2026-03-11 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Israel’s bombing of Iran’s oil infrastructure will have major long-term environmental repercussions, experts have warned, as monitors admitted they were struggling to keep track of the environmental disasters arising from the widening war.
Even as Iranians filled the streets to mark the appointment of a new supreme leader, the Shahran oil depot northeast of Tehran and the Shahr-e fuel depot to its south continued to burn on Monday, two days after they were bombed by Israeli warplanes.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Iran’s environmental agency and the Iranian Red Crescent Society had warned Tehran residents to stay at home, warning the toxic chemicals spread by airstrikes on five fossil fuel installations around the city could lead to acid rain and damage the skin and lungs.
“There will be a real cocktail of chemistry, including significant amounts of aromatic compounds that are known to interact with DNA and have been linked to cancers.”
On Monday, the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said: “Damage to petroleum facilities in Iran risks contaminating food, water, and air—hazards that can have severe health impacts especially on children, older people, and people with pre-existing medical conditions.”
Iran’s deputy health minister, Ali Jafarian, told Al Jazeera that the soil and water supplies around Tehran were already beginning to be contaminated by the fallout from the weekend’s explosions.
The black rain that fell across Tehran in the hours after the bombings was a mixture of soot and fine particulate matter from the explosions with rain from a storm that was already moving across the region, according to Dr Akshay Deoras, a research scientist at the University of Reading.
“The airstrikes on oil depots released soot, smoke, oil particles, sulfur compounds, and likely heavy metals and inorganic materials from the buildings, whilst a low‑pressure weather system, which typically sweeps across Iran and west Asia around this time of year, created conditions favorable for rainfall,” Deoras said.
“In terms of atmospheric chemistry, the oil fires produce sulphur and nitrogen compounds that could form acids if they dissolve in rainwater,” he said. “The risks to human health come from inhaling or touching the smoke and particles. Immediate impacts can include headaches, irritation of the eyes and skin, and difficulty breathing—particularly for people with asthma, lung disease, older adults, young children, and those with disabilities.”
Tehranis reported difficulty breathing on Sunday, as well as headaches and burning sensations in their eyes and throats. But the acute effects of the black cloud that spread across the city could just be the beginning, according to Prof Andrea Sella, professor of inorganic chemistry at the University College London.
“The explosions will have exposed the local population to all manner of undesirable and toxic chemical species, a problem that is well known to accompany warfare,” he said, explaining that the crude oil will have contained a range of elements, including metals, that would “also be spread indiscriminately.”
“There will be a real cocktail of chemistry, including significant amounts of aromatic compounds that are known to interact with DNA and have been linked to cancers. Whether or not this manifests will depend strongly on how long and serious the exposure is of any individual.”
“We are now aware of hundreds of environmentally problematic incidents in Iran.”
“And on top of this, once the containment provided by the tanks and pipes is destroyed the material will flow everywhere leaving a mess of harmful material that permeates the soil and coats everything else. There is the potential for contamination of drinking water supplies.”
Despite US efforts to distance itself from the attacks, there are growing fears the attack might spark a tit-for-tat cycle of retaliation after a spokesperson for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps warned it could take “similar actions [against oil infrastructure] in the region.”
On Monday, Bahrain’s state-owned energy company Bapco Energies declared force majeure on its operations after Iran attacked the country’s only oil refinery, and Saudi Arabia reported intercepting four Iranian drones targeting its Shaybah oil field.
Those attacks followed drone strikes last week on the world’s largest natural gas export plant in Qatar, the Saudi refinery at Ras Tanura, fuel storage hubs in Oman and the United Arab Emirates, and multiple tankers in the Persian Gulf, each of which posed a potential environmental catastrophe.
Doug Weir, director of the Conflict and Environment Observatory, said that his organization’s efforts at tracking incidents of environmental harm caused by the fighting around the Persian Gulf was becoming increasingly difficult.
“We are now aware of hundreds of environmentally problematic incidents in Iran and the region but the ongoing conflict, internet restrictions and delays in the availability of satellite imagery mean that this figure is an understatement,” Weir said. “Piecing together the war’s environmental footprint and its potential impacts on people and ecosystems will be a huge task, and one that grows more complex with every day that the war continues.”
