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Shell’s profits ‘obscene’ as European oil majors’ profits surge by 43%
May 07, 2026
As Shell announces bumper Q1 profits of $6.9 billion, new analysis from Global Witness reveals that six of Europe’s leading oil majors – bp, Shell, TotalEnergies, Eni, Equinor and Repsol – have recorded the highest quarterly profits since 2022, when they reaped the benefits of the fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine.
In the first quarter of 2026, the combined $21.7 billion* in quarterly profits recorded by bp, Repsol, TotalEnergies, Eni and Equinor was 43% higher than the same period last year, reflecting a significant windfall from volatile oil prices caused by the US-Israel war in Iran.
According to Global Witness’ analysis of quarterly filings, these six fossil fuel giants have not collectively generated this much money since Q4 2022. The three biggest European majors - Shell, BP and TotalEnergies - have earned $252 billion since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Global Witness head of news investigations Patrick Galey said: “As lives are destroyed through war and people everywhere fear rising bills, it’s galling to see oil giants like Shell raking in obscene amounts of money.
“Sadly, we all know this isn’t the first time oil giants have cashed in from war - when Russia invaded Ukraine 4 years ago, our energy bills spiralled as fossil fuel firms raked it in.
“And now we’re seeing the same pattern repeat itself: the combined profits of Europe’s six biggest oil firms were up by 43% compared to the same period last year. These are clearly the spoils of war.
“It’s time to break free from the fossil fuel doom loop – we need robust taxes on big polluters to insulate households from price shocks and to fund a cheaper, cleaner, more stable energy future for all.”
In April, analysis by Global Witness and the Guardian found that the world’s top 100 oil and gas producers banked more than $30m every hour in excess profit in the first month of the US-Israeli war on Iran, with the conflict pushing up oil prices above $100 (£74) a barrel in March.
Although US oil majors Chevron and ExxonMobil are yet to cash in on the windfall from higher prices thanks to stalled deliveries and supply disruptions in the region, European majors like bp and TotalEnergies are already enjoying a boon from higher prices thanks to their substantial trading operations, which allows them to monetize market volatility.
The shareholders in these companies stand to gain considerably from these profits. The three largest European supermajors – bp, Shell, and TotalEnergies, rewarded shareholders a combined $10 billion in Q1 2026 – since the war in Iran that sent oil prices spiralling began.
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The GOP Wants to Put Workers Under AI's Thumb: A Shorter Work Week Is a Better Answer
Just because Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have no grasp of economics doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t.
May 07, 2026
Productivity growth is an old concept; we’ve been seeing it at a substantial pace for more than 200 years. Nonetheless, many elite intellectual types like to claim they know nothing about it when they talk about AI.
It’s far from clear how much of a productivity boom we will see with AI. For people who are lost with my reference to productivity growth, the story that AI will take all the jobs is a story of a massive productivity boom. If that happens, it will mean that the people who are still working will be hugely more productive, since we will be producing the same or more goods and services as we do at present, with many fewer people working.
FWIW, virtually no major forecaster or forecasting agency is projecting anything like this productivity boom. For example, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that productivity growth will average 1.5 percent over the next decade.
That’s a healthy rate of productivity growth, but nothing extraordinary. It’s a bit better than the 1.3 percent rate from 2005 to 2025, but less than the 2.0 percent rate we saw in the 1990s and much less than the 2.4 percent pace the country had from 1947 to 1973. There is no story of AI creating mass unemployment here.
CBO is not God, but they are pretty much in the center of professional forecasters by design. They try to make sure that their forecasts do not vary hugely from what other public and private sector forecasters are projecting.
It is also worth noting that if CBO is seriously wrong on the low side, then some other things logically follow. Most importantly, if productivity growth proves to be far more rapid than what they have projected, GDP growth will also be far more rapid than projected. This would mean, among other things, that the debt-to-GDP ratios will be much lower in the future than is currently projected.
In other words, the people yelling about unsustainable debts and deficits need to STFU. You can’t both be expecting a massive AI productivity boom and think the US has a huge debt problem. That is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of logic.
But let’s assume for a moment that we do get a huge productivity boom from AI. We don’t need to run around like chickens with our heads cut off when we ask what to do about it. Because productivity growth is in fact a very very old phenomenon. We have long known how to deal with it; we shorten work hours.
Workers in Germany, France, and other wealthy countries work on average 20-25 percent fewer hours a year than Americans.
That is why we got the 40-hour work week with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1937. The Act doesn’t actually prohibit employers from having longer work weeks; it simply requires them to pay a 50 percent premium for overtime hours. This was supposed to encourage them to hire more workers instead of working their existing workforce more hours. (Contrary to the way it is discussed in the media, the decision to put in overtime is almost always the employer’s, not the worker’s. Unless a union contract specifies otherwise, an employer has the option to fire a worker who refuses overtime.)
