The International Energy Agency told the world on Friday to work from home, avoid air travel, and lower highway speed limits to cope with the energy crisis created by the war on Iran. This is the same agency that two weeks ago coordinated the largest emergency oil release in history to stabilize markets. 400 million barrels clearly haven’t. So now the IEA is asking people to commute less.

The recommendations landed the same day QatarEnergy’s CEO confirmed that Iranian missile strikes had knocked out 17% of the country’s LNG export capacity for three to five years, confessing that he never expected Qatar would suffer such an attack “from a brotherly Muslim country in the month of Ramadan.”. Qatar accounts for nearly 20% of the global LNG supply. A 17% cut to that capacity for half a decade is a structural hole in the global energy market.

The fallout extends well beyond LNG. Liquefied petroleum gas, used for heating homes across South Asia, will fall 13%. Helium, critical for semiconductor manufacturing in South Korea, will drop 14%. And none of these will come back immediately when the war stops; physical repairs will take years.

This is all happening because the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil used to transit every day, remains closed. Since late February, Iran has attacked at least 21 merchant ships. The IRGC warned that any vessel linked to the U.S., Israel, or their allies would be treated as a legitimate target. Major shipping firms naturally suspended transit. The IRGC told the world to “expect oil at $200 per barrel.”

The IEA’s 400 million isn’t a lot if you do the math. Global oil consumption runs about 105 million barrels per day. The release covers less than four days of world demand. Compared to the 20 million barrels per day that normally flow through Hormuz, it equals about 20 days of typical traffic. And it takes roughly two weeks from a presidential release order for oil to actually reach U.S. markets through pipelines and refining capacity. This is a band-aid on an arterial bleed, and the IEA knows it.

So the agency is now turning to demand. The ten-point plan released Friday asks governments to encourage remote work, reduce highway speed limits by at least 10 kilometers per hour, promote car sharing, and urge citizens to avoid flying when alternatives exist. It recommends switching from LPG to electric cooktops where possible and asks industrial users to find alternative feedstocks. The Philippines has already shifted government employees to a four-day work week to save fuel. Pakistan has cancelled public events and restricted fuel consumption. 

The phrase “until normal flows resume” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Nobody knows when that’ll be. Israel says it’s helping the U.S. reopen the strait. Trump says a coalition is coming. But no warships from any allied nation have committed to escort duty and the IRGC is still firing on commercial vessels. The result? Goldman Sachs raised its U.S. recession odds to 25%. 

The IEA is not wrong that reducing demand helps at the margins. But the gap between “work from home three days a week” and “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market” tells you everything about where things stand. The supply side is broken. The strategic reserves are a stopgap measured in weeks, not months. The physical infrastructure that makes Qatar the world’s second-largest LNG exporter just lost 17% of its capacity for the rest of the decade. And the international body responsible for coordinating the global energy response is asking you to take the bus.