“After the first few days where military sites were targeted we are now seeing an expansion into civilian and dual-use facilities, with this comes a broadening of the range of environmental and public health risks associated with military actions,” he added.
2026-03-11 18:00:00
The new food pyramid says it all. In January, the federal government released updated dietary guidelines for Americans that reimagine the pyramid by literally turning it upside down. The guidelines, which once prioritized foods like grains while minimizing fats, now recommend red meat, whole milk, proteins, and healthy fats. It’s one of the most unmistakable ways that US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has ushered the Make America Healthy Again movement into the federal government. But it’s also illustrative of how the entire Trump administration has tried to turn just about everything in Washington on its head.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.And it’s not just the food pyramid. Over the last year, RFK Jr. has reshaped the country’s vaccine advisory committee with vaccine skeptics, fired thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, and revised the CDC’s stance on the unfounded link between vaccines and autism. The moves, often influenced and cheered by folks in the MAHA movement, are ones that infectious disease epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera says are not merely misguided, but dangerous.
“MAHA is asking the right question: How do we make America healthy again? But they’ve come to the table with answers already to that question that are not rooted in evidence. And that’s the concerning part,” Rivera tells host Al Letson. “This is not saying science should never be questioned. Science is always being questioned. But when you come in with answers to questions and hypotheses already, that’s the backwards way to do science.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Rivera examines how Big Ag has influenced the nation’s latest dietary guidelines, whether the US is on the cusp of a national measles outbreak, and why the CDC dropping vaccine recommendations could have potentially long-term and deadly consequences.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
2026-03-10 23:31:22
Kristi Noem is out as Homeland Security Secretary, but a luxury 737 she has traveled on remains in government hands. That plane, reportedly dubbed the “Big, Beautiful Jet” by DHS staffers, has been quietly leased to the department by a company linked to William Walters, a former State Department official who donated thousands of dollars to a pro-Noem political action committee. Walters owns a constellation of businesses that—despite a dearth of prior experience working for the government—won lucrative contracts with Noem’s DHS over the past year.
One Walters company is selling half a dozen planes to DHS, in a deal that has raised questions within the department and on Capitol Hill about the cost of the aircraft. Another firm owned by Walters landed a contract worth up to $915 million last year, through a procurement process that one DHS official said was flawed and “created an appearance of favoritism,” according to previously unreported court documents.
President Donald Trump fired Noem Thursday, announcing via social media that Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) will replace her at the end of the month. But her exit doesn’t undo the massive deals that DHS struck with a vast array of contractors, many with close ties to Noem, her adviser Corey Lewandowski, and other top administration officials.
The 737 jet gained extensive attention in February when the Wall Street Journal reported that Noem and Lewandowski were traveling together on the plane. DHS is reportedly using money meant for the Trump administration’s self-deportations program to lease the plane and is in the process of buying it outright for $70 million. The taxpayer-funded aircraft, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) noted Wednesday, has “a queen-size bedroom” and a “deluxe” bar. “A big, beautiful jet paid for by the Big, Beautiful Bill,” Raskin remarked.
“A big, beautiful jet paid for by the Big, Beautiful Bill.”
During the same congressional oversight hearing, Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) referenced “reports of a romantic relationship between” Noem and Lewandowski and asked Noem if she had “sexual relations” with Lewandowski during her time at DHS. Noem called the allegation “tabloid garbage”; she and Lewandowski, who are both married, have previously denied being romantically involved with each other. Public tittering over the situation reached a crescendo last month when the Daily Show dubbed the 737 “a taxpayer-funded fuck plane,” though no evidence has emerged of anyone actually having sex on the jet.
Noem told lawmakers last week that she had only been on the plane “once.” And she said the plane was being used by other administration officials, though she didn’t name them.
On Friday, Axios reported that Noem and Lewandowski loaned the jet to First Lady Melania Trump, “who used it on several flights from D.C. to New York.” The plane last flew from DC to New York City on March 1, and Melania Trump spoke to the United Nations Security Council the next day. The White House did not respond to questions about the First Lady’s reported use of the plane.
