Articles & Videos

Juan Cole Informed Comment The Ember energy think tank reports the numbers for China’s green energy exports this spring and they are mind-blowing. The Hormuz energy crisis is having predictable effects. In March, China exported 68 gigawatts of solar panels, twice what it did in February and an all-time high. By a lot. That’s one month of […]

Traders are now betting on at least one US Federal Reserve rate increase this year.

About half of the global supply of fertilizers passed through the Strait of Hormuz before the Iran war.

Tehran fired warning shots on four ships that tried to cross the strait, as the country moves to exert more oversight of the channel.

The American strikes were the second set this week, while Tehran said it targeted a US air base in the region.

Joshua Scheer As Washington and Tel Aviv escalate pressure on Lebanon, a senior Hezbollah official is warning that the next phase of the conflict may not be fought only with bombs and drones — but through political coercion designed to fracture Lebanon from within. In a sweeping interview with The Grayzone, Wafiq Safa, one of […]

Lawmakers are raising concerns about plans for an “Economic Defense Unit” first reported by Semafor.

Summer is just getting started, and people are already dying. Western Europe is sweltering through a climate-fueled “heat dome” that has trapped hot air from London to Spain, where temperatures have broken new records and surpassed 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Seven people are reported to have died in France of heat-related causes. Weeks of oppressive temperatures in the southern India state of Telangana have killed at least 19 people—and likely many more—as highs neared 115 degrees in many cities across the region. Heat warnings have now been issued across Canada’s western Prairies. The United States broke its own heat records back in March, and a “super” strong El Niño is expected to push temperatures up around the world. Extreme heat is the deadliest weather hazard in the United States. It’s not exactly breaking news at this point to say that the Trump administration denies the climate crisis that’s now helping the U.S. smash long-held temperature records year after year. It’s worth emphasizing, however, that such denial isn’t a matter of abstract doctrinal dispute—or even just a means to allow fossil fuel companies to drill and pollute whatever and wherever they’d like. As the coming summer will likely illustrate, climate denial often takes fairly invisible, quotidian forms, like weakening little-known regulatory programs as a way of helping out employers who’d rather not cool down their overheated workers. This sort of ordinary, everyday climate denial doesn’t always make headlines. But as temperatures continue to rise, it will almost certainly rack up a body count. In the case of the United States, at least, that kind of denial can mean just not changing much about the status quo. There are still relatively few federal protections in this country against extreme heat. That’s long been the case with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is charged with keeping workers safe on the job. The Biden administration proposed a rule in 2024 that would have established the country’s first nationwide workplace heat safety standard. It aimed to mandate that employers offer specific protections—like water and shade breaks—once temperatures cross dangerous thresholds. It also meant to require employers to make certain upgrades at job sites and conduct regular audits and trainings related to heat risks. Unsurprisingly, that rule has faced harsh pushback from business groups. While the Trump administration so far hasn’t opted for a full withdrawal, favored by groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it also hasn’t moved that regulatory process forward since last summer. If it does, OSHA has signaled that it could significantly water down the proposed rule.Last month, in the meantime, OSHA issued a new and notably vaguer National Emphasis Program on heat-related hazards. When that program was first launched in 2022, OSHA set out a goal of increasing heat-related workplace inspections in every region by 100 percent over previous baselines, making sure that bosses offer water and shade in warmer temperatures. Before the program was implemented, OSHA performed just 200 heat-related inspections. Between April 2022 and December 2024—while the National Emphasis Program was in place—it conducted more than 7,000. Those inspections resulted in 60 heat citations for violations of the general duty clause—OSHA’s omnibus safe-workplace requirements—and 1,392 “hazard alert” letters to employers, laying out steps to keep workers safe when it’s hot.That program’s latest, Trump-era iteration, which eliminates and replaces the Biden-era version, makes no reference to specific numerical inspection goals, leaving it an open question as to just how many proactive inspections OSHA will perform. Data released by Senator Elizabeth Warren earlier this year—which isn’t regularly published—showed that overall inspections had declined by about 20 percent in the first six months of 2025; Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget requested a steep 7.5 percent cut for OSHA. Several elements of the 2022 National Emphasis Program remain in place—including randomized inspections on heat advisory days—but the new version has removed 46 designated “high-risk” industries while adding 23. Among the industries no longer considered to involve heat-related hazards are support activities for mining, waste treatment and disposal, motor vehicle manufacturing, and basic chemical manufacturing. The new program is slated to remain in place for the next five years.The administration’s slow erosion of modest heat protections like the National Emphasis Program won’t get the same kind of attention as Trump Cabinet members’ bombastic sound bites about being in a “golden era” of fossil energy, or Trump himself posting nonsense about climate science on social media. Arguably, letting such programs lapse—and scrapping the proposed OSHA rule outright—would be newsier. Whether there’s some grand communications plan at work or not, the White House’s quieter forms of climate denial could end up being some of its most dangerous.

