Brussels is now moving from speeches to hard rules: from early 2026, Europe doesn’t just want more mines and refineries on its own soil, it wants to physically keep critical raw material waste inside the bloc so it can be turned back into strategic inputs rather than shipped off to cheaper processors abroad.

At the core of this latest proposal is a simple but far-reaching shift: rare earth scrap, spent batteries and “black mass” (the powdered mix of metals recovered from shredded lithium-ion cells) are no longer treated as low-value waste streams but as strategic feedstock. By reclassifying waste lithium-ion batteries and black mass as hazardous from September 2026, the European Commission will effectively ban their export to non-OECD countries.

What’s happening in Norway and Sweden is basically a live demonstration of what it actually means when Europe says it wants “mineral sovereignty” instead of just writing strategy papers in Brussels.

On one side you have Rare Earths Norway, trying to prove that Europe can build a major rare earths mine almost invisibly under a town. On the other you have LKAB in Kiruna, literally moving a city to keep an iron ore operation running and potentially unlock one of Europe’s largest rare earths finds. Both are extreme solutions to the same problem: Europe wants Chinese-style control over critical raw materials without Chinese-style political or environmental methods.

At the World LNG Summit in Istanbul, traders, producers and utility executives were striking new deals against a backdrop of something Europe hasn’t felt in its gas market for several winters: cautious confidence.

After a brutal start to 2025, when storage levels were low and memories of the 2022 energy crisis still raw, the prevailing view now is that Europe should scrape through this winter without a repeat of the panic, thanks above all to a powerful surge in liquefied natural gas imports, led by the United States.

Brussels is trying to harden the EU’s economic backbone before it gets crushed between Washington and Beijing. The new plan the European Commission just unveiled is less about free trade in the old sense and much more about survival in a weaponised global economy.

At the core of the proposal is the creation of an “economic security hub” inside the EU system, meant to act as a nerve centre linking policymakers, regulators and companies. The goal is to spot risks early, coordinate responses and help firms navigate an environment where tariffs, export controls and sanctions are now routine tools of statecraft.

China’s latest build-out of giant petrochemical complexes is tipping an already fragile global market into a more dangerous phase of structural oversupply and it’s doing so in a way that hits Europe and other high-cost producers right where they’re weakest.

Over the past decade, Beijing has rolled out seven huge integrated petrochemical hubs, pushing China past the United States to become the world’s largest producer of ethylene and polyethylene, the basic building blocks for plastics, synthetic rubber and fibers.

Emmanuel Macron’s latest trip to Beijing is essentially a test of whether France, and by extension Europe, can still play “strategic balancer” between China, the United States and Russia in a far more adversarial world. On paper, the visit is about cooperation on Ukraine, trade and climate; in practice, it’s about damage control on multiple fronts: a lopsided trade relationship, EU-China tariff warfare, and a war in Europe where Beijing’s leverage over Moscow remains more hypothetical than real.

Macron arrives in China carrying two heavy burdens: a yawning French trade deficit with Beijing and deep anxiety at home about industrial decline. He wants more market access for French companies in aviation, energy, luxury goods, agriculture and nuclear, and he wants to show he can protect jobs and secure contracts as his presidency ages and domestic politics grow harsher.

Ever since generative AI exploded into public view, financial markets have been living inside a tug-of-war narrative: is this the foundation of a new economic era, or just the latest glossy wrapper on an old-fashioned tech bubble? On one side are the true believers who argue that AI isn’t just another sector story, it’s a macro story, akin to electrification or the internet. On the other are skeptics who see stretched valuations, easy money and hype, and hear echoes of 1999.

What’s changed in the last year is that this isn’t just a philosophical debate anymore: companies and governments have literally committed trillions of dollars in capex on the assumption that AI will transform productivity across the U.S. economy, and probably far beyond it.

The Trump administration is moving to tear up one of Biden’s core climate tools and re-orient U.S. car policy back toward gasoline, even if it means Americans burn far more fuel and automakers slow-walk electrification. The new proposal from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would radically weaken federal fuel-economy rules for model years 2022-2031.

Instead of steering the fleet toward roughly 50.4 miles per gallon by 2031, NHTSA would now aim for only about 34.5 mpg, with tiny annual increases of just 0.25%–0.5%. On top of that, the agency wants to retrospectively soften the standards for recent model years, making it much easier for companies to show compliance.