This is Not Cool

The Grift and Graft are beyond staggering.

Wall Street Journal:

Americans have cumulatively spent about $45 billion more on gasoline and diesel during the war with Iran than they did during the same period a year ago, according to an analysis of OPIS pricing data and federal demand figures. The surging costs are eating an outsize share of low- and middle-income consumers’ paychecks, darkening their outlook relative to the well-off.

At the same time, investors in oil-and-gas companies are watching their portfolios swell. Big energy returns bolstered a blockbuster corporate-earnings season and added momentum to the artificial-intelligence-led rally that has pushed the stock market to records. While higher inflation and borrowing costs have added stress on less-affluent Americans, many economists believe high earners will continue powering the U.S. ahead.

Continue reading “War for Oil Siphoning from Middle Class to Rich”

I am still on travel but monitoring the big picture of the current poly-crisis.
Above, Oil expert Jeff Currie has been one making some of the most dire warnings. Short 2 minutes above, longer discussion below.
Addresses the disconnect between the dire threat to physical markets and the relatively muted response of oil futures. If people like Currie are right, there is a very sharp cliff coming.

The current energy crisis has already made a deep enough impression on world political and business leaders to lock in a rapid transition to renewable energy, but the potential exists for even much more traumatic impacts if the Hormuz closure is extended.
The first of June is the date that keeps coming up, and the key phrase is “operational stress”.

CipherBrief:

A new JP Morgan flash note, aptly titled “The Illusion of Plenty,” lays out the arithmetic in blunt terms. At the start of 2026, the world held approximately 8.4 billion barrels of oil and oil products — a number that sounds reassuring until you examine what’s actually usable. According to JP Morgan’s analysis, only around 800 million barrels of that stockpile can be drawn without pushing the physical system into what they call “operational stress.” Roughly 35 percent of that accessible buffer had already been consumed by late April.

The distinction between oil-on-paper and oil-you-can-actually-use matters enormously. Much of the global stockpile is locked up in pipeline fill, minimum tank levels, refinery feedstock requirements, and other operational necessities. Draw below those floors and you don’t just run short — you damage the infrastructure itself. Pipelines lose flexibility, terminals seize up, and refineries lose the feedstock they need to function.

Goldman Sachs reinforces the urgency: global oil inventories are draining at a record pace of 11 to 12 million barrels per day, driven by the loss of roughly 14.5 million barrels per day of Middle Eastcrude production. The IEA has called this the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. That’s not hyperbole — it’s the assessment of the institution responsible for coordinating emergency energy responses among developed nations.

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Oil Off a Cliff in June, the Rise of China”

Government out to get us. Check.
Evil Scientists working to depopulate the Planet. Check.
Bill Gate’s looking for new ways to inject you with poisonous “vaccines”. Check.
Climate change? What climate change?
Check. Check. and Check.

Grist:

“Tell you what,” Drew Maciel told his Instagram followers in April, “I’m sick of finding dead moose.” He zoomed in on a dead bull moose lying prone on the ground, running the camera over clusters of ticks nestled within every crevice of the corpse.

Maciel is a shed hunter, meaning he collects antlers that have been naturally “shed” by wildlife. But a winter tick feeding frenzy in Maine, driven by rising temperatures, means that this year he kept finding dead animals. Up to 90 percent of the moose calves tracked by scientists in recent years have been bled to death by ticks — an ongoing crisis in a state that prizes these largest of all deer species.

Continue reading “This Conspiracy Theory Ticks all the Boxes”

Mexico’s President Claudia Scheinbaum has announced a series of reforms that will decrease Mexican reliance on US natural gas, not just for power, but presumably as an industrial feedstock.
At the same time, she announced an acceleration in renewable energy, hastening an energy transition.

Significant, because the Trump administration, lead by Energy Secretary, shameless grifter and, of course, Fracking millionaire Chris Wright, has had big plans for the developing world, hoping to lock in huge investments and dependent on US gas.
Having shown the world that a Trumpian United States is no longer a reliable ally or partner, Mexico is looking after itself.
Scheinbaum, who has a background as a climate scientist, obviously knows the stakes here, and Mexico’s renewable resources are vast.

