On Monday, Canada, citing the imperative to move away from Russian energy sources, signed an agreement with Germany aimed at expediting efforts towards the commercial-scale trade of clean hydrogen fuel. The memorandum of understanding inked between the two nations commits them to supporting…

Washington is effectively rewriting the mandate of the Energy Department’s flagship lending arm, pivoting it away from the Biden-era role of scaling wind, solar and grid-heavy decarbonization projects and toward Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda centered on fossil fuels, nuclear, critical minerals and industrial supply chains.

The administration said it is restructuring or eliminating nearly $84 billion of clean-energy projects financed under the prior administration after a review of roughly $104 billion in outstanding loan commitments, much of it issued late in the 2024 election cycle.

Half a century after the oil shocks of the 1970s rewired global macroeconomics, the prevailing assumption in markets is that Middle East conflict is tragic, destabilizing and dangerous, but rarely macro-dominant. The modern oil system has repeatedly demonstrated a kind of geopolitical shock absorption: violence can intensify, shipping can be harassed, even state-on-state exchanges can occur, and yet crude often behaves as if the world’s central premise still holds, barrels keep moving.

This “firewall” between geopolitics and energy pricing is real but contingent. It is not that the Middle East has become economically irrelevant; it is that the specific kinds of disruptions that force a sustained oil repricing, like damage to production, export terminals, or a closure of critical maritime choke points, have generally been avoided. If that restraint breaks, the macro consequences would be immediate and global.