Noem has also asserted that the plane is being “refurbished” to transport detainees.
That claim has drawn derision. A sales brochure says the aircraft—a Boeing BBJ Max 8—“caters to the most discerning of travelers, offering an exquisite flying experience like no other,” and notes that in addition to the bedroom and bar, it includes showers, a kitchen, and four large flat-screen TVs. That would create an unusually sumptuous set-up for deportees who DHS has sometimes shackled on flights.
“What kind of deportee justifies being flown out of the country in a luxury jet with a bedroom?” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) asked Noem last Tuesday.
Typical 737 Max 8s have between 162 and 178 seats, according to Boeing’s technical specs. The brochure for the 737 Max 8 Boeing Business Jet that Noem has used says the aircraft has a passenger capacity of just 17 people. The department has said it plans to add seats by eliminating “at least one of the bedrooms.” On the evening of March 4, after Noem testified before the Senate, the luxury jet flew from New York City to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where there is a facility for modifying jets.
“Wouldn’t it have been cheaper just to buy a deportation plane in the first place?” Raskin asked at the House hearing. “It’s like buying a Rolls-Royce to turn into a Metro bus.”
Other details suggest the plane is primarily intended for high-level passengers. Last year, it received a new registration number: N471US—note the 47. (The Federal Aviation Administration allows aircraft owners to pick their own registration number.) The plane also got a new paint job and design scheme similar to the 47th president’s proposal for Air Force One.
DHS did not respond to a question about when Noem or other DHS employees used the plane. But Mother Jones and Project On Government Oversight found that the jet flew to Amman, Jordan, on December 15 and left the next day. Noem was in Amman meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II on December 16, according to his office.
The plane flew to Bermuda on January 14 and to the Dominican Republic on January 15. Other flight records since December show it going to the closest major airport to Mar-a-Lago, and to various other domestic locations. It’s not clear if Noem or any other administration officials were on those flights.
Walters—the former head of a State Department unit called the Bureau of Medical Services that helped to evacuate personnel in emergencies—left government service in 2021 and later emerged as a vocal Trump supporter. In the fall of 2024, he spoke out in support of Trump’s immigration agenda and received an award from the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank.
After leaving the State Department, Walters launched a series of businesses. Following Trump’s election, his firms began seeking federal contracts to help implement the president’s plan to deport millions of people.
“We have serious concerns about the cost to the American taxpayer.”
Those contractors all seem to be headquartered in a few suites alongside a cluster of other related firms in a nondescript office building in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington. We found over two dozen companies there that list either Walters or two of his former State Department colleagues—with whom he now works—as registered agents.
One company in that building is Valkyrie Aviation Holdings Group, which owns the luxury 737 being leased to DHS. That firm, incorporated last August in Delaware, does not list its ownership or the people who run it. But the FAA’s website shows that the company shares an office suite with Soterex Financial Services, a Walters-run company. Journalist Gillian Brockell previously reported that Valkyrie Aviation is in the same building as the Walters-linked companies, among other ties.
None of the companies responded to queries, and we were unable to access the offices when we attempted to visit the Arlington building.
DHS agreed to pay one of the firms in the building, Daedalus Aviation, $140 million for six 737s, the Washington Post reported in December. Though legally separate from Valkyrie, Daedalus, according to its website, is hiring pilots and a mechanic to work on a 737 MAX 8—specifically one designated “BBJ,” for Boeing Business Jet. In other words, a luxury plane that matches the description of the one owned by Valkyrie. The solicitation contains no suggestion the plane will be used for deportations. Instead, Daedalus states that the pilots will be “executing global flight operations on behalf of a senior executive or government official.”
Federal Aviation Administration records show Daedalus acquiring five 737s to date, none of which is a Max 8 Boeing Business Jet, like the one owned by Valkyrie. Tricia McLaughlin, a former DHS spokeswoman, has claimed that the planes being acquired via Daedalus will save the government money, in part by allowing “more efficient flight patterns.”