Mexico News Daily:

Alongside natural gas, Sheinbaum said her government would continue expanding renewable energy capacity, including solar, wind and geothermal, while maintaining oil and fertilizer production.

The natural gas challenge is significant. As previously reported by Mexico News Daily, virtually all of Mexico’s gas imports arrive via pipeline from the United States, creating a dependence that some energy analysts describe as a national security risk.

Sheinbaum’s government is currently studying whether what it describes as sustainable fracking could help unlock domestic reserves, though no final decision has been made.

Above: During a House Natural Resource Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Dave Min (D-CA) asked Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum about investments into energy.

Below:
During a House Natural Resources Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) asked Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum about wind farms.

MIT Sloan School of Management:

“We find that RPS mandates have virtually zero impact on prices, and utility-scale renewables are actually associated with lower retail rates,” said Christopher Knittel, the George P. Shultz Professor and Associate Dean for Climate and Sustainability at MIT Sloan, and faculty director of the MIT Climate Policy Center. “Energy generated by large-scale solar plants, for example, comes with lower transmission, distribution, and maintenance costs for utilities, and these efficiencies can be passed on to the consumer.”

Continue reading “Secretary Burgum Under Fire for Anti Clean Energy Policies”

Axios:

Geothermal power developer Fervo Energy priced its IPO at $27 per share, raising $1.89 billion on Tuesday night.

Why it matters: The upsized IPO shows surging investor interest in clean energy stocks amid the backdrop of the AI boom and the Iran war.

Zoom in: The Houston-based company sold 70 million shares of Class A common stock, giving it at a valuation of $7.7 billion. 

• Underwriters also have the option to purchase an additional 10.5 million shares. The max proceeds including the greenshoe could deliver $2.17 billion.
• The offering was massively oversubscribed, says a source with knowledge of the offering, and bankers are marketing it as “the largest primary clean energy public equity deal of all time.” 

The intrigue: The largest shareholders before the offering include shale firm Devon Energy, Capricorn Investment Group, DCVC, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

• Other investors include B Capital, Google, Congruent Ventures, Galvanize, and Prelude Ventures.

Continue reading “FRVO Dreams: Geothermal’s Giant IPO”

I always take music cues from my daughter, who has great taste.

Like an approaching Tsunami, El Niño events do give some warning before their arrival.
Following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, impacts on global food security are already setting off alarms. My concern is that the falling dominoes will be exacerbated as the impacts of a building El Niño system could trigger, at least, food insecurity like that in 2011-12.
That episode was triggered by a 1000 year drought in Russia, which lead to a cut-off in Russian grain exports, precipitating food shortages, political unrest, and the “Arab Spring” which swept away governments across North Africa.
This time the vulnerable area includes several nuclear-armed states across Asia.
Predictions are tough, especially about the future.

Washington Post:

The climatic shift devastated crops nearly 150 years ago, raising the question of whether a similar disruption could threaten global food security yet again. The strongest El Niño on record from 1877 to 1878 fueled conditions that led to a global famine which killed more than 50 million people across India, China, Brazil and elsewhere. That was 3 to 4 percent of the estimated global population at the time, equal to at least 250 million people if it happened today.

“It was arguably the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity,” researchers have written about the event.

This disaster took years to unfold. Drought began spreading across the tropics and subtropics in 1875. In the years that followed, a combination of strong climate forces in the Indian and Atlantic oceans formed alongside the record-breaking El Niño, amplifying and prolonging the drought.

Deepti Singh, an associate professor at Washington State University who has studied this super El Niño, said famines are not an inevitable consequence of droughts. The deliberate actions of colonialists in the 1870s disrupted local systems that communities relied on for being resilient to climate variations, Singh said.

Might similar consequences unfold today?

Continue reading “Could El Niño Trigger Global Catastrophe?”