This is why it was truly incredible that Trump eliminated the income tax on the overtime premium. This is effectively encouraging employers to have longer workweeks, 180 degrees opposite of the intention of the FLSA.
But just because Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have no grasp of economics doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t. If we really are seeing an AI-driven productivity boom, the most obvious way to deal with it is to shorten the workweek and work year. The United States is an outlier here. While we were originally a leader in implementing a 40-hour workweek, we have done little to reduce work time in the 90 years since then.
As a result, workers in Germany, France, and other wealthy countries work on average 20-25 percent fewer hours a year than Americans. As a crude approximation, if workers put in 20 percent fewer hours on average, it will mean 20 percent more jobs. Things in the real world are never quite that simple, but the basic logic that shorter work years means more jobs does hold.
It’s also not rocket science to get to shorter work years. We can amend the FLSA so that the overtime wage premium kicks in at 34 or 36 hours. Also, instead of removing taxes on the premium (having taxpayers subsidize long workweeks), we can raise the premium from 50 percent to 75 percent, as the Congressional Progressive Caucus recently proposed. We can also mandate 2 weeks or more vacation, along with paid sick days and family leave, as many states have already done. All this is old-fashioned stuff that other wealthy countries have been doing for decades, and we have done in the United States nationally in the distant past and more recently at the state level.
The immediate prompt for this diatribe was a New York Times article that asked how we will deal with a collapse of employment from AI. In fairness, the piece does note that an AI-driven productivity boom is far from certain, but it then suggests that if it does happen, a universal basic income, or a universal high income might be ways to deal with it. The piece notes that Elon Musk is supposedly an advocate of the latter.
While any pro-worker legislation will face an enormous uphill battle in the current political environment, a variation of policies that people have seen for a century might have a better shot than something that seems completely new.
While these proposals are, in principle, fine, they ignore the reality of US politics. Just four years ago, when the Democrats had a trifecta, they could not get a modest increase in the child tax credit approved in the Senate. Get out your yard stick and try to measure the distance between a modest boost to the child tax credit and a universal basic income, much less a universal high-income.
It’s probably also worth mentioning that Elon Musk has done everything he can to keep his workers at Tesla from forming a union, where they would be better able to secure their share of the company’s profits. That may lead reasonable people to question his commitment to workers’ well-being in an era of AI-driven mass unemployment.
While any pro-worker legislation will face an enormous uphill battle in the current political environment, a variation of policies that people have seen for a century might have a better shot than something that seems completely new. It is also worth pointing out that the tools for dealing with a surge in productivity growth are well-known and tested. Whether or not a universal basic income is a better way to go, our toolbox is already far from empty when it comes to dealing with this situation. This is not a new story, and it is wrong to portray it as one.
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The Climate Reckoning That the Nuclear Arms Control Can’t Ignore
Climate change and nuclear weapons reinforce one another in dangerous ways: Environmental stress increases the risk of conflict, while nuclear conflict would produce environmental consequences on a planetary scale.
May 07, 2026
At 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945, a 9,000-pound atomic bomb detonated 1,900 feet above Hiroshima, instantly killing 70,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb exploded over Nagasaki, killing another 40,000.
The sheer scale of destruction—that humans could annihilate each other by means as violent as a nuclear blast—ensured that Hiroshima and Nagasaki would become the defining images of nuclear weapons in the American imagination. According to a 2025 Pew Research survey, 83% of Americans reported knowing at least something about the use of nuclear weapons in Japan. However, increasingly large numbers of younger Americans don’t know enough about nuclear weapons today to give an opinion on their role in national security.
What is often remembered as the only detonation of nuclear weapons in history remains the sole use of nuclear weapons in warfare. While Americans looked overseas at the devastation in Japan, fewer recognized that nuclear weapons were also transforming the American environment at home.
For decades after World War II, nuclear weapons reshaped landscapes and communities across the United States. Between 1945 and 1992, the United States conducted 1,030 nuclear tests, while producing tens of thousands of warheads during the Cold War. At its height, the US nuclear stockpile comprised 31,255 warheads, with the last fully functional nuclear weapon being produced in 1989. The environmental and human consequences of this effort extended far beyond test sites and production facilities. Yet, the US government kept the public in the dark, leaving a generation born in the 21st century to bear the consequences of its obfuscated proliferation campaign.
The Nuclear Transformation of Marginalized America
Consider that the plutonium used in the first nuclear test in New Mexico and in the Nagasaki bomb was produced at the Hanford Site in Washington State. Between 1945 and 1970, Hanford’s reactors discharged roughly 444 billion gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Columbia River basin, a watershed that today supports over 8 million residents.
