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The policy brief outlines how Saudi Arabia and the UAE can leverage their geological storage potential and National Oil Companies to scale up carbon capture and storage (CCS). It identifies current project statuses, storage capacities, and recommends the creation of carbon management strategies, open-access storage hubs, and enduring financial incentives to decarbonize hard-to-abate industries and the power sector.

Environmental groups filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of California to restore safety protections established after the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon blowout. The legal action specifically challenges the Trump administration's rollbacks of the 2016 Well Control and Blowout Preventer Rule, which included weakening performance requirements for blowout preventers, eliminating independent safety equipment inspectors, grandfathering existing rigs into outdated standards, and reducing testing and inspection requirements.

The authors contend that energy efficiency is a far more cost-effective and reliable method for reducing oil dependence than drilling in frontier areas or investing in synthetic fuels. They provide data showing that from 1973 to 1986, efficiency gains significantly outperformed supply expansions in terms of effective energy supply. The paper highlights the transportation sector, particularly light-vehicle efficiency, as the most critical area for potential savings, suggesting that higher CAFE standards could save billions of barrels of oil. It also examines savings in buildings, industry, and utilities, arguing that these 'negabarrels' are cheaper to produce than extracting new oil. Finally, the authors link energy efficiency to broader national security goals, including the mitigation of climate change, the reduction of nuclear proliferation, and the decrease of geopolitical volatility in the Middle East.