By Claire Brown

Nearly two weeks into the conflict, the war in Iran has triggered “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” the International Energy Agency said on Thursday. That comes despite an agreement among world leaders on Wednesday to release some 400 million barrels of oil from their strategic reserves. Here’s what else to know:

Oil price warnings. A spokesperson for Iran’s military command warned on Wednesday that oil could reach $200 barrel, far exceeding previous records. The U.S. energy secretary, Chris Wright, said that’s unlikely.

President Trump shrugged off concerns about rising prices, pointing out on social media that the United States is the largest oil producer in the world. “When oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” he wrote Thursday morning.

A crucial shipping lane remains largely closed. On Thursday, Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, vowed to continue blocking the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow body of water that conveys about 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies. Two oil tankers were set ablaze early on Thursday, leading Iraq and Oman to close oil terminals.

The environmental consequences. In Iran, damage to fossil fuel infrastructure has caused black rain and thick smoke over Tehran, prompting concerns that tanks of mazut, a bottom-of-the-barrel oil residue product used in power plants, have caught on fire, releasing huge quantities of sulfur and other toxic pollution into the air.

Will all this upheaval push governments around the world to pick up the pace of renewable energy installations? Not necessarily, Brad Plumer and Lisa Friedman write. And in the short term, some countries are likely to burn more coal.

What questions do you have about the environmental fallout of the war in Iran or its effects on the world’s energy supplies? Email us at climateforward@nytimes.com and we’ll answer your questions in future newsletters.

Kicked out of the Sierra Club

	By David A. Fahrenthold David Fahrenthold is an investigative reporter based in Washington who covers nonprofit organizations.

Last year, the Sierra Club’s national magazine honored Delia Malone as a “changemaker” — an activist to inspire other activists — for her yearslong campaign to reintroduce wolves to wild areas of Colorado.

A year later, the Sierra Club kicked her out.

In February, the club sent Malone, 71, a letter saying she had committed “serious violations of Sierra Club Member Obligations.” The letter listed seven rules that she had violated, including provisions requiring members to be respectful of each other, and to represent the club positively in public.

“You are no longer a member of Sierra Club,” said the letter, which was signed by the club’s office of general counsel. “Revocation of your status as a member of Sierra Club is permanent, meaning that you will no longer be eligible for any form of Sierra Club membership.”

What the letter did not say was what Malone actually did to deserve this rare punishment — which the club says is for members whose misconduct is “beyond repair.”

Malone said she believed that she was targeted in part because she talked to The New York Times last year, a claim the organization denies. She was quoted in a Nov. 7 article about how the Sierra Club had embraced social-justice issues far removed from its traditional environmental goals.

In that article, Claire Brown and I reported that the nonprofit organization’s shift was followed by years of internal strife and declining membership, leaving the group weakened just as the Trump administration has ramped up its attacks on environmental protections.

Delia Malone, an ecologist and activist, was expelled from the Sierra Club last month. Kristin Braga Wright for The New York Times

‘I had no idea’

In an interview, Malone said the club had not notified her that she was facing this punishment, had not told her what she was accused of doing and did not give her a chance to defend herself.

“I had no idea this was going on,” Malone said.

An ecologist by training, she had been a volunteer for the Sierra Club for 12 years and had previously served as one of the Colorado chapter’s statewide leaders. She helped lead the club’s efforts to campaign for a 2020 ballot measure authorizing the reintroduction of wolves to the state. It passed narrowly, and now the state says at least four packs of wolves live in Colorado.

In the November article, Malone had said she had once been scolded by a Sierra Club staffer for saying that the club should lobby the Colorado Legislature for more protections for wolves.

“One of the staff said, ‘That’s fine, Delia. But what do wolves have to do with equity, justice and inclusion?’” Malone said then. After that, Malone said she had heard from an investigator hired by the club, who had asked her questions but declined to say what she was being investigated for. The Colorado chapter of the Sierra Club told us last year that “no one was investigated or accused of values misalignment on the basis of wolf conservation efforts.”

