This is Not Cool

Gang that Can’t Tweet Strait: No US Escort for Tankers thru Hormuz

Grifter Energy Secretary Chris Wright hurriedly deletes misleading tweet.

For days, the global oil market has swung wildly while traders from New York to London to Singapore have watched footage of drones and missiles flying across the Middle East. Tuesday’s selloff was sparked in part by a social-media post.

A plunge in oil prices intensified in the early afternoon after Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on X that “The U.S. Navy successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz to ensure oil remains flowing to global markets.” The prospect of a prolonged energy shock momentarily dimmed. Futures for oil, diesel and gasoline slid. Stocks jumped.

But the message vanished within minutes, leaving investors the world over struggling to see through the fog of war emanating from the Trump administration itself.

U.S. officials soon after said that the military isn’t currently escorting commercial ships through one of the world’s chokepoints for oil and natural gas.

“A video clip was deleted from Secretary Wright’s official X account after it was determined to be incorrectly captioned by Department of Energy staff,” an agency spokesperson said. The administration is reviewing other options to resume tanker traffic, the spokesperson added, “including the potential for our Navy to escort tankers.”

PBS Newshour on Powering Data Centers

Iran Mines Hormuz. US Navy Too Busy to Help – Sorry Suckers

Suck it up. Sacrifice. Freedom isn’t free. We’ve got brown people to bomb, and pedophilia to distract you from.
Yadda yada.

CNN:

Iran has begun laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important energy chokepoint that carries about one-fifth of all crude oil, according to two people familiar with US intelligence reporting on the issue.

The mining is not extensive yet, with a few dozen having been laid in recent days, the sources said. But Iran still retains upward of 80% to 90% of its small boats and mine layers, one of the sources said, so its forces could feasibly lay hundreds of mines in the waterway.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which now effectively controls the strait along with Iran’s traditional navy, has the capability to deploy a “gauntlet” of dispersed mine-laying craft, explosive-laden boats and shore-based missile batteries, CNN has reported.

President Donald Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday that “if Iran has put out any mines in the Hormuz Strait, and we have no reports of them doing so, we want them removed, IMMEDIATELY!”

Powering Data Centers Behind the Meter Might Not Be All That Easy

I’m struggling to get up a very steep learning curve on the subject of Data Centers, specifically the mammoth hyper scale AI based centers that are now being sited around the country, and consume energy and water on the scale of small cities.

To get oriented on the macro scale, I’m listening to Jigar Shah, who is a clean energy expert, investor, Founder of SunEdison, and President of Generate Capital, which invests in clean energy. Formerly director of the Department of Energy Loans Program Office, where he oversaw billions of dollars in clean energy investment.

I met Jigar some years ago at a conference in DC, and have always been more than impressed with a his grasp of the technology and economics of clean energy.

He is the expert’s expert in this area. I’ve taken the liberty of excerpting from two podcasts, one in which he is one of a panel of experts, Open Circuit, from Latitude Media, and the other, Energy Empire, which is his own vehicle.

The gist is – plans to power data centers with massive new natural gas turbines are half baked due to constraints on natural gas pipeline infrastructure – which takes years to build, if it can be permitted at all.

Below, Jigar’s guest is an expert on powering data centers – Tim Hade, Founder of Scale Microgrids, with deep experience in industrial Power systems
Hade says that many facilities that have been announced will simply not be built.

Solar Power Surging in Midwest

Michigan Public Radio:

A new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has found that despite Trump administration efforts to push coal and natural gas, renewables are still gaining market share at a “blistering” pace — especially in Michigan and the Midwest.

That’s particularly true when it comes to solar power. Michigan is served by part of the national grid called the Midwest Independent System Operator, or MISO. The report says that as recently as 2023, solar provided barely 1% of the system’s power.

But energy analyst and report coauthor Dennis Wamsted said that number had grown to 4.5% last year. He says that’s largely due to recent major improvements in battery storage technology that lets utilities capture and distribute renewable power as needed.

“It’s like a secret sauce,” Wamsted said. “You put them together and you have a competitor for any kind of coal or natural gas plant, because you now have dispatchable renewable power.”

Wamsted said solar’s growth trajectory in MISO mirrors that of Texas a decade ago. Texas is now the largest solar market in the U.S. Wamsted said MISO won’t necessarily see the same level of explosive growth, but “what it shows is that really fast growth is possible, and you can start to become a very significant part of the grid pretty quickly.”

Trump Admin Just Realized a Mid East War Might Impact Energy Prices

Wall Street Journal:

The national average price of regular unleaded gasoline was $3.48 a gallon as of Monday, up more than 15% since the start of the Iran conflict, according to OPIS. Automakers are racing to gauge the potential effect on sales, which have started slowly so far this year with buyers continuing to fret over record new-car prices and still-high interest rates.

Brian Irwin, leader of the automotive-consulting practice at Alvarez & Marsal, said gas prices at these levels aren’t historically high, but the rate of their rise is noteworthy.

“It is the sudden and rapid changes in price that impact consumer buying behaviors,” Irwin said.

For many automakers, it is a headache they didn’t need after spending a year winding back plans to roll out new electric vehicles.

