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Investment in fossil fuels will fall this year for the first time since the Covid pandemic, according to the International Energy Agency, led by a contraction in the oil sector where a sharp drop in prices is forcing companies to reassess their plans. 

In its annual report on money flowing into the energy sector, the IEA predicted a 6 per cent drop in spending on oil production this year. Excluding the Covid-19 pandemic years, it will mark the largest fall since 2016, when oil prices crashed below $30 a barrel. 

“This is the first time we have seen such a decline, except for Covid, because of lower prices and lower oil demand,” said Fatih Birol, the head of the Paris-based intergovernmental energy advisory body. 

Since hitting $82 a barrel in mid-January, oil prices have fallen to about $65 a barrel after Opec, the oil cartel, started to significantly increase its production. The IEA said US shale oil producers, who account for 15 per cent of global spending on oil production, were the most sensitive to lower prices and would cut their investment by 10 per cent this year. 

It also expects international oil majors to slightly reduce their spending, as they prioritise shareholder returns. The pullback means that the giant state oil companies of the Middle East and Asia will account for 40 per cent of all spending on oil and gas this year, compared with a quarter ten years ago. 

International oil companies are also continuing to cut their spending on clean energy, with the IEA noting that they had collectively invested $22bn in low emissions technology in 2024, some 25 per cent less than the year before.

Overall, the IEA said the world would spend $1.1tn on fossil fuels in 2025, compared with more than $2.2tn on renewable energy, nuclear, batteries, power grids, low emission fuels and energy efficiency. 

While overall spending on fossil fuels will shrink by 2 per cent this year, China and India have both committed to build significant fleets of coal-fired power plants to meet rapid electricity demand growth. By contrast, for the first time on record, the world’s advanced economies placed no new orders for turbines for coal-fired plants. 

“The addition of coal is mainly driven by energy security reasons,” said Birol. “China had some bitter experiences when there was very hot weather and hydropower was very weak.” 

In the US, where the Trump administration has been plain about its disdain for renewable energy, Birol said the jump in electricity demand from AI and data centres would mean that there would be an additional need for renewables, gas and nuclear.

In a separate report, Enverus, a research firm, said that while there are 517 gigawatts of renewable energy projects in the US that need federal tax credits to be viable, there are 284 gigawatts that do not require such funding.

“If these projects are built at the same pace as last year, that is enough to sustain today’s build-out pace for more than six years,” said Corianna Mah, an analyst at Enverus.

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon had a complicated job this week: To explain to lawmakers the Trump administration’s new fiscal year 2026 budget proposal for a department McMahon and President Trump have both committed to close.

According to a new budget summary, the administration wants to cut the Education Department’s funding by 15%, while largely preserving the two most important federal funding streams to K-12 schools: Title I, for schools in low-income neighborhoods, and IDEA grants to states, which help support students with disabilities. It is proposing cuts to other programs instead, including TRIO, which help low-income and first-generation college students.

On Wednesday, McMahon testified before the House education committee and, on Tuesday, before a Senate appropriations subcommittee. Here are several moments that stood out:

• The definition of insanity

In Tuesday’s Senate hearing, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican, asked McMahon, “What’s the definition of insanity?”

“Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome,” McMahon answered.

Mullin’s point, based on declining test scores: Whatever the U.S. Department of Education has been doing over the years, “It’s not working. What we’re doing is not working.”

The notion that U.S. students have been failing academically and that the Education Department is to blame has been Republicans’ leading argument in support of gutting the department, and it came up time and time again in this week’s hearings with McMahon.

Critics of that argument have noted that the department does not run the nation’s schools. It can’t tell districts or states what to teach or how to teach it.

In fact, in Tuesday’s hearing, Sen. Katie Britt, Republican of Alabama, rightfully highlighted her state’s exceptional academic progress in recent years, something NPR has documented. Another state, Louisiana, has also improved remarkably.

• Colleges may be on the hook for student loans

When it comes to student loans, McMahon said colleges need to get “a little skin in the game.” She suggested that the federal government should not be responsible for all loans that go unpaid by students.

“Loans are not forgiven or just go away, they’re just shouldered by others,” she said.

A plan to force colleges and universities to repay a portion of the loans their students do not has been included in House Republicans’ big reconciliation bill. Republicans also want to make it clear when a given college program isn’t giving students a good return on their investment.

“If you want to get a student loan … you’ve got to go get a degree in something where actually you might be able to do something useful when you’re done with it,” said Rep. Randy Fine, a Florida Republican.

Such a shift would require significant changes to the student loan system and federal oversight of colleges.

In Tuesday’s Senate hearing, Democrats’ toughest questions for McMahon were about the department’s decision to stop paying out $1 billion in grants to school districts to hire mental health professionals, including counselors and social workers.

Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, told McMahon: “It’s a really cruel thing to do to those kids. Did you think about the impact?”

McMahon doubled-down on the department’s explanation of the funding freeze, that some of these programs were tainted by what the administration considers toxic DEI ideology.

She also said that “the states and the local areas, I think, are the best place where we need to concentrate for these particular programs.”

The administration uses this trust-the-states approach throughout its budget: For the programs it does not want to cancel outright, the budget calls for stripping away regulations and sending the money to states in chunks, via block grants, that can be spent at the discretion of state leaders.

For example, the budget would fold federal funding for rural schools, students experiencing homelessness, literacy instruction and a host of other unrelated programs into one, generic bundle of money that would go to states.

• The fate of Upward Bound and the other TRIO programs

The department’s fiscal year 2026 budget would end a cluster of federal programs known collectively as TRIO, meant to help low-income and first-generation students access and succeed in college. And McMahon heard bipartisan support for TRIO and pleas to save the programs.