A month after the Times story came out, the Sierra Club’s Colorado chapter removed Malone from her unpaid role as “Wildlife Chair.” It cited the same section of the club’s rules that the Sierra Club’s national leaders later cited to strip her membership.

Malone said she believed the Times article helped trigger both punishments. “It gave them a specific reason to say, ‘She’s not abiding by the rules,’” she said.

A day earlier, the Sierra Club had also voted to strip membership from another former leader of the Colorado chapter, Kent Abernethy.

In an interview, Abernethy, 64, said he had been a Sierra Club member for 40 years and had until recently led a local branch of the Colorado chapter. He said his letter from the club was identical to Malone’s: it described the rules he had violated, but not how he had violated them.

The future of the Sierra Club

Abernethy said he believed his dismissal was also rooted in the broader debate over the Sierra Club’s direction. The Colorado chapter has been a center of that debate: in 2022, the Sierra Club’s national leaders ousted the chapter’s elected leaders for fostering what it called a “harmful and non-inclusive management culture.” It replaced them with an unelected “steering committee” approved by the club’s national leaders, an arrangement that continues today.

Abernethy had recently emailed his local Sierra Club branch to criticize the club’s leaders for stifling dissent and punishing Malone.

The Sierra Club has defended its shift in focus, saying that its embrace of social justice is necessary to build a broader coalition. A spokesman for the club, Jonathon Berman, declined to describe what Malone and Abernethy had done to trigger their punishment, but said “the decision was not made as a result” of the Times article.

Berman said that the club encouraged debate among its members: “Any claim that an action taken to protect our members and staff is meant to silence dissent is false.”

Malone now leads her own environmental group, ColoradoWild, and Abernethy sits on its board. Both said they would continue their environmental work outside the Sierra Club. Malone said she looked back fondly on her work with the organization.

“There’s families of wolves thriving in Colorado,” Malone said. “That’s amazing.” She said the Sierra Club’s national leadership at the time had provided crucial help: “They were very supportive, up until they weren’t.”

The Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee advises the E.P.A.’s leadership on the latest scientific evidence on soot, smog and other hazardous pollutants. Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

Eye doctor named to air pollution advisory board draws pushback

The Trump administration has tapped an eye doctor with no background in air pollution science to advise the Environmental Protection Agency on what levels of air pollutants are safe to breathe.

The E.P.A. named Brian Joondeph, a Colorado-based ophthalmologist and political commentator, on Monday to the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, an influential panel that advises the agency’s leadership on the latest scientific evidence on soot, smog and other hazardous pollutants.

Dr. Joondeph has never published a peer-reviewed paper dealing with air pollution. He has coauthored a handful of peer-reviewed papers about eye diseases, as well as dozens of opinion pieces in conservative publications, many of which praised President Trump’s style of governing and foreign policies.

It was the government’s latest move to sideline or shun scientific expertise, drawing criticism from past members of the advisory panel. — Maxine Joselow

Read more.

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A reef in waters off Tahiti, French Polynesia. Countries and territories including Chile, Colombia and others pledged 20 new marine protected areas on Friday.  Credit…Daniel Cole/Associated Press

More than 20 new marine protected areas in coastal waters were announced at the third U.N. ocean conference this week. Experts say thousands more are needed.

Remote coral atolls in the Caribbean. Habitat for threatened sharks and rays around a Tanzanian island in the Indian Ocean. And 900,000 square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean around French Polynesia.

These are some of the millions of acres of water now set aside as part of an international goal to protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030. More than 20 new marine protected areas were announced at the third United Nations Ocean Conference, which ended on Friday in France.

Countries and territories pledging new areas included Chile; Colombia; French Polynesia; Portugal; Samoa; Sao Tome and Principe; the Solomon Islands; Tanzania; and Vanuatu.

“Protecting the ocean is beginning to become fashionable,” said Sylvia Earle, a marine biologist and oceanographer who served as chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the 1990s, at an event celebrating a network of protected areas around the Azores.

The new designations come at a time when the United States, which sent only two observers to the conference, has moved to reopen the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing. The country is also seeking to unilaterally authorize mining of the seafloor in international waters.

