I admit it: It’s tough out there. The U.S. and Israel war in Iran is pummeling energy markets, but we’re here to help you navigate the fray. First up, the stock market rallied a bit today while oil prices dropped under $100 a barrel. Also, a national surplus of natural gas could supercharge  demand for data centers built here instead of Europe or the Middle East. We have some non-energy news too, but first, my colleague Samantha Fields explains why this crisis is different from the 1970s. 
— Carrie Barber, newsletter editor

The U.S. and Israeli war in Iran is posing a “major, major threat” to the global economy, and “no country will be immune” if it continues much longer, said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency on Monday.

Those who were old enough to drive in 1973 — during the OPEC oil embargo — or during the Iranian Revolution in 1979 might remember gas shortages and long lines to fill up their tanks.

 

“Each of those took about 5 million barrels a day of oil supply off of the market,” said Samantha Gross, director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution.

But now, with the Strait of Hormuz largely closed, she said the impact is larger.

“We've lost maybe 15 million barrels a day , or 15% of supply,” Gross said. “So this supply shock is three times bigger than the ones that we saw in the 1970s.”

This is also not the 1970s.

“The United States now is less dependent on oil imports than we were 50 years ago,” said Hugh Daigle, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies petroleum.

Daigle said that’s why gas prices in the U.S. are spiking, but we’re not seeing shortages.

“But countries like Pakistan, India, Thailand, China, Japan — they are really being hurt by this,” he said.

More than 60% of middle, high school, and college students in the U.S. are turning to AI for homework help, according to a new study from Rand, but about two-thirds of them believe it will hurt their critical thinking skills.

Schwartz, one of the study’s authors and a parent herself, suggested AI tools should be introduced after a student writes the first draft themselves. That’s where you use lots of different skills to synthesize information and build up critical thinking muscles. And the ability to interpret information, she said, is a “building block of human agency.”