Current conditions: The warm, springy temperatures in the Northeast and Great Lakes are set to drop by as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit as cold air moves into the region • Telekitonga and Telekitokelau, two of the northernmost atolls in the Kingdom of Tonga, are facing severe winds from Tropical Cyclone Vaianu • The death toll from the floods deluging southern and eastern Afghanistan topped 110.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Trump’s self-imposed deadline to bomb Iran’s power plants is just hours away
The Bushehr nuclear plant. ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images
Over the weekend, President Donald Trump renewed his on-again, off-again threat to borrow a tactic from Russia’s playbook in Ukraine and bomb Iran’s power plants. As I told you in yesterday’s newsletter, Trump set a deadline of Tuesday night — tonight — for Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face the bombardment of its key civilian infrastructure. The Wall Street investment research firm Citrini Research sent an analyst to the strategic chokepoint with a briefcase of $15,000 in cash, Cuban cigars, and Zyn nicotine packs, and produced a report that concluded that billions of dollars in cargo were still passing through the Strait — but only if linked to the Iranian government or to Chinese vessels. On Monday, Iranian authorities halted two Qatari tankers that attempted to cross the narrow waterway out of the Persian Gulf. “Iranians want the regime gone and they don’t want the country destroyed,” one expert told the hawkish Free Press writer Eli Lake. “Now they fear that the country will be destroyed and the regime will remain.”
It’s unclear whether Washington would target the Bushehr nuclear plant, Iran’s first and only civilian atomic power station. Built by the Russians, the single-reactor station came online in 2011, just months after the Fukushima disaster, and was before the war undergoing an expansion. Russia’s state-owned Rosatom has decried the absence of global outrage over U.S. and Israeli missiles landing near the plant as a double standard, given that the Kremlin’s own occupation of Ukraine’s top nuclear plant drew widespread condemnation. On Saturday, however, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that a projectile fragment had killed a plant worker in the fourth and latest strike near the power station. On Sunday, the World Health Organization sounded the alarm over the safety of the plant. “The latest incident involving the Bushehr nuclear power plant is a stark reminder: a strike could trigger a nuclear accident, with health impacts that would devastate generations,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote in a post on X.
2. Trump’s budget proposal continues his war on renewables
If you thought Stephen Miller’s influencer wife embracing solar and the Trump administration declining to appeal its big offshore wind legal losses meant the president had turned the page on his anti-renewables agenda, think again. The fiscal year 2027 budget proposal the White House released Friday highlights “plans to continue waging its longstanding war against renewable energy and climate initiatives while boosting support for artificial intelligence and fossil fuels,” E&E News reported. In a fact sheet entitled, “Ending the Green New Scam,” the White House says “President Trump is committed to eliminating funding for the globalist climate agenda while unleashing American energy production.” The document thrice refers to renewable energy as “unreliable.” Overall, the budget proposed slashing non-military spending by the federal government roughly 10%, or $73 billion.
The White House’s budget proposal is, of course, more of a statement of priorities than anything else, and cuts that steep are unlikely to pass through Congress. The administration has, meanwhile, outlined the biggest boost to military spending in modern history, raising the budget to $1.5 trillion.
3. Gunman attacks Indiana lawmaker’s home, leaves ‘no data centers’ note
A gunman fired more than a dozen shots into an Indianapolis lawmaker’s home early Monday morning, leaving behind a note on the doormat reading “no data centers.” City Council member Ron Gibson, a third-term Democrat and native of Indiana’s largest city, had voted in favor last week of approving construction of a 75-megawatt data center on a lot that The Indianapolis Star described as having “sat idle for years and did little for economic development in the neighborhood.” The roughly 14-acre property appears on Google Earth to be an empty dirt lot surrounded by an auto body shop, a payday lender, and a gas station. In a statement to The Indianapolis Recorder, Gibson said that while he understood that public service meant withstanding criticism from those who disagree with his decisions, this attack was unlike anything he ever expected. He said his eight-year-old son was in the house. “Just steps from where those bullets struck is our dining room table, where my son had been playing with his Legos the day before. That reality is deeply unsettling,” Gibson said. “This was not just an attack on my home, but endangered my child and disrupted the safety of our entire neighborhood.”
Local opposition to data centers has erupted across the country over the past year, leading to what Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer documented as a wave of cancellations.
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4. U.S. plastics manufacturers are in overdrive trying to meet soaring demand
Until recently, the plastics industry was in the doldrums. Amid surging scrutiny of the environmental and health impacts of plastics’ global waste crisis, cheap natural gas and a vast network of suppliers had kept prices for materials such as polyethylene low. Then came the Iran War. Now it’s a boom. High demand has chemical giant Dow running its “crackers” — plants that heat ethane, a component of natural gas, to more than 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit to crack the molecule into hydrogen and ethylene, the basic building block of the plastics such as polyethylene — near full capacity, The Wall Street Journal reported. Shares in Dow and rival LyondellBasell are up nearly 80%. “In my career of almost 30 years of covering chemicals, I have never, ever seen price hikes this steep and this quick,” Hassan Ahmed, a partner at Alembic Global Advisors, told the newspaper.
5. Polestar will make its largest EV yet in the U.S., killing off a Chinese model
Polestar, the Swedish-based and Chinese-owned automaker, is betting that the land of big cars will be the land of big electric cars. By the end of this year, the Polestar 3, the company’s flagship electric SUV and its largest battery-powered vehicle, will be assembled exclusively in the U.S. InsideEVs noted that this will make the model the only American-made electric vehicle in Polestar’s portfolio. The Polestar 3 is currently built in Chengdu, China, and Volvo’s Ridgeville plant in South Carolina. By the end of the year, Polestar will end its Chinese production, according to CarBuzz.
THE KICKER
Panama emerged as one of the world’s most significant new players in the copper market right as demand for the metal was surging. Then, in 2023, anti-mining protests shut down First Quantum’s Cobre Panama mine. Since then, the facility has sat idle. But on Tuesday, the Panamanian government is expected to issue permits that will allow for the removal and processing of copper ore stockpiled at the site, La Estrella de Panamá reported.
The Bushehr nuclear plant. ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images
