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We have all seen the viral photos of eye-popping numbers on price signs at Southern California gas stations. But the exact cost to American drivers nationwide hadn’t yet been quantified. Until now. Researchers at Brown University gave Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer a sneak peak at their new Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, a hub for the team’s analysis and data. The war has cost the U.S. economy about $17 billion solely by increasing prices for gasoline and diesel fuel, the estimates show. The higher prices amount to a hike of $129 per household so far. “If you think about an individual paying $1 or $1.50 more for gasoline, that’s often just a nuisance,” Jeff Colgan, an author of the analysis and a political science professor at Brown University, told Rob. “But as a country, we consume 370 million gallons of gasoline per day. So when you add that all up, this is more than just a nuisance for the country. This is a major cost.”
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When the Trump administration became the biggest shareholder in MP Materials last summer, Biden-era officials admitted to Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin that they were jealous of their Republican successors who marshalled the political will to experiment with quasi-nationalization. But at least one former official from President Joe Biden’s White House has a different take. “Bottom line: the MP deal is both too much & not enough,” Brian Deese, the former director of the National Economic Council, wrote in a post on X, announcing the findings of a new paper he co-authored at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The deal delivers unprecedented support to one firm, creating new risks without long-term resilience.”
Uranium Energy Corp., meanwhile, has started up production at its Burke Hollow mine in Texas. It’s the first new mining operation using in-situ recovery, a process that includes chemical leaching out of ore. It’s the first new facility of its kind in the U.S. in more than a decade, World Nuclear News reported.
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Volkswagen is shifting production at its Chattanooga plant from the ID.4 electric SUV to the large Atlas SUV. The ID.4 will remain available throughout the U.S., and “future models are planned,” but the German automaker said it’s “exploring pathways for a new vehicle model to be assembled.” Instead, the facility will focus on churning out the Atlas, Volkswagen’s second-most popular vehicle. EVs “continue to challenge” the industry, requiring what the company called measured decisions. “The Chattanooga plant has been, and will continue to be, a cornerstone of Volkswagen’s strategy in the United States,” Volkswagen Group of America President and CEO Kjell Gruner said in a press release. “This strategic shift underscores the company’s commitment to Chattanooga and its workforce as we position the plant for long-term success and future product opportunities.”
A national map showing the paper’s findings. Nature
A team of scientists at Princeton University and the University of Arizona produced what the Los Angeles Times called “the most extensive estimate of the country’s groundwater to date.” The researchers took data from about 800,000 wells and applied a machine-learning model to project the depth of the water table in each location. The findings, published in Nature, could help local policymakers decide how to handle overpumping from stressed aquifers. “Groundwater is out of sight and out of mind for most people,” Reed Maxwell, a hydrologist at Princeton and co-author of the study, told the newspaper. “Knowing how much we have will be helpful in knowing how to use it wisely.”
The population of Antarctic fur seals, the smallest of the polar seals which live almost exclusively on the island of South Georgia, halved over the last 25 years, from 2.2 million adults in 1999 to 944,000 in 2025, Mongabay reported. Global experts now say half of the population loss is due to reduced food availability as warmer temperatures and shrinking sea ice spur large schools of krill, the seal’s main prey, into deeper and colder waters. To boot, the seals are facing more competition for their food. High-quality krill now appears in tins at supermarkets in New York City. But really demand is surging for use in fish farming.
