Author: omc_admin

The One Big Beautiful Bill will kill wind and solar power tax credits—and pit humans against AI in a battle for scarce electricity. President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act – assuming the version Senate Republicans passed on Tuesday becomes law–would cut the legs out from under the renewable energy industry. The biggest hit: The bill would quickly phase out federal tax credits that have for years enabled wind and solar developers to offset 30% or more of project costs. Yes, it could have been even worse. At the last minute, the Senate’s Republican leadership ditched a proposed excise tax…

Dollar Softness Supports, but Inventory Build Adds Caution The dollar fell to a 3-1/2-year low on Wednesday, typically supporting crude by making it cheaper for non-dollar buyers. Traders are watching Thursday’s U.S. non-farm payrolls for clues on potential Fed rate cuts that could spur economic activity and demand. Late Tuesday, API data showed U.S. crude inventories rose by 680,000 barrels, counter to usual summer drawdowns, adding caution ahead of EIA data due later today. China Demand and Russian Premiums Offer Underlying Support China’s factory activity returned to expansion in June, pointing to firm demand from the world’s second-largest oil consumer.…

As she canvassed for Zohran Mamdani in New York City on Tuesday last week, Batul Hassan should have been elated. The mayoral candidate – a 33-year-old state assemblymember – was surging in the polls and would within hours soundly defeat Andrew Cuomo on first preference votes in the Democratic primary election.But Hassan’s spirits were hampered by record-breaking temperatures. In Crown Heights, where she was the Mamdani campaign’s field captain, the heat index soared into the triple digits.“I couldn’t think about anything but the heat,” she said. “It was so dangerous.”Early that Tuesday morning, Hassan visited a public school polling site,…

Chinese refiners continue to buy high volumes of crude oil from Iran, with first-half imports at the major port clusters estimated at nearly 1.4 million barrels per day (bpd), according to oil flow tracking data from Kpler cited by Bloomberg.Ports near industrial clusters Qingdao, Dalian, and Zhoushan are importing crude from Iran in several legs from the Persian Gulf via Malaysia with ship-to-ship (STS) transfers using shadow fleet vessels and tankers blacklisted by the United States.Officially, China’s customs data show there haven’t been any crude imports from Iran since 2022. Unofficially, China buys nearly 90% of all of Iran’s crude…

By: Lorenzo Saa, Chief Sustainability Officer, Clarity AI Something shifted in the first half of 2025. The era of vague optimism and feel-good ESG slogans is over. What comes next demands harder questions, sharper tools, and a deeper tolerance for uncomfortable answers and trade-offs. We’re not watching a collapse; we’re witnessing a necessary reset. Regulation is fragmenting, political winds are shifting, and markets are sobering up. But if we lean in, armed with materiality, smarter data, and clearer intent, 2025 could mark not a retreat, but a reinvention. The Policy Environment: Fragmenting, Localizing and Creating a Void In our outlook…

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Hurricane Flossie has strengthened into a powerful Category 3 hurricane off Mexico’s southwestern Pacific coast with maximum sustained winds of 115 mph (185 kph), according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. The hurricane center said Flossie would begin weakening later Wednesday. The center said Flossie was about 315 miles (505 kilometers) south-southeast of Cabo San Lucas and was moving west-northwest off the Mexican coast at 10 kph (17 mph). It was expected to skirt the coast for a few days while dropping rain on several Mexican states. While its center is forecast to remain…

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A strike being staged by nearly 10,000 city workers in Philadelphia entered its second day Wednesday as a judge ordered some emergency service dispatchers and essential water department employees to return to work.Common Pleas Court Judge Sierra Thomas-Street granted the city an injunction Tuesday stating 237 out of 325 workers at the city’s 911 call center must return to work because their absence creates a “clear and present danger to threat to health, safety or welfare of the public.” The order does not prevent those workers — 32 fire dispatchers, five supervisors and 200 police dispatchers —…

Morning opening: How can we live with that?Jakub KrupaAs the European heatwave continues and expands east – with Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, Prague and Warsaw all expecting temperatures in the 30s – there are growing debates about how do we adapt to deal with these temperatures.People find shade to cool off next to a fountain in Piazza del Popolo in Rome, Italy. Photograph: M Scott Brauer/ZUMA Press Wire/ShutterstockThe World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations’ weather and climate agency, said yesterday that we will have to learn to live with the new normal of extreme heatwaves, which will occur more often…

A new age of human-looking, multi-tasking robots may be here sooner than you think, says Vinod Khosla.In an episode of the “Uncapped” podcast published on Tuesday, the billionaire venture capitalist predicted that robots that don’t need to be programmed would be available in a few years. The 70-year-old VC’s notable investments include OpenAI, DoorDash, Block, and Impossible Foods.”Robotics will take a little longer, but I think we’ll have the ChatGPT moment in the next two to three years,” he said.Khosla said that these robots will most likely be humanoid. He said there will be enough demand for them to lower…

Macquarie strategists are forecasting that U.S. crude inventories will be down by 1.3 million barrels for the week ending June 27, an oil and gas report sent to Rigzone by the Macquarie team late Monday revealed. “This follows a 5.8 million barrel draw in the prior week, with the crude balance again realizing significantly tighter than our expectations amidst another week of disappointing net imports,” the strategists stated in the oil and gas report. “For this week’s crude balance, from refineries, we model an increase in crude runs (+0.2 million barrels per day),” the Macquarie strategists added in the report.…