But DHS has not provided details to bolster that claim, which has drawn broad skepticism.
“For months, we’ve requested a briefing from DHS about its purchase of these aircraft because we have serious concerns about the cost to the American taxpayer,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement. “DHS has refused to provide basic transparency and continues to stonewall the Committee.”
An agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, raised concerns about the cost of the planes. That official said that former acting DHS Under Secretary Christopher Pratt was involved in arranging to buy the jets. Pratt—who overlapped with Walters at the State Department—recently left DHS, according to two DHS officials. Pratt did not respond to inquiries.
Two other companies linked to Walters appear to have quietly provided even more planes to DHS. Vigilant Aviation Holdings and Transnational Aviation Holdings—which were both registered in Delaware on the same day as Valkyrie—own business-class jets operated by DHS, according to flight tracking data. Both of these Gulfstream G650 jets have Trump-themed tail numbers that are strikingly similar to that of the luxury 737: N472US and N473US. FAA records show Transnational has the same business address and suite number as Daedalus Aviation. And the tail number for the Gulfstream jet owned by Vigilant was initially registered to Valkyrie, according to the FAA. As with its luxury 737 job posting, Daedalus is seeking a pilot to fly a Gulfstream 650 for a senior government official.
Walters’ biggest piece of DHS business appears to have come through a contract the department awarded last year to yet another firm he owns. That company, Salus Worldwide Solutions, is also located at the Arlington address, though apparently one floor up from Valkyrie. Under that contract, which is worth up to $915 million, Salus is supposed to arrange free flights for immigrants who agree to self-deport; it is also tasked with processing $1,000 exit bonuses for individuals and $2,500 stipends for unaccompanied minor children who take part in the program. Additionally, the company provides DHS with “diplomatic engagement” support to boost work by foreign governments to persuade their citizens to leave the United States.
Mother Jones and the Project On Government Oversight previously reported that DHS awarded the contract to Salus through a “limited competition,” following extensive contacts between company employees and top DHS officials, among them Pratt.
“I can’t think of any legitimate reason there could not have been a full and open competition for this work.”
A rival contractor, CSI Aviation, sued the federal government last August over the Salus deal, calling the award “a sham competition with a predetermined outcome.” CSI’s suit notes that Salus had no previous record of contracting directly with the federal government—though a court filing states that a $113 million State Department subcontract Salus was awarded a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration “was a significant factor in DHS’s award decision.”
In a December court filing, federal officials, even as they opposed CSI’s lawsuit, made striking admissions about flaws in the procurement process.
The government said that Salus won its DHS contract after contacting the department with an unsolicited proposal to provide services on January 23, 2025, just days after Trump’s inauguration. That’s a legal but unusual inversion of a standard solicitation, in which the government determines a need and then seeks bids from contractors to fill it. Salus’ pitch, according to DHS’s own account, led to extensive contacts between DHS and company officials about a potential contract.
A DHS contracting officer found that Salus had “appeared” to shape the government’s requirements for the contract that the firm was trying to win, which suggested “biased ground rules,” the filing says. The officer, according to the filing, also found that DHS officials “shared high-level budget and task information with Salus that was not available to the public, suggesting an unequal access to information.” All of this “created an appearance of favoritism toward Salus,” the officer found.
But, according to the court filing, the contracting officer recommended waiving restrictions meant to prevent conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety, citing steps DHS said it took to mitigate Salus’ advantages. A higher-level official concurred, noting the contract’s supposed urgency and “national security considerations.” And then Salus got the contract.
“I can’t think of any legitimate reason there could not have been a full and open competition for this work, and it’s not as though the government hasn’t contracted for charter flights before,” said Don Fox, a former acting head and general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics.
Noem and other DHS officials have touted their voluntary deportation program, which they call Project Homecoming, as a success. DHS said last fall that “tens of thousands of illegal aliens” had used the Customs and Border Protection app to assist with self-deportation.