France, which hosted the conference with Costa Rica, pushed for a moratorium on deep sea mining, with four new countries pledging their support this week, bringing the total to 37 countries.

Less than 3 percent of the ocean is currently fully protected from “extractive” activities like commercial fishing and mining, according to the Marine Protection Atlas.

Peter Thomson, the United Nations secretary general’s special envoy for the ocean, acknowledged at the Azores event that reaching 30 percent by the 2030 deadline may not happen. But, he said, “It’s not a mythical thing that will never happen.”

In order to reach the goal, the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement, also known as the High Seas Treaty, needs to be enforced with at least 60 countries ratifying it. At the conference, 19 new countries ratified the treaty, bringing the total to 50 individual countries plus the European Union. Once active, the treaty would provide a pathway toward protecting stretches of the ocean beyond individual countries’ borders.

And in coastal waters within those borders, much remains to be done. A study published in May found that the average marine protected area today is about 10 square kilometers, meaning about 188,000 more areas of that size are needed — or 85 new marine protected areas a day.

These numbers are “super daunting,” said the report’s lead author Kristin Rechberger, who is chief executive of the conservation organization Dynamic Planet. She wants countries to break through the challenge by decentralizing marine protection and allowing coastal communities to create their own small protected areas at a faster pace.

A separate report published last week found that countries need to raise $15.8 billion a year in order to protect 30 percent of the ocean. Currently about $1.2 billion a year goes toward ocean protection globally.

Questions also remain about how meaningful existing protections are.

Activists have been pushing the French government to announce a ban on bottom trawling in its marine protected areas. President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would place 4 percent of its mainland waters under “strong protection,” limiting bottom trawling, a fishing process that drags nets along the seafloor. This falls short of an existing European Union goal of placing 10 percent of its waters under “strict protection,” without commercial fishing of any kind.

“Allowing destructive bottom trawling in most of France’s so-called ‘protected’ areas makes a mockery of ocean protection,” said Alexandra Cousteau, senior adviser to Oceana and granddaughter of the ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, in a written statement. “It’s like building a fence around a forest and then bulldozing it anyway.”

Even where protections from commercial fishing exist around the world, enforcement is often lacking.

Zafer Kizilkaya, president of the Mediterranean Conservation Society, has worked with local fishing communities to create and patrol a marine protected area at Gokova Bay in Turkey, allowing endangered monk seals to return. Community members — including former fishers — serve as marine rangers, reporting illegal commercial fishing to the Turkish Coast Guard, which follows up with fines.

Mr. Kizilkaya is not seeking greater percentages of protected marine areas at this point, but rather “serious enforcement and management,” he said. “That will make a huge difference.”

The United States did not send an official delegation to the conference. Two representatives from the the administration’s Environmental Advisory Task Force, including Ed Russo, the chairman, attended as what the State Department called “government observers.”

The day before the conference began, Mr. Russo wrote an opinion piece in Time magazine with Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce and owner of Time, outlining ideas for a “focused, global effort to restore coral reefs.”

“We believe that addressing coral-reef health is a smart place to focus — not because it is the only crisis,” they wrote, “but because it offers a clear, actionable, achievable goal that can unite governments and ocean advocates.”

Mr. Russo and Mr. Benioff did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Russo is chief executive of RussKap Water, president of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition and a board member of Reef Relief.

Mr. Benioff, who during the first Trump administration raised Republican support for an initiative to plant a trillion trees, has funded a center for marine conservation called the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Salesforce was a major sponsor of the U.N. ocean conference’s publicly accessible exhibits.

John Kerry, the former special presidential envoy for climate under President Biden, said he didn’t know what role the United States would play in ocean protection now.

“We have an amazing conglomeration of countries that have come together to improve the marine protected areas,” Mr. Kerry said. The announcements this week, however, are “just building blocks,” he said. “We are not moving fast enough or at scale.”

Note: Along with heads of state, delegates, NGOs, and journalists, Fellows with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network attended the conference.

Daphné Anglès contributed reporting.

Delger Erdenesanaa (Author)

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