Oil prices plunged by “almost 15%” last night after US president Donald Trump postponed his threat of “civilisation-ending” attacks on Iran, reports the Guardian, while Iran’s foreign minister said passage through the strait of Hormuz would be allowed for the next two weeks under the management of its military. The newspaper notes that news of the two-week ceasefire was “embraced by markets”. The price of Brent crude – the international standard – dropped 14.4% to $93.48 and futures for US crude oil fell by 14.7% to $96.27 a barrel, it says. However, it adds that “prices remain well above” where they were at the start of the war. Reuters reports that the heads of the International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Monetary Fund and the World ​Bank will discuss the energy crisis triggered by the war next Monday.

Meanwhile, Reuters is among the outlets covering comments made by the IEA’s Fatih Birol to Le Figaro where he said the current energy crisis is worse than those of “1973, 1979 and 2022 combined”. The newswire reports that Birol said the “world has never experienced ​a disruption to energy supply of such magnitude”. According to the Guardian, Birol added that developing nations ⁠would suffer the most from higher oil and gas prices, higher food prices and an acceleration of inflation, while European nations would also feel an impact. The Financial Times’s Energy Source newsletter covers Birol’s six predictions for how the energy crisis will shape the future. These include an acceleration of nuclear power, an increase in coal use and an uptick in renewable power installations in Europe, according to the outlet. Separately, the Financial Times asks whether the Iran war will “derail” the energy transition. And the Times reports that “Shell’s oil traders have cashed in on the chaos caused by the Iran war even as the energy giant’s gas business was hit by disruption to its facilities in Qatar”.

MORE ON ENERGY CRISIS

• Madagascar has declared a “nationwide state of ​energy emergency” for 15 days, reports Reuters.
• Reuters: “Malaysia announces measures to address supply disruptions amid energy crunch.”
• Four airports in Italy have introduced jet fuel restrictions amid “limited fuel availability”, according to the Independent.
• Euractiv covers a report which finds European households could suffer “devastating” additional energy costs of “close to €1,900 per year”.
• Nearly a fifth of French petrol stations are currently facing fuel supply shortages, prompting protests from some truckers, according to Reuters.
• Reuters: “High fuel costs forcing Philippine farmers to abandon harvests.”

The Guardian speaks to climate experts – economist Nick Stern, Paris Agreement architect Christiana Figueres, Power Shift Africa’s Mohamed Adow and an anonymous African climate negotiator – about the impact of the UK opening up new oil and gas fields in the North Sea. They warn that new UK fields would “send shock waves around the world, imperilling international climate targets, undermining the UK’s climate leadership and encouraging developing countries to exploit their own fossil fuel reserves”. Their warnings come as the UK government faces pressure from the “oil industry, the Conservatives, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, some trade unions and parts of the Treasury” to give the green light to new oil and gas fields, despite “clear evidence that doing so would not cut prices and would have almost no effect on imports”, it reports. [See Carbon Brief’s factcheck of various false and misleading claims around North Sea drilling.]

The hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party said yesterday that it would approve the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields in the North Sea, reports the Daily Mail. The party claims, adds the newspaper, that it would, if elected, “increase UK oil and gas production by at least half”. Richard Tice, the party’s energy spokesperson, claims inaccurately that the “Tories and Labour have deliberately made us poorer with their net-zero obsession”. [See Carbon Brief’s factcheck about why gas – not net-zero – is behind the UK’s high electricity prices.]

MORE ON UK

• Politico reports that Drax is “walking away” from its plans to install “vast” carbon capture facilities at its Yorkshire biomass plant due to “lack of policy certainty on the required levels of support”.
• The Daily Mail and Daily Express cover calls for the government to allow more North Sea drilling from Sharon Graham, general secretary of the Unite trade union.
• Oil and gas companies have accused chancellor Rachel Reeves of “blocking” £17.5bn of investment in the North Sea after she “shelved” plans to scrap the windfall tax on the industry, reports the Times. The paper claims that Reeves was “supportive” of a plan to end the tax early last month, before oil and gas prices “soared”.
• The Press Association, Times, Daily Telegraph and BusinessGreen report that UK electric car sales saw their “best month ever” in March amid rising oil prices.