However another court document in the Salus case suggests the program is failing to meet the administration’s hopes. Taundria Cappel, Salus’ chief financial officer, revealed that, as of December 1, Salus had paid out more than 17,000 stipends to voluntary deportees and had contacted tens of thousands of immigrants. But Cappel said the company, since receiving the contract in May 2025, had provided just “9 chartered aircraft flights” which supported “917 voluntary departures.” At that pace, Salus’ performance will fall far short of what, according to a CSI court filing, was the department’s stated goal of “1480 charter flights over three years.” Neither Cappel nor DHS responded to questions about those figures.
Other Walters-run companies are also involved in DHS’s effort to facilitate self-deportations. Soterex Financial Services, the company that shares an office suite with Valkyrie, appears to be handling payments made to people who agree to voluntarily deport, according to payment records on DHS letterhead listing Soterex as the sender reviewed by Mother Jones and POGO.
Soterex, which was formed just days after Trump announced the launch of Project Homecoming, does not itself appear to hold a federal contract. That suggests the company is working under the contract held by Salus, in effect as a subcontractor for a company run by the same person. A government procurement website does not show any federal contracts or subcontracts held by Soterex Financial, although subcontracting data is often missing.
Noem told lawmakers last week that neither she nor other political appointees at the department have influenced who receives contracts. But Noem has also touted a policy under which her office must personally approve any significant DHS spending, including contracts. In Senate testimony last Tuesday, Noem said she had personally evaluated all contracts worth more than $5 million. That gave her an undeniable role in the department’s procurement decisions.
And there’s another link she has to Walters.
In October 2024, Walters donated $10,000 to a political action committee tied to Noem, who at the time was the governor of South Dakota and widely seen as angling for a cabinet post if Trump won. That super PAC, American Resolve, is part of a network of groups that support Noem. Another, American Resolve Policy Fund, a nonprofit, paid Noem’s personal company $137,842 that year for “fundraising consulting,” the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported in January. American Resolve Policy Fund also paid $265,500 to a Lewandowski company, according to its tax filing.
Noem did not reveal those payments to her South Dakota constituents or in the financial disclosure form she filed after her nomination as DHS secretary. They remained secret until Propublica last year reported that the group had paid Noem $80,000 in 2023.
Noem was not asked about those payments at last week’s hearings. Much of her testimony involved defending her statements falsely accusing Alex Pretti and Renee Good, Minneapolis residents killed by DHS agents, of domestic terrorism. (Prior to her firing last week, POGO called for Noem’s removal, in part because of how she responded to the shootings of Pretti and Good.)
Noem also said about 650 DHS agents remain in the Twin Cities “to get to the bottom” of widespread social services fraud in Minnesota. Noem has suggested DHS would look into public officials there who, she implied, had profited from their positions. Just after Good’s death, Noem said she was sending more agents to Minneapolis “to uncover the true corruption and theft that has happened.”
This story was reported with POGO Investigates, the news reporting division of the Project On Government Oversight.
2026-03-10 22:30:54
On Monday evening, as his administration escalated air strikes on Iran, President Donald Trump openly mused about his next moves on Cuba. “It may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover,” he said. “It wouldn’t matter because they’re really down to, as they say , fumes. They have no energy, they have no money.” He told CNN last week that “Cuba is gonna fall pretty soon.”
From the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to a blockade on oil shipments to Cuba, President Donald Trump’s efforts to reshape Latin America are in full swing—impacting millions of lives. People in Venezuela continue living under a repressive government now supplying oil to the US. Meanwhile, Cuba’s healthcare system has been strangled by the US-orchestrated fuel crisis there. The fear across the region is being fanned by a US arsenal aimed at killing what Trump has labeled drug dealers.
Across the globe, protestors have condemned the administration’s recent actions in Venezuela and Cuba. But as my new three-part video series for Mother Jones reveals, I saw a different story unfolding in my hometown.
Miami is home to the country’s largest Venezuelan community, which largely wanted Maduro gone, according to recent polling. It’s also home to a Cuban community that I was born into and helped raise me—one that has historically encouraged US-backed regime change.