At one point during Tuesday’s hearing, Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins pointed out that she was wearing a Maine TRIO pin on her lapel and that three of her staff members had gone through TRIO. Collins said she had seen first-hand how the programs had changed the lives of many vulnerable Americans for whom college might have otherwise been out of reach.

When asked by Collins why the administration thinks TRIO isn’t worth the investment, McMahon answered that the department of education lacks the ability to audit TRIO, to make sure the federal funding is being used appropriately.

Multiple senators voiced support for TRIO during the hearing and, at one point, New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen told McMahon, “if there is a problem with accountability, let’s address that … but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

• Who should pay for workforce programs?

The administration’s proposed consolidation of workforce-development programs was met with a range of responses, from slight apprehension to open hostility, from lawmakers from both parties.

Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat, pressed the Secretary to put a number on the cuts across the budget: “When the dust settles do we understand that there will be about a 33% cut across workforce development?”

McMahon did not answer the question with a yes or no, but continued to highlight the need for workforce development without the federal government shouldering the cost.

Rep. Haley Stevens of Michigan, also a Democrat, made a plea for her home state: “We are competing on a world stage,” she said of Michigan’s manufacturing apparatus. “We need these engineering jobs, we need these apprenticeship programs.”

In a later exchange with a Republican representative, Mark Messmer of Indiana, Secretary McMahon said the administration was looking into expanding public-private partnerships for career and technical education.

She cited a program in West Virginia that is a partnership between community colleges and the car manufacturer Toyota. Students there train in the auto plant and take classes at the college to develop a built-in workforce funded by the employer, she said.

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Original Sin is an odd name for a book that turns out to cover 2023 to 2024. It implies that readers will be taken to the ultimate root of a problem — the problem being that Donald Trump is in the White House — when in fact the authors lead them along the trail of blame no more than two years back. That was when an aged Joe Biden resolved to run for president again. It was a heinous decision. The cover-up of his fragile state was worse. Peers who didn’t call on him to go until a televised debate exposed him last summer must reflect on their dereliction.

But this wasn’t the “origin” of anything. Biden has become a scapegoat for a much longer-standing Democratic problem, which is a tolerance of probable and often proven election losers.

If there was a sin, a Fall, it was the Democrats’ choice of Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate in 2016. World history turned on that singular act of pigheadedness. Polls were telling the party that voters disliked her. She had already fluffed a huge lead over the young Barack Obama in the primaries of eight years earlier. True, her low reputation has never been fair. She isn’t a crook or much more of a hypocrite than other politicians, just one of life’s plodders. But the world is what it is. Democrats chose to ignore the objective fact of her unpopularity, and the outcome is a Trump era that was probably avoidable.

The other event that led us to where we are today was the elevation of Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate in 2020. Given his age, the Democrats were all but naming a future president. Again, they were spoilt for clues about her limitations. She had been the first candidate of note to withdraw from the primaries. Those who outlasted her included the mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city.

Biden carries nominal blame for choosing her as running mate, but “choice” is a misleading word here. There was a tacit Democratic rule that a white man couldn’t run with another white man. So no Pete Buttigieg. The Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar was a strong performer but also caught up in the recent history and politics of the state in which George Floyd had just been killed, which all but ruled her out. Is there another party that boxes itself in like this?

All in all, Biden’s refusal to stand down in good time comes third in the list of Democratic follies over the past decade. The problem isn’t one man. The problem is a pattern of collective delusion about candidates that goes back to the previous century. Look at margins of defeat. Not since Barry Goldwater have the Republicans misjudged the fit of nominee and electorate quite as badly as the Democrats did with George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

In the 50-50 nation of today, the Democrats are always competitive. As a result, it is easy to miss the stunning narrowness of their candidates. Tim Walz was the first person on either the upper or lower half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who hadn’t gone to law school. There has been no southerner on the top since Al Gore at the turn of the millennium, despite the mistrust that Democrats must overcome there. Last November, in a contest that it rightly described as existential for the constitution, the party put up a pair from California (which hasn’t voted Republican since the 1980s) and Minnesota (which didn’t even vote Republican in the 1980s). This is a party that is always willing to meet conservative-minded swing voters one-tenth of the way.

To be bad at choosing a leader is to be bad at politics. Whatever else seems to matter in that trade, such as ideas and tactics, it flows from the paramount individual in a party. Good leaders will tend to get these things right. The likes of Harris, or Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, reliably won’t. If this logic seems circular — “winners win” — I’m afraid that is politics. There should be more research and commentary on what constitutes “it”, otherwise known as the X-factor, than on campaigns, manifestos and other outputs of politics, the study of which is an exercise in looking through a telescope from the wrong end.

The question is why the Democrats in particular so often err at leadership selection. Perhaps parties of the left are necessarily softer on human weakness. The impulse that leads them to protect people without lucrative skills from market forces (a good thing) is the impulse that makes them coddle electoral no-hopers (a bad thing). That would explain why Labour in the UK has so often had the same problem: for each Dukakis, a Kinnock.

Or it might be that progressives, trained to think in terms of structural forces, regard an emphasis on individual talent as unintellectual. Increasingly, a Democrat is someone who pins the rise of Trump on academic abstractions — neoliberalism, oligarchy — but shirks the humdrum work of not choosing a great clucking turkey of a candidate every four years.

Either way, this problem predates and could postdate the Biden years. Even had he quit earlier, the Democrats would in all likelihood still have chosen Harris out of deference to seniority and those unwritten identity norms. With a longer campaign, and therefore more exposure of her mystifying syntax and opaque beliefs, I think she would have done even worse against Trump than she did. Original Sin exposes senior Democrats as people of titanic self-pity. “We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” says one grandee. “We got so screwed by the party as a world,” mumbled one reader.

janan.ganesh@ft.com