Newly freed from federal mandates to churn out fuel-efficient vehicles, General Motors, Ford Motor and Jeep-Ram parent Stellantis last year slashed production of EVs while doubling down on big trucks and powerful engines. Detroit’s automakers alone announced more than $50 billion in combined write-downs over scrapped EV plans.

Now, Wall Street analysts and investors are worried whether Detroit’s automakers and their truck-heavy lineups can weather this storm. Shares of Ford are down 13% since the war started, while GM has lost 5%.

Paul Krugman:

Donald Trump talked a lot of nonsense about energy during the 2024 campaign. But in fairness, some of the underlying premises behind “drill, baby, drill” were accepted by many people. At the very least, it was widely presumed that U.S. self-sufficiency in oil would protect America from disruptions in oil supplies overseas.

Up the Temperature Stair Case: Super El Niño Could be a “Major Jump”

Just over 10 years ago I interviewed Kevin Trenberth in San Francisco, in the midst of what turned out to be a strong El Niño event, when global temperature rose smartly through 2015-16, in a pattern that Dr. Trenberth described as a “step function”, and he hypothesized that successive El Niño events, since they represent a major cycle in ocean absorption and release of heat to the atmosphere, were important markers of the global heating process.
We have enough of a record now to see that Dr Trenberth was broadly correct. The El Niño cycle seems to be an important one in which planetary temperature equilibrates to a somewhat higher level.
The cycles historically recur on a 2 to 7 year cycle, the last one was 2023-24, with 2024 being the warmest year in the record.

Washington Post:

This year’s El Niño is looking increasingly likely to have wide-reaching impacts across the planet.

It’s still in its developmental stages and it’s too early to confidently say just how strong it may become, but its tendencies have been similar to major events in the past — boosted by record-breaking westerly wind bursts in the Pacific, which blow warm water eastward.

No two El Niño events are exactly alike, but here are some of the possibilities.

Atlantic hurricane season impacts

Harsh winds in the middle and upper atmosphere during formidable El Niño events can create conditions that are less conducive to hurricane formation.

“Overall, this would be about as unfavorable an Atlantic look as you could get for the peak of hurricane season,” wrote meteorologist Andy Hazelton, who has been tracking this potential El Niño’s impact on the upcoming Atlantic hurricane season, which starts June 1.

Even if there are fewer storms, El Niño doesn’t tell you where hurricanes may go. It only takes one landfall — as demonstrated by Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992 — for it to be a memorable season.

The strongest El Niño events almost always cause a record warm year. That’s because heat comes out of the ocean during El Niño, overspreads the tropics in the Pacific, then gets redistributed across the planet.

“The El Nino cometh,” wrote climate scientist Zeke Hausfather.

“Sky is the Limit” for Oil Prices

“Above what anyone expected”.
“A fifth of the world’s energy supply stuck.”

The Hill:

President Trump is pushing oil tanker crews to “show some guts” and sail through the Strait of Hormuz.

“These ships should go through the Strait of Hormuz and show some guts, there’s nothing to be afraid of. … They have no Navy, we sunk all their ships,” Trump said, according to Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade, who recounted the president’s remarks during an interview.

“Farmers and small businesses will see dramatically higher costs from diesel.”

Fox43 – Harrisburg, PA:

As fighting in the Middle East enters its second week, the American Farm Bureau is sounding the alarm on fertilizer prices.

On Monday, the American Farm Bureau held a press conference to discuss the volatility of the fertilizer market since the start of the Iran War. According to the bureau, the Middle East is a key export hub for nitrogen fertilizer, accounting for nearly half of the world’s urea exports and 30% of ammonia exports.

Earth Warming Accelerating as Aerosols Reduced

Bloomberg:

Planetary warming has significantly accelerated over the past 10 years, with temperatures rising at a higher rate since 2015 than in any previous decade on record, a new study showed.

The Earth warmed around 0.35 degrees Celsius in the decade to 2025, compared to just under 0.2C per decade on average between 1970 and 2015, according to a paper published on Friday in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters. This is the first statistically significant evidence of an acceleration of global warming, the authors said.

The past three years have been the hottest on record, compared to the average before the Industrial Revolution. In 2024, warming went past 1.5C, the lower limit set by the Paris Agreement. That target refers to temperature increases over 20 years, but breaching it for one year shows efforts to slow down climate change have been insufficient, the scientists who wrote the new paper said.

Study: Agriculture, Climate Change Pounding Bird Populations

No, it ain’t wind turbines.

Science:

Using data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey, the authors found that about half of the 261 species analyzed showed significant declines from 1987 to 2021, and a quarter showed accelerating declines. Hotspots of accelerating abundance decline were located in regions with high-intensity agriculture (high cropland area, fertilizer use, or pesticide use)

The first notable finding is that warm and warming regions coincide with areas of abundance decline (ΔN, Fig. 3, A and C, and figs. S7 and S8). This pattern is consistent with the evidence that bird populations are shifting their distributions northward as they track cooler conditions (31). Increases in temperatures have been shown to increase the risk of bird species’ extinction as a result of a lack of species adaptability to rapidly changing climatic conditions (32), and consistent temperature-related responses have been documented across both Europe and North America (33). Our results further support this by showing that areas experiencing greater warming (Fig. 3C) also exhibit stronger abundance declines, suggesting that rising temperatures may be a driver of recent bird population losses.