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The ceasefire deal allows both Iran and Oman to charge a toll on ships attempting to navigate the strait, according to the Associated Press. A 10-point peace proposal previously submitted to the U.S. by Iran, using Pakistan as an intermediary, includes a provision for a $2 million fee, The New York Times reported Monday. In a separate post on Truth Social, Trump called the proposal a “workable basis on which to negotiate,” though Oman’s transit minister has since rejected the idea of a toll. Oil prices plunged in response to the news, falling below $100 per barrel in after-hours trading.
The Environmental Protection Agency has finalized its changes to the last administration’s methane standards for oil and gas operations. The EPA had first proposed what Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo called the nation’s “strongest methane rules yet” back in December 2023. In a statement, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin accused his predecessors of trying “to regulate the oil and gas industry out of existence,” and called the changes “another step to fix those mistakes while proving we can both protect human health and the environment and grow the economy at the same time.”
E&E News described the regulatory changes as “minor” and “tweaks.” But the Sierra Club said the overhaul would allow producers to waste more gas by burning it at oil wells, a heavily polluting process known as flaring. “The Trump EPA’s move to loosen restrictions on gas flaring at oil wells is a massive step backward for public health, the climate, and economic common sense,” Mahyar Sorour, the Sierra Club’s policy director for the Beyond Fossil Fuels campaign, said in a statement. “Allowing more flaring will drive up harmful emissions, worsening smog and soot pollution in already overburdened communities while accelerating the climate crisis. At the same time, while families across the country are struggling to afford their energy bills, EPA is making it even worse with this action.”
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Founded in California 147 years ago, Chevron built an oil empire from the United States. But the giant, which recently relocated its headquarters to Houston, is expected to contribute nearly 13 times more in tax dollars to the Canadian government than the American Treasury for its 2025 operations. It’s set to pay 11 times as much to Australia, five times as much to Kazakhstan, and four times as much to Saudi Arabia and Nigeria each. In total, just 2% of the tax dollars Chevron is shelling out for 2025 are going to the U.S. government. For Exxon Mobil, that figure was just under 9%. A little over 22% of ConocoPhillips’ tax payments, meanwhile, are headed to Washington. That’s all according to a new analysis by the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks money flows. Overall, the three American supermajors are on pace to pay an average tax rate of just 6.1% on their domestic income in 2025, “a dramatic decrease” from the 10% average rate for those same companies between 2018 and 2024 and less than a third of the statutory 21% corporate tax rate, the report found.
The Kudankulam nuclear plant, India’s largest atomic power station. Pallava Bagla/Corbis via Getty Images
Since commissioning its first nuclear power station in October 1969, India has dreamed of atomic autonomy. Of the two dozen reactors New Delhi built at more than half a dozen plants, the vast majority were pressurized heavy water reactors that could run on raw uranium, eliminating the need for enriched fuel. With few uranium deposits on the subcontinent, India laid plans in the early 2000s to eventually transition its fleet to running on thorium, a more abundant but never commercialized fuel. In between, the government decided to follow a pathway the U.S. walked back in the mid-20th century: fast breeder reactors. Such machines generate plutonium through the atom-splitting process, producing or “breeding” more fuel than the fission consumes. On Monday, India’s Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor split atoms for the first time, following more than two decades of construction work. The Indian reactor is designed to transmute thorium-232, which is plentiful in the country, into uranium-233, which can be used as fuel. Once operational, the reactor would be one of just two commercial fast breeder reactors worldwide, following the first in Russia. “Today, India takes a defining step in its civil nuclear journey, advancing the second stage of its nuclear program,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a statement, according to World Nuclear News. “It is a decisive step towards harnessing our vast thorium reserves in the third stage of the program. A proud moment for India.”
China, meanwhile, has poured the first concrete for its latest nuclear reactor. The state-owned China National Nuclear Company announced that construction is underway on Unit 2 of the Jingqimen nuclear power station in Zhejiang province, NucNet reported. CNNC plans to build six gigawatt-sized Hualong Ones, China’s leading indigenous reactor design, at the site just south of Shanghai. In a sign of just how quickly things move in China, the National Nuclear Safety Administration issued a construction license for Units 1 and 2 at Jingqimen in February 2025. First concrete was poured for Unit 1 in August 2025.
Not content with what its leaders admit was the “historic mistake” of killing off nuclear energy, Germany is poised to adopt a policy change that could hurt yet another source of clean firm power. A planned amendment to the Renewable Energy Sources Act to end support for projects of up to 25 kilowatts aims to phase out subsidies for small-scale solar farms. But the tweak will also affect more than half of the country’s roughly 7,300 hydropower plants, according to BDW, a trade association representing the dam owners. “This measure, which is actually aimed at avoiding fluctuating feed-in, makes no sense at all for hydropower,” BDW president Hans-Peter Lang told Renewables Now. The trade group called for the German government to not only scrap the proposal but add a new subsidiary to support hydropower plants below 100 kilowatts.
Most of the world is struggling with soaring petrochemical prices as the main ingredients in all kinds of chemical components — oil and gas — surge amid the most severe shock in modern history to global hydrocarbon flows. Not China. Joining a distinguished club that includes Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa, Beijing has maintained its domestic supply of chemicals by forging an enormous sector around converting coal into chemicals. Over in Bloomberg, columnist Javier Blas quantified just how big the coal-to-chemicals sector is in China. On its own, the sector is larger than the entire U.S. coal market.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