At the same time, these communities—which had organized together to shape US foreign policy toward Latin America—now share another concern: the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. The White House has targeted Venezuelan migrants at seemingly every turn, from revoking their temporary protected status to trying to use a wartime deportation law against them. And the administration is now repatriating Cuban migrants, who had long benefitted from uniquely generous immigration policy, in record numbers.
“If Cubans fall off the Republican bandwagon and the Democrats take the opportunity to do something about it, then you have a chance to shift things,” said Guillermo Grenier, the lead researcher behind Florida International University’s Cuba poll.
But the longheld assumption that younger Cubans would drive that shift has gone unfulfilled. In fact, polling shows that younger Cubans have swung rightward. It’s a reality that’s difficult to square with my personal experience.
When I turned 16, I didn’t get my driver’s license. This enraged my grandfather, who worked for decades as a driving instructor and bus driver. It also delighted him, because it meant he could keep picking me up from school. His car speakers always blared conservative talk radio, which in the runup to the 2016 election—and after spending eight hours closeted in an all-boys Catholic school—was the last thing I wanted to hear. Mostly I just sat silently, listening to what my grandfather agreed with and wondering what he would think of me if he were ever to truly know me.
It’s easy to remember the car radio and forget the time he took every day to wash out the tumbler, fill it with a cold drink, drive across town to spend a fraction of my day with me, and then drive across town again, back to Little Havana. During my grandfather’s life, I focused on political divides between us. After his passing, I’ve thought more about what united us.
Generational politics in Miami’s Cuban American community also produced the government official at the heart of all this. The complex history of US imperialism in Latin America is bigger than any one person. But we can’t understand our current chapter in that history without understanding Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles from Miami, is the senior US government official in charge of foreign policy. That includes the capture of Maduro, the oil blockade against Cuba, and regime change efforts elsewhere. He’s project managing US intervention in Cuba, with the president’s trust and backing. And Trump is reportedly testing Rubio’s name for a possible presidential run in 2028. And to understand how this man at the highest levels of government is reshaping global politics, we need to understand something he and I have in common: the experience of growing up Cuban American in Miami.
What does it mean to be an heir to the Cuban diaspora, a group both targeted by and largely encouraging US imperialism? Marco Rubio and I have different answers to that. His could explain where Venezuela, Latin America, and our world are heading—and why Rubio is steering us there.
2026-03-10 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The war with Iran has brought shipping traffic to a virtual standstill in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow Persian Gulf channel through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas flows. That has sent fossil fuel prices surging—and with them, the potential for profit.
The price of Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, is up more than 10 percent since the conflict started almost a week ago, and natural gas prices in some places, especially Europe, have doubled. US consumers are already feeling the effects, with gasoline around 27 cents per gallon higher than before the war. But industry analysts say that, at least in the short-term, higher prices could be a windfall for producers that aren’t dependent on Persian Gulf supplies, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and the French company Total.
“What’s delayed, what’s disturbed, and what’s destroyed, I think that’s the whole key.”
“If you are operating, if you’re producing, and you’re going to enjoy higher prices for your product, you are going to benefit,” said Abhi Rajendran, who leads oil market research at the analysis firm Energy Intelligence and is a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “These high prices are going to be good for energy companies in general.”
Energy stocks are to some degree reflecting those price jumps, with firms like Venture Global and Cheniere Energy seeing notable gains this week. An analysis by the EnergyFlux newsletter, for example, found exporters and traders of American liquefied natural gas are set to earn nearly $1 billion more per week based on higher prices. Refineries in the region have sustained damage that will make that business more profitable for companies located elsewhere, too.
The stock gains aren’t ubiquitous. ExxonMobil, for example, is down slightly and Chevron has been hovering around its pre-war price. Those more tepid responses could be due to a range of factors, such as geopolitical uncertainty or increased refining costs that come with high prices, but even those companies are probably selling their product for more than they were last week.
“You are opportunistic in a sense. You see a price spike and you want to capture that upside,” said Vincent Piazza, senior equity analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. At the same time, he said, “I don’t think anyone is happy with volatility.”