Other sites tell similar stories. In South Carolina and Georgia, rural communities were displaced to make way for the Savannah River Site nuclear weapons facility, where millions of gallons of radioactive waste were stored in underground tanks.
Make no mistake, the United States federal government was calculated in its targeting of marginalized communities to isolate radioactive material from the general population. These facilities were often located in rural or economically disadvantaged areas, where political resistance was limited and land was cheaper.
Nuclear weapons represent one of the most profound environmental risks humanity has ever created.
Currently the only permanent waste site for nuclear material in the United States, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico, collects plutonium-contaminated waste to be buried over 2,000 feet underground a salt flat formation. Framed as a barren wasteland far from major population centers, WIPP is in Eddy County, New Mexico—home to a population of over 61,000 people, of which 64% identify as people of color. Many communities face contaminated water supplies and elevated rates of respiratory illness, kidney disease, and cancer: a pattern sometimes described as “radioactive colonialism.”
Despite the government’s efforts to isolate nuclear activities and waste disposal, radioactive contamination did not respect geographic boundaries. Research released in 2023 found that nuclear tests conducted between 1945 and 1962 distributed radioactive fallout across 46 of the lower 48 contiguous states in the United States, as well as parts of Canada and Mexico. As a result of nuclear tests conducted by both the United States and other nuclear-armed powers, radioactive isotopes released into the atmosphere spread throughout the world in communities far from test sites. By the 1960s, “there was no place on Earth where the signature of atmospheric nuclear testing could not be found in soil, water, and even polar ice.” Radioactive isotopes entered the food chain through plants and animals, creating pathways of exposure far from any test site.
For most people living far from testing areas, these exposures were small. But they illustrate a fundamental reality of nuclear weapons: Even carefully controlled programs produce global environmental consequences. Even when the government attempted to isolate radioactivity and testing in supposedly remote communities, contamination from weapons production, testing, and disposal still spread far beyond those sites, affecting environments across the world.
The Renewed Nuclear Arms Race
While the United States has not conducted a full-scale nuclear test since 1992, nuclear competition is accelerating again.
China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, with estimates suggesting that its stockpile could exceed 1,000 warheads by the early 2030s. At the same time, arms control agreements that once constrained the world’s largest nuclear powers are eroding. The expiration of the New START treaty in February 2026 removed the last formal limits on US and Russian strategic nuclear forces.
Even if informal limits remain in place, the collapse of binding agreements signals a shift toward a less regulated nuclear environment. Some policymakers have suggested that renewed nuclear testing may be necessary in response to foreign advances, which would risk repeating many of the mistakes of the Cold War.
Consider that for the first time in history, the new nuclear proliferation environment includes a three-way standoff between three major armed powers: the United States, China, and Russia.
Mutually Assured Climate Destruction
A global nuclear war alone would be enough to trigger catastrophic climatic effects. Even a limited nuclear exchange could inject vast quantities of smoke and soot into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight and lowering global temperatures. The use of a mere 2% of the world’s current arsenal could trigger severe cooling and agricultural disruption, leaving 2 billion people at risk of starvation in just the following two years. If nuclear winter renders any use of nuclear weapons as unsurvivable, then deterrence may be an inadequate strategy, since the consequences of a miscalculation or accidental launch would increase dramatically.
This erosion of international nonproliferation channels comes as climate change fuels geopolitical instability by intensifying resource competition, migration pressures, and regional conflicts, increasing the risk of confrontation among nuclear-armed states. Climate change and nuclear weapons therefore reinforce one another in dangerous ways: Environmental stress increases the risk of conflict, while nuclear conflict would produce environmental consequences on a planetary scale.
Bridging the Gap: Building the Next Generation of Advocates
Despite these connections, environmental and social justice concerns remain peripheral in most nuclear policy debates. Discussions of deterrence and arms control typically focus on military balance and strategic stability, while the environmental legacy of nuclear weapons receives far less attention.
This gap may help explain why nuclear policy often struggles to engage younger generations.
Surveys consistently show that climate change is one of the defining concerns of younger voters. Roughly 70% of young people report deep anxiety about environmental degradation and say they are likely to support candidates who prioritize climate policy. Nuclear weapons policy rarely speaks to these concerns directly. Yet nuclear weapons represent one of the most profound environmental risks humanity has ever created.
Reframing nuclear policy to include environmental and social justice considerations would not only reflect historical reality, but also make nuclear policy more relevant to the challenges of the 21st century.
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Rutgers University Condemned for Canceling Palestinian Rights Advocate's Graduation Speech
"The message Rutgers is sending to this class and everyone around the country is alarming," said Rami Elghandour. "Don't dare stand for anything. Don't dare speak up."
