This is Not Cool

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?”

Democrats need to talk about climate change. Loud. pic.twitter.com/ihCPJDBLlb

— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) May 12, 2026

A recent New York Times piece suggested that Democrats should stop talking about climate change, sparking predictable Fox News alerts about “the end of the climate change hoax.”
While I agree there are some setting where the climate discussion is not going to win points, polls do show that Americans are increasingly freaked out by a planet that is speaking more plainly every day.
Key is, know your audience.
UPDATE:
My qualifier is that I am on the front line of deployment for clean energy, and the allies I have are often conservative Republican farmers and landowners, who do not accept human caused climate change, even though they want clean energy, and get why it’s important for a number of reasons.
So I don’t have a purity test to screen those I am working with, and I don’t make it a priority to change their minds on the science as long as they are with me on the solutions.
At the moment, I might add, it is still a pitched township by township battle, but we are winning, just not quickly enough, yet.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse on X:

Top 10 reasons why Democrats need to talk about climate change now:

In some states, the top economic issue is the home insurance meltdown. Start with a big cost, add a huge increase, and you get big cost impact on families.

Behind the cost impact is huge hassle factor, as insurers abandon customers and whole markets, and families suddenly face massive “get new insurance” problems.

Insurance meltdown cascades into mortgage markets and property values. Florida, first and worst into this mess, now leads the country in lost residential property value.

The economic pain, bad already, will widen and worsen. One warning is a $25 trillion hit to global real estate markets. That’s Crash-level stuff.

Continue reading “Should Democrats Talk about Climate Change?”

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. – Seattle

Those aren’t mountains.

I don’t think there is a lot of discussion of the potential for mass food insecurity, political instability, and magnified impacts of a very large global El Niño event. Metaphors fail.

Pandora’s Cavern.

Washington Post:

The standoff between President Donald Trump and Iran that has brought shipping to a virtual halt in the Persian Gulf has set off supply chain shocks that are upending lives thousands of miles away in Asia, raising costs for farmers at the start of key planting seasons that will sharply reduce crop yields in the second half of the year and beyond, according to government officials, economists and farming groups.

Addressing world leaders in Rome on Thursday, Dongyu Qu, the director general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said the war had created not only a geopolitical crisis but “a disruption at the core of the global agrifood system.”

Iran’s destruction of gas infrastructure in the Gulf and the dueling U.S.-Iran efforts to choke the Strait of Hormuz have prevented crucial supplies of fuel and its derivatives like urea — a potent source of nitrogen that enhances harvests — from leaving the Middle East. Because fuel infrastructure takes years to build, there is no ready replacement for these supplies.

In effect, 30 percent of the world’s urea has been “wiped out,” said Pranshi Goyal, senior analyst at the market intelligence firm CRU Group. China, a major fertilizer producer, has restricted exports to ensure its farmers have enough. Russia, another big manufacturer, is seeing demand soar, potentially boosting its economy and aiding its war in Ukraine. On what is known as the spot market, urea prices are up 40 percent since February.

Continue reading “Butterfly Effect: Hormuz Closure has Widespread Effects”