Shell declined to comment, and none of the other companies named in this article responded to requests for comment. But Piazza said long-term oil and gas futures show that investors expect stabilization, meaning that the gains companies are seeing now may not last. “It provides them with a modest short-term windfall,” he said. In the 12-month futures market, “prices in the latter months haven’t changed.”
Both Piazza and Rajendran made comparisons to the war between Russia and Ukraine. Energy prices skyrocketed at first—far more than they have during the Iran conflict—but eventually moderated. That also implies, of course, that there is still plenty of room for the current situation to continue to escalate before it improves.
President Trump has said US and Israeli strikes could continue for four to five weeks. More than 1,000 people have died in Iran since the United States and Israel launched their attack Saturday. Iran’s retaliatory strikes throughout the region have killed more than a dozen civilians and seven American troops.
The energy impacts have so far been relatively temporary, said Piazza, and confined mostly to delays in delivery. Prices are already coming down off their initial spikes. But if, say, a major gas port in Qatar or oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia is severely damaged or destroyed, that would drastically change the outlook. A prolonged war could also cause countries like Iraq to shutter production that couldn’t easily reopen. EnergyFlux says that if Qatari gas remains offline into the summer, companies could see as much as $20 billion more in profit each week compared to before the war.
“What’s delayed, what’s disturbed, and what’s destroyed, I think that’s the whole key,” Piazza said of the benchmarks he’s watching as the conflict continues. “Think of it as a massive storm hitting the Gulf Coast as opposed to a tsunami that wipes out entire sections of infrastructure.”
Rajendran also warned that prices could rise high enough that demand slumps, and it backfires on producers. “Once you start getting to $100 or $100-plus range, then it starts becoming economically disruptive even for the oil companies,” he said. But for now, he added, “as long as oil prices remain where it doesn’t become disruptive and destructive, oil companies are going to benefit.”
2026-03-10 04:39:29
When six-year-old Joseph Rodriguez got sick, his mother had to bring him along to her regular check-in at a California ICE office. There, last week, he was immediately detained and quickly deported—all without his hearing aids.
Rodriguez is Deaf; he and his mother Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez, an asylum seeker from Colombia fleeing domestic violence, live in the congressional district of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who sent staff to Colombia over the weekend to return Rodriguez’ assistive devices. A relative who attempted to provide them to the boy while he was in ICE detention was turned away; ICE officials refused to give him the hearing aids, according to local station KRON.
“This child has been dragged from detention center to detention center, to places that are not meant for children,” his attorney said to KRON. “They are definitely not built for children with severe disabilities. It’s inhuman, illegal, and unconstitutional.”
The family, who were deported as a group—six-year-old Joseph, his four-year-old brother, and Rodriguez Gutierrez, their mother—had lived for four years in the Bay Area city of Hayward, until their detention last week without due process or contact with their lawyers. Joseph was enrolled at the California School for the Deaf in nearby Fremont.
“Think about that for a moment: a six-year-old child with a disability suddenly in a different country, separated from the country he has come to know,” Swalwell said, “now surrounded by silence. The horror stories from this White House continue from ICE.”
Unlike many other medical devices, most hearing aids are highly customized to an individual’s hearing loss, and quality hearing aids can easily cost thousands of dollars, making them extremely difficult or impossible to replace in a situation like Rodriguez’s. (Some Deaf people choose to not use hearing devices and rely entirely on signing; Rodriguez and his family’s proficiency in ASL or other sign languages is unclear, and ICE facilities are not equipped to accommodate Deaf people without assistive devices.)
At the press conference, Swalwell also referenced ICE’s deportation of a six-year-old with cancer, among other deportations and deaths in custody that sum to a pattern of sometimes fatal hostility towards kids and adults with disabilities or other health needs. As I reported in February, the Department of Homeland Security now has just a few staff investigating civil rights complaints, meaning the department and its officials are unlikely to face any internal repercussions for their conduct—or any pressure to change course.
Swalwell, who is also running for governor of California, said that his office was working with the family’s lawyers to secure their return under humanitarian parole, but it’s not clear how long that would take.
“We will not stand by while ICE tears our families apart and endangers innocent children,” Swalwell said at the conference. “What happened here was not about public safety.”
