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This year, coal usage has been heating up.
It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service.
I'm Leanna Byrne.
The price of oil is up because of American threats on Venezuelan tankers, and Amazon could be getting a big order for its computer chips.
Yep, so the world is set to burn more coal this year than ever before.
The International Energy Agency says global use will hit a record 885 billion tonnes in 2025, the first increase in 15 years.
In the United States, coal consumption is expected to rise by 8, helped by policy support from the Trump administration.
The IEA does expect demand to ease in the years ahead as cleaner alternatives become more widely available.
But here's the catch.
Replacing coal means building a lot more clean energy and that depends on mining more metals.
So, can that be done responsibly?
Here's Ro Doan, the Chief Executive of the International Council on Mining and Metals.
You've got the biggest, most responsible companies in the world, showing that it is possible to meet the world's demand for critical minerals while respecting the health of the planet and people.
But then you do have a lot of companies that operate a bit in the shadows, away from scrutiny, who may be doing practices that are unfavorable.
And the challenge here is how do you get a minimum playing field for everybody to follow?
Because there is a space for government regulation to help do that.
Unfortunately though, In many parts of the world, those regulations are either too weak or they're not well enforced.
For the green transition, a lot of people say we need mining.
In the EU.
It's planning to loosen water, chemical and permitting rules to speed up these mining projects.
Do you support easing environmental protections if it accelerates access to critical minerals?
I don't think there is a choice.
And the EU's position has been that it will allow projects to go ahead quicker and speed up permitting if those projects can demonstrate that they are meeting high environmental and social standards.
So I wouldn't frame it as a trade-off because I don't think one exists.
You can do things much more efficiently from a permitting point of view and uphold really strong safeguards socially and environmentally.
And the EU has basically said that if you follow a credible standard that gives the EU comfort that you are planning this project right and you're going to do it responsibly, then the EU is willing to look at ways to give you a permit quicker.
So you don't think that there's a risk.
The bar gets lowered when there is a push for faster permitting.
I'm much more concerned that the bar that has been set is not being met, rather than the bar being lowered.
So already around the world, if miners are, no matter what size and where they were, were meeting the regulatory ask of them, we would be in a much better position.
But the reality is that many fly under the radar.
They don't meet those obligations.
Illegal mining is rife and a growing problem around the world.
And unless governments get a grip on that and can enforce the laws that are in place, it doesn't actually matter how high the bar is if there's no way of enforcing it and making sure that people are actually meeting the bar.
Having a voluntary standard that is designed for everyone to follow is one way of making sure that others also follow responsible practices.
Because as long as you have this unlevel playing field where some are doing the right thing and others are not, but both are getting paid for their product, people will always take the cheap and dirty route.
And that's the unfortunate reality of a global economy.
Meanwhile, the price of oil is up after President Donald Trump said he's ordering a blockade on sanctioned oil tankers off Venezuela.
The US has accused President Nicolás Maduro's government of using oil to finance themselves, as well as drug trafficking.
Venezuela has accused the US of trying to steal its oil wealth.
Our reporter, Gideon Long, is looking at the story and I asked him if the US does manage to stop sanctioned tankers leaving Venezuela, what will that mean for its economy?
It would be a big deal.
Traditionally, oil has been the absolute bedrock of the Venezuelan economy, accounting for over 90 of its export revenue.
At times,
Now, it's true that that figure has dropped dramatically in recent years.
It's difficult to know by how much because Venezuela for a long time has not produced any oil.
Thank you very much.
In recent years, of course, Venezuela has exported a lot of its oil clandestinely to get round US sanctions.
So the oil tankers turn off their transponders so they can't be tracked.
And often they offload the oil from one tanker to another, before the oil is then shipped under different flags to the final purchasers, countries like India and China.
And if Venezuelan oil is taken off the global oil market, what might that mean for global oil prices?
Well, the truth is probably not that much.
And that's because the oil sector in Venezuela has been so decimated and is now so dilapidated.
If you go back to the 1960s, Venezuela was one of the founding members of OPEC.
And in its heyday in the 1970s, it accounted for up to 15% of global oil supply in any given year.
Now that figures down to about 1%, fewer than a million barrels a day.
It's true that Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves in the world but, A it doesn't have the infrastructure to get that oil out of the ground and, B it's poor quality oil anyway, really heavy crude so it needs refining and Venezuela doesn't have that refining capacity.
So...
It's oil that's only really worth exploiting when the oil price is high.
But the bottom line is, take Venezuelan oil off the global market and the world will hardly notice.
Gideon Long there.
With me now, Russ Mould, Investment Director at AJ Bell.
Russ, where's the oil price at now?
Because Venezuela says oil exports, they're continuing as normal.
It's up a little bit today, nearly 2, using Brent crude as a benchmark, but it's still below 60 a barrel, near its year lows, because of concerns that really there's more than enough supply to keep up with demand, even if demand is holding up better than everybody expected this year.
Now, one country that could suffer from this, China.
It's the largest buyer of Venezuelan oil.
And we've just had something on the wire saying that its foreign minister is saying China opposes unilateral bullying.
It stands with Venezuela.
So could this hurt China?
It could conceivably, but if you buy into the narrative that the oil market is oversupplied and there could be more supply coming if OPEC Plus keeps on raising production and sanctions against say, Russia or other countries are lifted, then it may be easy to find alternative sources.
And equally, even if Russia has been sanctioned, China doesn't seem to be that shy about buying Russian supply anyway.
All right, Russ Mould, stay right there.
The board of Warner Brothers Discovery has published that it's rejected Paramount's 78 billion hostile bid.
In a letter to shareholders, it said the offer posed numerous and significant risks and strongly rejected the idea that the Ellison family, one of America's richest, was financially supporting the bid.
Instead, it said the merger with Netflix was in the company's best interests.
Now, there are reports that Amazon is in talks to invest $10 billion in OpenAI.
The online retailing giant is planning to sell the company AI chips and computing power.
Amazon's been making chips and renting more data centers capacity in its efforts to compete with NVIDIA.
The potential deal could push OpenAI's valuation above $500 billion.
Russ, I'm going to bring you back in on this.
The talks are at an early stage, but it would be a big win for Amazon if this happened, right?
It could be a big supply deal for its trinium silicon chips and its data sensors.
But looking at Amazon as a company overall 700 billion of annual sales, 24 trillion of stock market value.
So even a 10 billion deal isn't actually that big a deal in terms of the numbers, even if strategically it could be a bigger deal further down the road.
Yes, that's still not right already.
But it's really, it's about competition, isn't it?
It's about going up against NVIDIA.
It is.
NVIDIA dominates supply for silicon chips for AI at the moment even though people at Amazon Google, AMD are all trying to get in there and a Chinese company, MetaX.
It floated in the Shanghai Composite Exchange today and its shares went up through the ceiling.
There you go.
Russ Mould, Investment Director at AJ Bell, keeping an eye on that industry for us.
Thank you so much for joining us.
And that's it from World Business Express with me, Leanna Byrne.
Please subscribe to get the latest from us.
Just search for World Business Express wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks so much for listening.
Want to know how to become the richest person in the world?
Start with the latest episode of our podcast, Good Bad Billionaire.
We're telling the story of how Elon Musk amassed half a trillion dollars from his troubled childhood in South Africa to buying Twitter and launching rockets into space, with all the boardroom dramas along the way.
Find out how he did it on Good Bad Billionaire.
Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
