That the war in Iran is a sad fiasco becomes more apparent each day: our president declared “total victory” in the first few hours but somehow our adversaries didn’t get the message, and now there are hundreds of dead schoolgirls and skyrocketing oil prices. An 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei is dead, replaced by a 56-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei, who doubtless hates us for killing his father, his wife and his children. The White House has gone from dismissing the idea that we might need help from others to begging the nations we’ve been stinging with tariffs to come to our aid. And so on — what a pathetic story all around.

But all cataclysmic world events help us see the world more clearly, and in this case one of the things that’s come into focus is the future of energy. Either we remain dependent on an energy source — oil and gas — that’s only available in a few places, or we seize the chance to switch to power from the wind and sun, available everywhere and at a reasonable price.

It’s true that sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the earth, but none of those miles are through the Strait of Hormuz; its price is the same today as it was yesterday and will be next week. Even our species, so good at fighting wars, will have a hard time figuring out how to fight one over sunshine. The solar panel is the new peace symbol — and also the new sign of good economic thinking.

Oh, and there’s a considerable bonus attached to the fact that it also doesn’t destroy the earth’s climate.

Moving to clean energy has never been easier. Sometime earlier this decade we crossed some invisible line where generating power from the sun and wind became cheaper than burning coal and gas and oil; with the steady steep decline in the price of batteries, even nightfall doesn’t mean the sun is setting. (In California, batteries that spent the afternoon soaking up excess sunshine are now often the main source of supply to the nighttime grid).

We’re seeing incredible success stories across the globe. In Pakistan we’ve watched as people, working off YouTube videos, have put up enough solar panels to duplicate half the country’s national electric grid; the country, which once was heavily dependent on Qatari liquified natural gas, has started turning away cargoes of the stuff. Africa leads the world now in solar installations, benefiting from the cheap Chinese panels now so easy to find in most of the world.

Paradoxically, it’s harder to find traction for the clean energy revolution in some of the richer parts of the world.

In Vermont, with its proud green heritage, we’ve had a de facto moratorium on new wind development in the state for more than a decade, and we’ve turned down many solar farms pretty much solely on aesthetic grounds: we don’t want to look at them. Even with that opposition, though, we’re seeing good things happen. Middlebury has been blessed by the college’s courage in building new solar fields, and students are hoping that will continue into the future. And those of us at Third Act, which organizes elders across the country for action on climate and democracy, are very hopeful that the legislature will soon join Utah and Virginia in permitting “plug-in solar” for our homes and passing laws that make permitting for rooftop panels much easier.

Most people, the polls show, are deeply upset by the war in Iran, as they were by our attack on Venezuela. That these countries hold the second- and third-largest reserves of crude oil in the world is almost certainly not a coincidence: our president has been talking about “energy dominance” since the moment he took office, and he has many favors to return to the oil interests that helped him get elected. Just last week he proposed taking a billion dollars of our tax money to buy out offshore wind leases along the Atlantic Seaboard and insure we stop building this cheap, clean, reliable energy.

Most of us — at the gas pump, when the propane bill comes — are hostage to this kind of bad decision-making. Addison County sends tens of millions of dollars to Texas or Saudi Arabia every year for our energy, money that could stay close to home building our own economies and our own self-reliance.

But each of us — in our decisions as voters, as consumers, and as citizens of our towns and our state — get to have a say too. Hopefully Americans, come the midterm elections, will decide that Washington needs to change.

In the meantime, we can help our towns and Montpelier break out of their ruts and join the new energy world. The climate of our world, and the peace of our world, both depend on it.

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Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, the founder of 350.org and Third Act, and the author most recently of “Here Comes the Sun.”