Nearly two weeks into the conflict, the war in Iran has triggered “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” the International Energy Agency said on Thursday. That comes despite an agreement among world leaders on Wednesday to release some 400 million barrels of oil from their strategic reserves. Here’s what else to know:
Oil price warnings. A spokesperson for Iran’s military command warned on Wednesday that oil could reach $200 barrel, far exceeding previous records. The U.S. energy secretary, Chris Wright, said that’s unlikely.
President Trump shrugged off concerns about rising prices, pointing out on social media that the United States is the largest oil producer in the world. “When oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” he wrote Thursday morning.
A crucial shipping lane remains largely closed. On Thursday, Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, vowed to continue blocking the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow body of water that conveys about 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies. Two oil tankers were set ablaze early on Thursday, leading Iraq and Oman to close oil terminals.
The environmental consequences. In Iran, damage to fossil fuel infrastructure has caused black rain and thick smoke over Tehran, prompting concerns that tanks of mazut, a bottom-of-the-barrel oil residue product used in power plants, have caught on fire, releasing huge quantities of sulfur and other toxic pollution into the air.
Will all this upheaval push governments around the world to pick up the pace of renewable energy installations? Not necessarily, Brad Plumer and Lisa Friedman write. And in the short term, some countries are likely to burn more coal. What questions do you have about the environmental fallout of the war in Iran or its effects on the world’s energy supplies? Email us at [email protected] and we’ll answer your questions in future newsletters.
Kicked out of the Sierra Club
Last year, the Sierra Club’s national magazine honored Delia Malone as a “changemaker” — an activist to inspire other activists — for her yearslong campaign to reintroduce wolves to wild areas of Colorado.
A year later, the Sierra Club kicked her out.
In February, the club sent Malone, 71, a letter saying she had committed “serious violations of Sierra Club Member Obligations.” The letter listed seven rules that she had violated, including provisions requiring members to be respectful of each other, and to represent the club positively in public.
“You are no longer a member of Sierra Club,” said the letter, which was signed by the club’s office of general counsel. “Revocation of your status as a member of Sierra Club is permanent, meaning that you will no longer be eligible for any form of Sierra Club membership.”
What the letter did not say was what Malone actually did to deserve this rare punishment — which the club says is for members whose misconduct is “beyond repair.”
Malone said she believed that she was targeted in part because she talked to The New York Times last year, a claim the organization denies. She was quoted in a Nov. 7 article about how the Sierra Club had embraced social-justice issues far removed from its traditional environmental goals.
In that article, Claire Brown and I reported that the nonprofit organization’s shift was followed by years of internal strife and declining membership, leaving the group weakened just as the Trump administration has ramped up its attacks on environmental protections.
‘I had no idea’
In an interview, Malone said the club had not notified her that she was facing this punishment, had not told her what she was accused of doing and did not give her a chance to defend herself.
“I had no idea this was going on,” Malone said.
An ecologist by training, she had been a volunteer for the Sierra Club for 12 years and had previously served as one of the Colorado chapter’s statewide leaders. She helped lead the club’s efforts to campaign for a 2020 ballot measure authorizing the reintroduction of wolves to the state. It passed narrowly, and now the state says at least four packs of wolves live in Colorado.
In the November article, Malone had said she had once been scolded by a Sierra Club staffer for saying that the club should lobby the Colorado Legislature for more protections for wolves.
“One of the staff said, ‘That’s fine, Delia. But what do wolves have to do with equity, justice and inclusion?’” Malone said then. After that, Malone said she had heard from an investigator hired by the club, who had asked her questions but declined to say what she was being investigated for. The Colorado chapter of the Sierra Club told us last year that “no one was investigated or accused of values misalignment on the basis of wolf conservation efforts.”
A month after the Times story came out, the Sierra Club’s Colorado chapter removed Malone from her unpaid role as “Wildlife Chair.” It cited the same section of the club’s rules that the Sierra Club’s national leaders later cited to strip her membership.
Malone said she believed the Times article helped trigger both punishments. “It gave them a specific reason to say, ‘She’s not abiding by the rules,’” she said.
A day earlier, the Sierra Club had also voted to strip membership from another former leader of the Colorado chapter, Kent Abernethy.
In an interview, Abernethy, 64, said he had been a Sierra Club member for 40 years and had until recently led a local branch of the Colorado chapter. He said his letter from the club was identical to Malone’s: it described the rules he had violated, but not how he had violated them.
The future of the Sierra Club
Abernethy said he believed his dismissal was also rooted in the broader debate over the Sierra Club’s direction. The Colorado chapter has been a center of that debate: in 2022, the Sierra Club’s national leaders ousted the chapter’s elected leaders for fostering what it called a “harmful and non-inclusive management culture.” It replaced them with an unelected “steering committee” approved by the club’s national leaders, an arrangement that continues today.
Abernethy had recently emailed his local Sierra Club branch to criticize the club’s leaders for stifling dissent and punishing Malone.
The Sierra Club has defended its shift in focus, saying that its embrace of social justice is necessary to build a broader coalition. A spokesman for the club, Jonathon Berman, declined to describe what Malone and Abernethy had done to trigger their punishment, but said “the decision was not made as a result” of the Times article.
Berman said that the club encouraged debate among its members: “Any claim that an action taken to protect our members and staff is meant to silence dissent is false.”
Malone now leads her own environmental group, ColoradoWild, and Abernethy sits on its board. Both said they would continue their environmental work outside the Sierra Club. Malone said she looked back fondly on her work with the organization.
“There’s families of wolves thriving in Colorado,” Malone said. “That’s amazing.” She said the Sierra Club’s national leadership at the time had provided crucial help: “They were very supportive, up until they weren’t.”
The Trump administration
Eye doctor named to air pollution advisory board draws pushback
The Trump administration has tapped an eye doctor with no background in air pollution science to advise the Environmental Protection Agency on what levels of air pollutants are safe to breathe.
The E.P.A. named Brian Joondeph, a Colorado-based ophthalmologist and political commentator, on Monday to the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, an influential panel that advises the agency’s leadership on the latest scientific evidence on soot, smog and other hazardous pollutants.
Dr. Joondeph has never published a peer-reviewed paper dealing with air pollution. He has coauthored a handful of peer-reviewed papers about eye diseases, as well as dozens of opinion pieces in conservative publications, many of which praised President Trump’s style of governing and foreign policies.
It was the government’s latest move to sideline or shun scientific expertise, drawing criticism from past members of the advisory panel. — Maxine Joselow
More climate news from around the web:
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The Guardian reports that an estimate by the United Kingdom’s climate advisers finds that achieving the country’s net zero target by 2050 will cost less than a single oil shock, like the fallout from the war in Iran.
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Sublime Systems, a green cement start-up, has laid off two-thirds of its staff, Bloomberg reports, after the Trump administration canceled a grant that would have supported the producer’s first major manufacturing facility.
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Claire Brown covers climate change for The Times and writes for the Climate Forward newsletter.
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