“I should be securely in the middle class,” Kris Massey, a 57-year-old nurse practitioner who lives near Nashville, told CNN. “I should be fine, and I’m not. I can’t be the only one feeling like this.”As that CNN article shows, a lot of people in America are struggling to get by right now, thanks in part to a huge spike in prices caused by President Trump’s war against Iran, which retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz. The nationwide average for a gallon of gas is $4.45, per AAA’s tracker. Consumer sentiment just hit an all-time low—worse not only than during the Great Recession or the pandemic, but even the oil crises of the 1970s. Since 2021, CNN notes, prices are up more than 25 percent. The high cost of everything played a pivotal role in the 2024 election, dragging down approval of the Biden-Harris administration and boosting Trump’s campaign, which focused on bringing down prices. Now, looking ahead to the November midterms and the 2028 presidential election, the table has turned: Without really doing much of anything—largely because it holds no power in Washington—the Democratic Party is favored to retake at least one chamber of Congress in the fall and will likely be in a strong position to retake the presidency two years later. Affordability politics has become a pendulum, with consumer sentiment driving electoral shifts: Voters punish incumbent parties for high prices and empower minority parties, and then a few years later they reverse course. That’s good news for the Democrats in the near term—but a warning to them, as well.There is a temptation to view these electoral shifts as being driven by events—that post-pandemic inflation doomed the Democrats and now Iran war inflation is kneecapping Republicans. That is hard to argue with, but it obscures something else: Affordability politics predates both crises. It is the second-most-important political trend of the last decade, behind the rise of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. As The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey wrote in a shrewd piece last weekend, even many people who are not drowning in this economy still hate it. “People have stopped believing that the economy can be good, and have lost the willingness to admit that they are doing well,” Lowery writes. “That pessimism might be harder to fix than an actual downturn.” That pessimism has also become a stubborn part of our politics, and will no doubt persist in two years—even if the war ends, the Strait of Hormuz reopens, and global commerce returns to “normal.” Democrats need to prepare right now for this political reality—and if and when they retake power, they need to have a plan to deal with what Lowery calls the “permacession.” Here’s Lowery running through the data: Ninety-six out of every 100 Americans who want a job have one. The rate of underemployment is low, and the rate of labor-force participation is high, meaning that there’s no pool of discouraged workers lurking behind the marquee jobs statistics. Young workers are struggling to establish themselves, given businesses’ caution around hiring. Still, the tight labor market has fueled wage gains that have swelled family budgets, even after accounting for inflation. Real disposable personal income, which measures how much spending power Americans actually have, is at a record high. It’s a bit perplexing to read this, given that prices are soaring again, but she’s right. The U.S. economy is, in spite of everything, still quite good—and it looks even better when compared to other countries. The idea that the economy is in good shape, but people still complain about it, was a familiar refrain from Biden administration officials—including the president—and many of their allies. They were perhaps right to be bitter. They had done a masterful job of managing the end of the pandemic and reopening the economy—better than anyone else in the world. They blamed Republicans and, especially, the media for fueling negative feelings, essentially arguing that the press was gaslighting the people, who simply didn’t know how good they had it. That is never a good electoral message, of course, and it was especially lousy coming from a blundering 82-year-old president. But Lowery’s piece offers a better, if frustrating, explanation: Americans are just kind of miserable right now. She offers a number of potential explanations: political polarization, the sticker shock of inflation, declining trust in institutions, phone addiction. There isn’t a clean explanation, but what’s offered is more thorough—and in some ways more dispiriting—than the one offered by Biden. Americans are miserable right now for reasons that aren’t easy to explain, which means elected politicians can’t message their way to success. There’s no easy way to convince people who think the economy is terrible that it’s good—even if it is. That was the Biden plan in a nutshell: to tell people about all the effective things they were doing to steer the economy. But this problem is deeper than the political class has acknowledged, and it’s possibly systemic. As costs rise, so are bankruptcies, delinquencies, and credit card debt. But ending the most immediate driver of high prices—the Iran war—may not make a significant difference in stemming those other trends. Americans probably have been miserable for longer than we realize. Economic anxiety was indeed a factor in the 2016 presidential campaign, even if some on the liberal left dismissed such claims as whitewashing MAGA’s obvious racism. Bernie Sanders’s insurgent campaign was undoubtedly driven by some of the trends Lowery describes, particularly economic dissatisfaction among young people. In fact, Democrats could look to that campaign as a model for how to deal with the new politics of affordability. It’s not enough to argue that you will be a good steward of the economy, as Biden did. There needs to be a grander message about why people are miserable and how you can fix it—which is something that Sanders offered in 2016 and that other politicians, such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, are offering today. Will that arrest the misery crisis? Maybe not. But it’s clear that nothing either party is offering right now is working.