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Oil prices haven’t had a breather since the year started as one geopolitical crisis has moved to another. Just a week after the U.S. intervention in Venezuela captured Nicolas Maduro, U.S. President Donald Trump has turned his sights to Iran, threatening a U.S. response to the deadly suppression of mass protests against the Islamic Republic’s regime. Oil settled on Monday at a one-month high amid concerns about a potential supply disruption in the Middle East if Iranian protests further escalate and a U.S. intervention of some kind…
Few debates in Brussels carry as much emotional charge as critical raw materials. Mention lithium, rare earths, graphite, or nickel and the discussion almost immediately turns alarmist. China dominates the supply chain. Europe is dangerously dependent. The energy transition is at risk. The tone often suggests inevitability, as if this imbalance were a law of physics rather than the result of political and industrial choices. Step back from the panic and a different picture emerges. Europe’s vulnerability in critical materials is not geological.…
Traders are betting record amounts of money on China’s metals markets, expecting a continued rally in the prices of base metals and lithium. At the end of 2025 and the start of 2026, speculators held record-high open interest in the base metals copper, zinc, nickel, tin, lead, and aluminum traded on the Shanghai Futures Exchange, and near-record open interest in battery metal lithium on the Guangzhou Futures Exchange. Concerns about tightening global metal supply, lower interest rates driving investment in metal commodities, and expectations…
Global economies are increasingly splitting into two opposing camps when it comes to energy policy. While many nations are moving toward electrification and installing record-breaking amounts of clean energy capacity, other nations – most notably the United States, the world’s biggest economy – are installing more fossil fuels than ever before. Put simply, the future of the global energy balance now depends on the results of a high-stakes battle between petro-states and electro-states. The emergence of artificial intelligence…
For months, anger has been building in the communities that are involuntarily footing the bill for the AI boom. As data center clusters pop up around the globe to feed AI’s massive and growing computational needs, nearby communities are seeing their utility bills skyrocket, even if they themselves don’t benefit from the sector at all. And now, in the United States, the backlash against data centers’ resource consumption – and its impact on consumers’ bottom line – has spilled out of the bounds of local politics…
