Liam Denning

The US and Canada appear poised to clinch a deal on an industry central to the North American free-trade battle: autos. As ever with President Donald Trump’s trade war, a fog of uncertainty and potential U-turns persists. In this case, the details that have emerged suggest the deal would represent a good first step for Detroit, but only that. Don’t tell the president, but foreign automakers look like more immediate beneficiaries.

Hyperscalers like Amazon plan to build their own power plants in the US so that people don't complain of data centres driving up electricity bills. But grid use can also lower household bills on economies of scale. Developers need to get that message out.

Weeks after taking office again, President Donald Trump established the National Energy Dominance Council, proclaiming that “abundant natural resources” would help to, among other things, cool prices, cut the deficit and “end wars across the world.” Some 18 months later, gasoline that costs more than $4 a gallon has stoked inflation, the national debt has topped $40 trillion and the US has started a war several thousand miles across the world.

Oil has what you might call a weak correlation with liberal democracy. Consumers have long tolerated being dependent on unstable or unsavory regimes for their energy. As Paolo Scaroni was fond of observing when he ran Italian oil major Eni SpA, no one drills for oil in Switzerland.

US President Donald Trump's oil deal with Venezuela is an opaque settlement that may put new elections further out of reach, says Liam Denning for Bloomberg Opinion.

In a momentous week for Venezuela, Chevron Corp. delivered the sequel to the White House’s blockbuster oil deal. Except that it’s more of a prequel. While the US oil major’s new multi-billion dollar investment in Venezuela would appear to confirm that President Donald Trump’s own venture there will soon bring barrels flooding back into the global market, it actually serves to highlight the challenge of turning rhetoric into reality.

The US oil giant may become the proof of concept to attract the capital needed for any eventual Venezuelan oil boom, says Liam Denning for Bloomberg Opinion.

It seems the Trumpian recession in US green energy fails to apply to one of the more Trumpian areas of the country: Texas. Solar power and batteries are taking large bites out of America’s biggest state power grid in the US, and helping to suppress electricity prices in the process.

Genius, according to Thomas Edison, is only 1% inspiration. But that 1% is crucial to making the other, sweaty 99% worthwhile when it comes to innovation. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy appears to have missed this in sending a strongly worded letter to Ford Motor Co. about its dealings with Chinese companies.

Apple Inc. just launched its long-anticipated foldable iPhone. It made a big deal of it, livestreaming an event at its headquarters hosted by brand new Chief Executive Officer John Ternus. That makes sense: “The stakes for Apple are high,” as my colleague Dave Lee put it. This is, after all, the single biggest change ever made to the design of a device that transformed Apple into one of the most valuable companies in the world, and still accounts for about half its sales.