infrastructure and operational fuel burn are combined, the carbon cost of even a limited phase of the campaign becomes staggering. A single concentrated assault on Tehran's fuel depots, coupled with the sorties required to execute it, can equate to 100,000-300,000 tonnes of CO2 released in days.

In the United Kingdom, the switch from a conventional gas boiler to an air source heat pump typically saves between 1,400-1,900 kg of CO2 per household annually, according to figures from British Gas, Energy Saving Trust and other analyses. Pairing the heat pump with a domestic solar array pushes that saving comfortably above two tonnes per year for many homes.

The arithmetic is merciless. The emissions from one strike in Iran offset the annual decarbonisation gains of 50,000 to 150,000 British households. Extend this across the full scope of the ongoing campaign (with its repeated waves, retaliatory exchanges and broadening regional disruptions) and the equivalent quickly reaches hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, of household-years of effort erased.

This disparity raises a question that cannot be evaded by those of us who have invested time, money and conviction in home-level decarbonisation. Is it worth it?

When geopolitical decisions taken far beyond our borders unleash carbon pulses of this magnitude, when a handful of precision-guided munitions can incinerate the equivalent emissions savings of entire cities' worth of retrofitted homes, what rational basis remains for the individual householder to persist?

The British government urges millions of installations by the end of the decade, backed by grants and mandates, yet the global carbon ledger appears to be balanced not in planning documents or domestic energy bills, but in the targeting cells of distant command centres.

The conflict's wider repercussions compound the futility. Disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz, where roughly one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas transits, have already forced rerouting of tankers, idled production in Qatar and elsewhere, and driven up energy prices worldwide. I covered this in my video here.

Such shocks historically prompt short-term shifts toward coal in import-dependent markets like Europe and Asia, as gas supplies tighten which is a "nightmare scenario" for energy security and emissions alike, in the words of analysts tracking parallels to the Ukraine invasion.

The war has suspended significant fractions of Middle Eastern supply, pushing consumers toward dirtier alternatives and elevating overall global emissions even as physical production halts in some areas.

None of this diminishes the intrinsic value of the technologies themselves. Heat pumps remain vastly more efficient than gas boilers, solar generation displaces marginal fossil-fired power on the grid. The physics holds.

Yet the episode exposes a profound asymmetry in accountability. Domestic climate action in Britain is measured with precision (every kilowatt-hour tracked, every tonne saved audited) while the carbon consequences of state violence remain largely externalised, uncounted in national inventories and politically insulated from scrutiny.

Humanity’s capacity for self-destruction appears to outpace its capacity for self-restraint by orders of magnitude. The same species that can engineer a heat pump capable of extracting warmth from minus five degree air cannot, it seems, restrain itself from setting fire to oil depots on the other side of the planet.

For the UK homeowner who has spent thousands on a retrofit, who monitors their smart meter with satisfaction, the question lingers. Why persist when distant decisions can undo it all so effortlessly?

The answer, if there is one, lies not in abandoning the endeavour but in recognising its limits. Individual and national action, however diligent, cannot insulate against a world where conflict remains the ultimate emitter. The fires in Tehran are burning more than oil, when the blazes at Shahran alone can release in days the carbon equivalent saved annually by tens of thousands of British heat pump and solar homes, one is forced to ask whether all this domestic effort is simply futile in the face of such effortless, distant destruction. They are burning any illusion that our small, earnest efforts can outrun the larger folly of which we remain collectively capable.