Rebecca Dell

2026 Grawemeyer world order award winner explores the connection between climate change and security | UofL News For his work to understand why climate change leads to negative security consequences in some places and not others, Joshua W. Busby, professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, ...

Some news. My book on climate and security for Cambridge University Press is the winner of the 2026 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Advancing World Order. Thrilled to be among the august company of previous winners. www.uoflnews.com/post/uofltod...

Thyssenkrupp agrees steel restructuring with union, paving way for potential sale Indian magnate Naveen Jindal is continuing to conduct due diligence on steel business

May be seeing the end of an iconic European steel company.
www.ft.com/content/2fec...

Thanks. Very helpful.

California refinery closures spark pipeline race to West Coast A race is on among energy companies to build a major fuel pipeline to the U.S. West Coast, a potentially lucrative prize as the planned closure of two California refineries threatens to send gasoline ...

Serious question: where would any of these pipelines be coming from? The West Coast doesn't have pipeline connections to the rest of the country because it's not close to other oil supply centers and there are inconvenient things like the Rocky Mountains in the way.

www.reuters.com/business/ene...

Nippon Steel: Advancing climate policy disclosure and decarbonisation efforts | Climate Action 100+ Nippon Steel, the fourth largest steel producer in the world1, has improved its climate policy engagement disclosures and announced additional investment in electric arc furnaces (EAFs) in 2025.

Climate Action 100+, a climate investor-led initiative, recognised Nippon Steel's progress in terms of disclosures & announced additional investment in EAFs in 2025. They also pointed out a few areas to continue engagement to strengthen the company’s #climate transition strategy👇
#GreenSteel #Coal

For the moment, the best suggestion I can offer is that everyone should be studying the effects of the Trump tariff madness for what it can tell us about climate and trade. So many exogenous effects!

And here concludes what turned out to not really be an especially short thread.

Carbon prices on imports can create real incentives to offshore production even if they are implemented perfectly (which they never will be). The clearest evidence of this is that when we just do what's good for business, we end up with negative carbon prices.

That's not to say we shouldn't do climate-linked trade measures. We definitely should. But we should consider how they will affect different stages of the supply chain differently. Because climate pollution and value add are inversely correlated, analysis base on averages can be very misleading.

And one of the things we can see is that this tariff structure can, in fact, be very bad for domestic manufacturing. According to the thread that started all of this, Ford is expecting a $3b hit to its 2025 profits from the new tariffs.

Back to Trump's "inversion". Weirdly, it works the same way that a carbon price on imports would. At least the sign of the effect is the same. Obviously, he's not a stealth greenie. He isn't doing climate policy. He's following his manias and we're learning what we can from the collateral damage.

Add this to my ever-lengthening list of things that we really should talk about more.

Like all the times we have accidentally almost nuclear bombed ourselves and that IEA thinks there is 70 million barrels per day of of oil that can be drilled for less than $10 per barrel.

One person who did notice was Joe Shapiro at Berkeley, who calculated the size of this effect a few years back. Our current average level of SUBSIDY for climate pollution in international trade is about a $100 per ton of CO2.

www.joseph-s-shapiro.com/research/Sha...

Wild, huh? My fellow climate nerds have spent so many millions of hours arguing about carbon border adjustment mechanisms, but very few of them have even noticed that we've all had border carbon subsidies in place in place all along.

Lower taxes (tariffs) at the beginning of the supply chain and higher taxes at the end means that you have lower taxes on high CO2 goods and higher taxes on low CO2 goods--a negative carbon tax!

That's right: pretty much every country in the world has a de facto negative carbon tax on imports.

One extreme example: for a concrete apartment building, making the cement might be 30% of all the emissions to build the building, but less than 1% the construction cost.

These tariff structures are not environmentally neutral, though. Making basic materials like steel emits vastly more carbon pollution per dollar than making finished goods.

It's probably also not great for "American competitiveness," regardless of how you define that term.

This is the "inversion" from the post above--Trump is doing the opposite. Today, the auto industry is facing the highest tariffs on basic materials, lower tariffs on car parts, and the lowest tariffs of all on the cars and trucks. This is very bad for car companies.

This means that the customer-facing firms are more profitable and with that comes more political power. They use that power to lobby for lower tariffs on their inputs (to lower their own costs) and higher tariffs on their competitors. So usually tariffs go up the closer you are to the customer.

Understanding this requires a little background on the typical structure of supply chains and tariffs.

In most supply chains, the closer you are to the customer, the higher your value-addition. Profit margins are a lot higher on cars than on steel, on clothes than on polyester chemicals.

This year's tariff madness has an interesting structural feature. What @jonasnahm.com is calling an "inversion" is that Trump has higher tariff rates on intermediate goods and basic materials (esp. steel and aluminum) than finished goods. He points out one consequence. There are others.

A short🧵.

1/4 California refineries are closing faster than gas demand is declining. Two facilities shutting down could eliminate another 18% of the state's refining capacity. Gasoline consumption has fallen 16% over 20 years.

buff.ly/26t8H5J

Industrial Equity Mapper Stories of Industrial Pollution in the U.S.

@industriouslabs.bsky.social just released a powerful new tool that analyzes health, demographic, economic, and pollution data in communities impacted by industrial pollution across the US.

industriouslabs.org/issues/indus... 1/2

Iran president says capital move now a necessity as water crisis deepens Iran’s capital must be moved because the country “no longer has a choice,” President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Thursday in remarks carried by state media, warning that severe ecological strain has mad...

It really feels like it should be a bigger story that the President of Iran said that their capital must be moved because of environmental degradation, including water shortages and land subsidence of 1 foot per year.

www.iranintl.com/en/202511209...

The most interesting aspect of this is von der Leyen represents a continent without much oil & gas. The faster the world stops poking holes in the ground and pumping energy (and CO2) out, the better for Europe. It's in her interest to create maximum pressure to get off fossil fuels. And yet...

Shifting away from fossil fuels & fossil-based materials, to biofuels & biomaterials, means reducing one important source of GHG emissions (fossil fuels) but potentially increasing another (land-use change, driven by increased land demand). It’s essential to account for both sides of this equation.

At COP30, chemical companies push biobased climate solutions But environmentalists are raising concerns about the ecosystem, food security, and other impacts from the fossil fuel alternative

The chemical industry is a huge source of GHG emissions. Decarbonizing the industry will be hard, but as a UNFCCC technology expert said here, there's no way we can avoid it. COP30 reflected that, with what seemed to be more spotlight on chemicals than past summits. cen.acs.org/environment/...

The Department of Energy unveiled a sweeping internal reorganization that included eliminating two major clean-energy offices. The agency is cutting the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, a new organizational chart the agency released Thursday morning shows. The department is “aligning its operations to restore common sense to energy policy, lower costs for American families and businesses and ensure the responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement.

You're going to focus on lowering costs by cutting the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy?

Also, OCED was the coolest thing going. Industrial decarb! This sucks.

h/t @heatmap.news

US Steel Plans New Facility in Osceola U.S. Steel announced plans to build a new direct reduced iron plant at its Big River Steel site in Osceola, expanding its northeast Arkansas operations under Nippon Steel’s $11 billion growth plan. Th...

Coal-based steel, it’s a dead end! US Steel planning a new coal-free furnace to make iron for their electric arc furnace in Arkansas. www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/us-s...

Trump's EPA set up a system whereby corporate polluters could be relieved of the burden of meeting air-quality regulations. How? By, uh, asking.

Sure enough, lots of them have asked, with devastating consequences for air quality. New report: