Something happened yesterday morning that deserves more attention than it will probably get. In the pre-market hours in New York, before any public announcement had been made, someone placed two enormous bets on the financial markets. One — worth $1.5 billion — wagered that stock prices would rise. The other — $192 million — wagered that oil prices would fall. Fifteen minutes later, President Trump posted on Truth Social that the United States had been holding "very good and productive conversations" with Iran, and that planned military strikes would be paused for five days.
The markets moved exactly as those bets had predicted. The oil position alone generated an estimated $100 million in profit within twenty minutes. The equity gains pushed the total considerably higher.
There was just one problem. Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf flatly denied any negotiations had taken place, calling Trump's announcement "fake news used to manipulate the financial and oil markets."1 Iran's Foreign Ministry confirmed there had been no direct or indirect contact with Washington at all.
Someone made $100 million in twenty minutes on a presidential announcement that the other country involved said never happened.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has not commented. The CFTC has not announced an investigation. The White House called the allegations baseless. And the news cycle has already moved on to the next crisis.
This is the moment to stop and ask ourselves a question: are we simply choosing not to see what is directly in front of us?
There's a Pattern Going On Here
This was not an isolated event. Traders and hedge fund managers have noted multiple instances in recent months where very large, very precisely timed bets have preceded major US government announcements. Similar concerns have arisen around prediction markets, where suspiciously well-informed wagers have appeared ahead of US actions involving countries including Iran and Venezuela.2
There is also the matter of who is connected to those prediction market platforms. The New York Times has reported that leading prediction market firms share a notable commonality: Donald Trump Jr.3,4
The pattern, taken whole, is not subtle. A president makes announcements — sometimes apparently false ones — that move markets in predictable directions. Immediately before those announcements, people with what appears to be advance knowledge place bets that profit from exactly those movements. The institutions responsible for investigating such behaviour are led by appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president himself.
What the evidence shows
Trump's Iran ceasefire announcement came two hours before US markets opened, and the five-day pause he announced ends precisely at the close of the energy trading week — a detail Iranian analysts were quick to highlight.
Iran's parliament speaker said: "Every week, when markets open, Trump makes these kinds of statements to drive down oil prices." Iran's Foreign Ministry confirmed there had been no negotiations, directly or indirectly.
The trades preceding the announcement were described by multiple hedge fund managers as "highly unusual." No regulatory investigation has been announced.
The most straightforward explanation — the one that fits all the known facts about this president's character, history, and the people around him — is that personal enrichment is at or near the centre of his decision-making, and that associates with advance knowledge of his announcements are profiting from them. Whether that is the actual explanation requires an independent investigation to determine.
There is no independent investigation.
Why Is Nobody Stopping Him?
This is the question making us all crazy. And there are two levels of answer to it. The first level is about the current political situation.
He controls the enforcement mechanisms. The DOJ, the SEC, the FBI, the CFTC — all now answer, directly or indirectly, to the president. Investigating him would require institutions he controls to act against him. This is not accidental. It is the outcome of a sustained effort to place loyalists in every position of institutional authority.
The Republican Party has stopped functioning as a check. Individual Republicans who should know what Trump is have made a rational calculation: personal survival requires silence. The result is that one of the fundamental mechanisms of democratic governance — opposition within the system — has effectively ceased to operate.
The courts are slower than the damage. Legal challenges take years. By the time rulings arrive, the profits have been made, the norms have been broken, and the next outrage is already dominating the headlines.
The volume of wrongdoing is itself a weapon. When scandals arrive faster than public attention can process them, the effect is not outrage but exhaustion. There is substantial evidence that this effect, in authoritarian political movements, is not accidental. Overwhelmed people disengage. Disengaged people don't resist.
The greatest danger, alongside the physical reality, is the psychological retreat into helplessness that prevents even the damage-limitation that remains possible.
Historians who study democratic backsliding note one consistent feature: it almost always happens faster than people expect, and by the time the majority recognises it fully, the mechanisms for correction have already been significantly weakened. We are living through a case study in real time.
This Didn't Come From Nowhere
The second level requires us to zoom out, but hold the Iran trades in your mind for a moment longer first, because they illuminate something beyond the ordinary question of possible self-serving. A man with the power to move global oil markets made an announcement that enriched people around him. That same man has used every lever of power to undermine climate action and information, both in the US and globally. The market manipulation and the climate obstruction are not two separate scandals. They are expressions of the same underlying logic: extract maximum value from carbon, for as long as possible, regardless of the cost to anyone else. And it's not a coincidence he is pursuing this agenda now.
The period between roughly 2025 and 2035 is considered by many climate scientists to be the last window in which aggressive action could still meaningfully limit the degree of environmental catastrophe — prevention is most likely no longer possible.
Yet combatting climate change represents the single greatest threat to the profits of the fossil fuel industry — the wealthiest and most politically connected industry in human history. As the science became undeniable and public pressure for action grew through the 2010s, the stakes for that industry became existential. When your entire business model is threatened, you don't quietly accept it. You fight back with every tool available.
The tools available to people with hundreds of billions of dollars are considerable. This is not conspiracy theory — it is documented history. ExxonMobil's own scientists understood climate change from the 1970s. Rather than act on it, the company funded decades of deliberate disinformation.5 The Koch brothers built an entire political infrastructure specifically to block climate legislation. Dark money networks poured billions into think tanks, political campaigns and media outlets designed to manufacture public doubt.
These same networks were instrumental in Trump's political rise.
And here is where the Iran oil trades connect back to all of this. Every false announcement that knocks dollars off a barrel of oil, every market-moving tweet, every crony appointment that further disables the institutions meant to investigate it — these are not just personal grifts. They are also, functionally, acts of climate obstruction. A president who has learned he can move energy markets with a social media post has every incentive to keep energy markets — and therefore global attention — focused on oil. Not on the transition away from it.
Meanwhile, Russia's entire economy runs on fossil fuel exports. A world that successfully transitions to clean energy is an existential threat to Vladimir Putin's power. He therefore has enormous motivation to fund and amplify the political forces in Western democracies that resist climate action — and there is substantial evidence he has done exactly that, through disinformation campaigns, funding of far-right parties, and election interference.
The alignment between Trump, the fossil fuel lobby, and Putin on climate is not coincidental. They all benefit from the same outcome: delay, denial, and the continued dominance of carbon-based energy. Trump isn't the cause of all this, he's just the perfect instrument to carry out this agenda — a man with no ideology beyond self-enrichment, and no inconvenient principles to navigate around. And he is doing this at precisely the moment it matters most — the period that climate scientists consider the last window for meaningful action.
The Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Which brings us to the hardest question of all. Given the seeming erasure of all climate action, science and information by one of the world's largest emitters, and given that the consequences are already unfolding — is it too late? Are we heading for civilizational collapse?
The honest answer, on climate at least, is: too late to prevent serious harm, yes. The 1.5°C target of the Paris Agreement is effectively gone. We are on course for somewhere between 2.5°C and 3.5°C of warming under current policies, with the range of uncertainty extending higher. Several feedback loops — Arctic methane release, Amazon dieback, ice sheet destabilisation — are either already triggered or approaching their tipping points.
Civilisational collapse, in this context, doesn't necessarily mean human extinction. It means the end of the stable, predictable world that complex modern societies depend upon. Mass displacement. Food system failures. Water scarcity affecting billions. Political breakdown in vulnerable regions, leading to conflicts that make current wars look minor. The gradual erosion of the conditions that make interconnected civilisation possible.
Much of this is not a future scenario. It is already happening — to people in the Global South, in low-lying coastal regions, in areas of chronic drought. It is happening now. It is simply not yet happening to enough people in wealthy northern countries in ways they cannot ignore or insulate themselves from.
The darkest calculation
Some of the people funding and enabling Trump are not merely indifferent to climate change. They are old, extraordinarily wealthy, and appear to have concluded — perhaps consciously, perhaps not — that they will be dead before the worst consequences arrive, that their wealth will insulate them from much of what does arrive in their lifetimes, and that the profits available between now and catastrophe are worth extracting regardless of the cost to everyone else.
A rational, if monstrous, calculation.
What Remains Worth Saying
Every fraction of a degree of warming still prevented matters enormously — the difference between 2.5°C and 3.5°C is the difference between very bad and potentially unsurvivable for large parts of humanity. The clean energy transition is happening rapidly in China, the EU, and elsewhere regardless of Washington. Massive efforts to restore nature's carbon sinks (forests, oceans, peat, meadows) are taking place. Local resilience matters even when global coordination fails.
And there is this: the resistance to action is not evidence that humanity as a whole has chosen this path. It is evidence that a relatively small number of extraordinarily powerful people have successfully manipulated democratic systems to protect their interests. That is a different problem — and in principle a more solvable one — than humanity being collectively suicidal.
But that solution requires people to see the situation clearly, name it accurately, and refuse the temptation of either false comfort or paralysing despair.
We know what is happening. We know who is doing it, and why, and roughly who is paying for it. The question that remains — the only question that matters now — is whether enough people are willing to say so plainly, loudly, and without waiting for permission.
Come and see it for yourself — then let's talk
If this piece has left you wanting to do something rather than simply absorb more bad news, we'd love to see you at a local screening of a remarkable film.
Last November, 1,200 politicians and community leaders gathered in Westminster for the People's Emergency Briefing — nine leading experts speaking honestly about climate, nature, food security, health, energy, tipping points, weather extremes and national security. Opened by naturalist Chris Packham and chaired by writer Mike Berners-Lee, the event was organised by Simon and Nick Oldridge of the Climate Science Breakthrough project, with Ben Casey and Henrik Delehag of the Utopia Bureau. A feature-length film of the day has now been made.
Screenings are taking place in communities around the country — not just as film nights, but as facilitated spaces for people of all backgrounds and political views to engage seriously with the evidence, reflect on what it means for their lives and communities, and connect with others locally around the question of how society responds. The wider aim is to build the public and political momentum needed to bring this briefing to television.
We are hosting a screening on Sunday 5 July, 7–9.30pm, at Haslingfield Village Hall. Everyone is welcome — especially people who don't normally come to climate events. Head to our What's On pages for details and to book your place.
Notes & Sources
- ↑ Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, posting on X, March 23, 2026, as reported by Al Jazeera: Iran denies any talks with US after Trump claims 'productive' discussions. Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei separately confirmed no direct or indirect dialogue had taken place. The IRGC described Trump's announcement as "psychological operations."
- ↑ NPR, January 2026: How Kalshi and Polymarket prediction market traders make money. Polymarket faced intense criticism after users made substantial bets ahead of the US military action in Venezuela. The trader's identity has not been publicly confirmed.
- ↑ Donald Trump Jr. joined Kalshi as a paid strategic adviser in January 2025, and later invested in rival Polymarket through his venture capital firm 1789 Capital, joining its advisory board. Both CNN and Reuters have reported on these arrangements. See: CNN, March 2026; Front Office Sports, August 2025.
- ↑ The New York Times, January 15, 2026: reporting on Donald Trump Jr.'s connections to the leading prediction market platforms.
- ↑ ExxonMobil's internal scientists accurately predicted the trajectory of climate change from the 1970s onward. Investigative reporting by InsideClimate News (2015) and the Los Angeles Times (2015) first documented this in detail, drawing on internal company documents. ExxonMobil subsequently funded external efforts to cast doubt on the science. Several US state attorneys general have pursued legal action on this basis.