According to a new report by energy thinktank Ember, battery storage is now “cheap enough in India that solar power can meet 90% of the country’s power demand at lower lifetime costs”, reports the Hindustan Times. Seven of the 10 largest states in India could meet “at least 83% of their electricity demand” from solar plus batteries at “costs lower than current average power purchase costs”, adds the Economic Times. While “the shift is being driven by a sharp fall in battery costs” – declining 40% in 2024 and 31% in 2025 – Down to Earth notes that the “transition is not without challenges”, from low solar output in the monsoon to “structural hurdles” in India’s power system, such as “transmission constraints and inadequate storage deployment”. Writing in the Business Standard, India’s former G20 sherpa Amitabh Kant wants the country to triple its renewable energy target “from 500GW to 1500GW” by 2030, emphasising that “every renewable tender should include battery storage”. 

Meanwhile, a nuclear reactor “two decades in the making” attained “first criticality” on Monday, reports the Telegraph India, “marking India’s entry into the second stage” of its nuclear energy strategy. The country’s prime minister Narendra Modi called it a “decisive step towards harnessing [India’s] vast thorium reserves”, the Economic Times reports, with Al Jazeera adding it “takes [India] a step closer to cutting dependence on uranium”.

MORE ON INDIA

• A two-week ceasefire in the Iran war “could ease pressure on India’s economy by stabilising energy prices and supply chains”, but “durable recovery” would need a longer truce, writes Moneycontrol.
• Private forecaster Skymet predicts India will ​receive “below-normal monsoon ‌rainfall” in 2026 as “El Niño ​is set to reduce ​precipitation”, reports Reuters.
• Writing for Mint, Soumya Sarkar argues that India’s companies need to “redirect about a quarter” of all corporate social responsibility budgets to cutting emissions and “tie executive pay to emission reduction targets”.

Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese has said he discussed “regional energy security” with Chinese premier Li Qiang by phone yesterday, reports Reuters. However, the readout from China’s state news agency Xinhua on the call did not mention “energy security or fuel”, adds the newswire. Meanwhile, China has once again limited petrol and diesel price hikes to around half the “typical increase under its pricing mechanism” amid the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, reports Reuters. A third Reuters report said that China has plenty of urea stock thanks to the country’s “rather unique reliance on coal” as the world struggles with the supply. Chinese coal companies are “turning to chemicals manufacturing for growth” amid a shortage of oil supplies, according to Bloomberg. A solar industry insider tells financial news outlet Caixin that geopolitical conflicts “reinforce the importance of renewable energy”, but the solar sector’s overcapacity problem remains difficult to improve in the short term.

MORE ON CHINA

• The South China Morning Post reports that China has broken ground on the world’s highest-altitude concentrated solar power plant.
• China’s electric-arc furnace steelmakers “boosted weekly capacity utilisation to the highest” levels since January 2024, reports Bloomberg, citing Mysteel.
• China plans to upgrade or phase out “outdated” petrochemical plants by 2029, reports Reuters.
• People’s Daily says China’s offshore wind sector is building competitive advantages globally in “scale, technology and industrial clustering”. Xinhua reports that China’s deepest offshore wind project, with 504MW of installed capacity, has achieved grid connection and power generation.
• South China Morning Post: “China to help Cuba with solar energy amid US oil blockade and total power outage.”
• The Associated Press discusses the challenges China’s mining workers face as the country shifts away from coal.

Proxy advisor Glass Lewis has recommended that BP shareholders vote against the re-election of Albert Manifold as the fossil-fuel company’s chair over concerns about climate-related reporting, in a move backed by investment group Legal & General, reports the Financial Times. Both groups said a decision by BP’s board to exclude a climate-related shareholder resolution from green investor group Follow This at its annual meeting later this month raised concerns about transparency, according to the paper. The proposal in question asked BP to set out strategies for maintaining shareholder value if oil and gas demand declines. The Guardian reports that the intervention comes as BP is in “the process of pivoting its focus back to oil and gas after an ill-received foray into renewables”.

Meanwhile, the Times reports on a poll of 200 fund managers from brokerage Berenberg which found that “ESG investors” were starting to “focus less on global warming and fossil fuels and more on other areas of concern including health, artificial intelligence ethics and corruption”.

Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope, co-founders of the journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now, argue the upcoming “just-transition” conference in Colombia “underscores a point often missed in the usual narrative about climate change”, namely, that the “overwhelming majority of the world’s people – 80-89% of them – want their governments to take stronger climate action”. The conference, they write, aims to begin drawing up the roadmap “blocked at COP30” in Belem, with energy and environment ministers that have agreed to form a “coalition of the willing”. One area of focus, they say, will be how to phase out the $7tn a year governments spend subsidising fossil fuels – “but to do so without punishing communities, workers and tax bases”. They continue: “The secret weapon of the ‘coalition of the willing’ gathering in Colombia is its potential to function as an economic superpower”.

Meanwhile, in an editorial about the Artemis moon mission, the Guardian says there is risk that the “programme is a dangerous distraction from the urgency of finding ways to live within the ecological limits of the world we already have”. It points out that the US has undertaken its first moon voyage in half a century in the same year that the country has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement for the second time. The Guardian continues: “Space-focused techno-optimism shades into moral nihilism when it opts for fantasies of colonising new worlds in preference to policies aimed at protecting the one we already have”. The human curiosity and science that underpins space travel should not be “dismissed out of distaste for its darker implications”, the newspaper says, adding that Trump’s “murderous bellicosity in recent days has been a horrifying contrast to the wonder of the astronauts”.

MORE COMMENT

• For the Backchannel substack, Powering Past Coal Alliance’s Julia Skorupska says fossil-fuel roadmaps can help countries transition away from coal in the wake of the energy crisis.
• In the Guardian, Christiana Figueres – executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) over 2010-16 –  writes that sea level rise is a health crisis that “polluters” should be held accountable for. 
• In a companion piece, the Guardian covers comments made by Figueres as she is announced as co-chair of a Lancet Commission examining how sea-level rise is reshaping health, wellbeing and inequality. She warns that countries are being “held hostage” by their reliance on fossil fuels.
• In his The Crucial Years substack, headlined “Oil and gas = peril and poverty; solar and wind = prosperity and protection”, veteran campaigner and author Bill McKibben argues that 2026 has “changed the psychological meaning of energy forever”.
• Forbes’ chairman and editor-in-chief Steve Forbes claims that the “massive push in this century for alternatives to fossil fuels” as “one of the greatest follies in human history”.
• In a separate piece for Forbes, contributor Ariel Cohen says the war has “highlighted the need to accelerate transportation electrification, expand nuclear energy use and bolster strategic energy reserves”.

Frank Elderson, an executive board member of the European Central Bank and vice-chair of the supervisory board of the central bank, argues that Europe’s energy dependence has “become one of the critical vulnerabilities” of its economy. He explains: “Recent energy price shocks have transferred vast resources out of Europe, prompted emergency interventions and strained public finances”. Europe’s energy dependence has “profound implications” for the European Central Bank, whose “primary mandate” is price stability. Elderson says “repeated price shocks make achieving this objective increasingly difficult”. He continues that the “most effective way” that Europe can reduce its exposure” to geopolitical risk is by “cutting reliance on imported fossil fuels and accelerating an orderly shift to homegrown clean energy”. BusinessGreen and Bloomberg cover the comments. 

MORE UK COMMENT

• The climate-sceptic Sun has an editorial entitled: “We’re in an energy crisis…Starmer must cut fuel duty and utilise the North Sea now.”
• The Independent’s political commentator John Rentoul explores why chancellor Rachel Reeves and energy secretary Ed Miliband are “locked in a dispute” around the response to the energy crisis.
• In Conservative Home, shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho claims the UK’s “carbon tax” – its emissions trading scheme (ETS) – has “placed an immense burden on the shoulders of British industry”.
• In the climate-sceptic Daily Express, chief political commentator Robert Taylor says the Green party’s agenda is a “mixture of the hilarious and mortifying” – and singles out the party’s plan to bring the “absurd” net-zero target from 2050 to an even more “ludicrous 2040 or 2030”.
• The Daily Express dedicates a double-page spread to a piece promoting the use of coal and the work of coal lobby group FutureCoal.
• Also in the Daily Express, climate-sceptic commentator Tim Newark says “one man” stands in the way of Reeves’ growth agenda.

This edition of the Daily Briefing was written by Cecilia Keating, with contributions from Henry Zhang and Aruna Chandrasekhar. It was edited by Leo Hickman.

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