May 07, 2026
Faculty members at Rutgers University in New Jersey on Thursday were among those condemning the school's decision to rescind an invitation to Rami Elghandour, a biotech executive and producer of the Gaza-focused film The Voice of Hind Rajab, who had been invited to speak at the School of Engineering commencement next week.
Elghandour said the engineering school's dean, Alberto Cuitiño, had informed him that he was no longer scheduled to give the commencement address after a "few" students told the administration they would not attend the graduation in protest of Elghandour's online advocacy for Palestinian rights.
"Commencement season is here, and with it the usual cycle of silencing voices that stand up for human rights," said Waheed U. Bajwa, a professor at Rutgers in New Brunswick. "This one hits close to home... I publicly call on Rutgers to reverse this!"
Elghandour, a graduate of the engineering school, released a statement saying that the school had "decided that the feelings of a handful of students who said that my social media posts 'opposed their beliefs' were more important than the experience of the entire graduating class, the reputation of the school, the dignity and belonging of Arab and Muslim students, and the First Amendment."
Speaking to the New Jersey Globe, a spokesperson for the university cited a specific post that Elghandour wrote in April on the social media platform X, saying that Israel has "committed genocide" and is "running dungeons where they train dogs to sexually assault prisoners."
"Weapons embargo is the absolute minimum," said Elghandour. "Sanctions and diplomatic isolation are beyond justified."
Leading human rights organizations and Holocaust scholars are among those who have called Israel's assault on Gaza, which began in October 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack and has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians, a genocide.
Calls for the US to suspend military aid to Israel in light of the war are hardly a fringe view in the US; a Quinnipiac University poll released last August found that 60% of voters across all parties supported a suspension of aid.
Middle East Eye reported in December on Palestinian detainees' allegations that Israeli guards had used dogs to sexually assault them. Rights organizations including the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have also collected testimonies alleging such abuse.
Rutgers spokesperson Dory Devlin told the Globe that some students had accused Elghandour of making an "inflammatory claim" when they said they would not attend the graduation if he spoke.
"Rutgers chose me in part because of my humanitarian work,” said Elghandour in his statement. “They put my role as an executive producer for the Oscar-nominated The Voice of Hind Rajab front and center. They led with my social justice advocacy. Until it was inconvenient. That’s the difference between virtue signaling and principles. One withstands challenge. The other wilts in the slightest breeze.”
"The message Rutgers is sending to this class and everyone around the country is alarming," he added. "Don't dare stand for anything. Don't dare speak up."
He said he plans to record the speech he had been scheduled to give and post it online so students can still hear it.
Hank Kalet, a journalism professor at the school who serves as vice president of the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, told the Globe that the university's actions met "the definition of viewpoint censorship.”
“We have somebody who is offering, in a public way on X, some opinions about genocide in Gaza and being retaliated against because of the opinions that he has,” said Kalet, who is Jewish. He told the outlet that he did not believe Elghandour to be antisemitic.
Naureen Akhter, public affairs director for CAIR-New Jersey, noted that Rutgers had recently hosted Israel Defense Forces soldiers on its campus as part of a national tour called "Triggered: The Ceaseless Tour."
“It is unconscionable that Rutgers rolls out the red carpet to soldiers engaged in genocide yet finds expression of pro-Palestine solidarity from one of their distinguished alumni so objectionable, they refuse to have him address graduates," said Akhter. “We call on Rutgers School of Engineering to reinstate Rami Elghandour as commencement speaker and approach issues of student safety and freedom of expression with more care.”
The Rutgers student body is no stranger to advocacy for Palestinian rights. As on other college campuses across the US, students held a sustained protest in the spring of 2024, demanding the school divest from companies that do business with Israel, terminate its relationship with Tel Aviv University, and take other steps to demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians.
Rutgers-Newark also defended its decision to host pro-Palestinian comedian Ramy Youssef at its 2025 commencement after a state lawmaker claimed his involvement would alienate Jewish students at the university.
The decision to cancel Elghandour's speech came days after the University of Michigan publicly apologized for a graduation speech by Professor Derek Peterson, who had applauded students who spoke out for Palestinian rights in campus protests, saying they exemplified the school's long history of social activism.
“I think [Palestine] is the moral issue of our time, and I believe it’s been used to undermine democratic institutions in the US,” Elghandour told The Guardian on Wednesday.
Bajwa said on social media that "everyone says they'd have stood against slavery, the Holocaust, segregation, and more."
"Easy to be righteous about the past," he said. "But what about now? What moral tests are you failing in your own time? That's the real test of courage."
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