A monthlong run of rising crude oil prices and refineries nearing capacity has pushed the average cost of diesel fuel to its highest level since 2022. At $5.78 per gallon on Thursday, the cost of diesel is up more than 53% since the war with Iran started in late February. At the time, diesel averaged $3.76 per gallon nationwide. The price of unleaded gasoline, which most personal vehicles run on, rose alongside diesel Thursday. According to AAA data tracked by NBC News, the national average was $4.14 per gallon, up two cents from Wednesday.

Pope Francis spent much of his papacy pushing the Catholic Church to treat climate change as a moral issue in addition to a scientific. Now, the Holy See’s plan is putting money behind that morality and looking to make the Vatican the world’s first carbon-neutral state.

Vatican City, which covers about 44 hectares, or 109 acres, will put roughly 100 million euros ($117 million) toward an agrivoltaic plant expected to power the microstate within two years, sources told Reuters.

The plan builds on what Pope Francis first ordered in 2024. Pope Leo has spent the past year moving it through the bureaucratic steps needed to build it by creating a foundation, a memorandum with an Italian utility, and a joint commission. What’s new is that this is the first time a dollar figure has been attached to the plan. And it also puts into context what we’re doing stateside.

The Vatican is roughly an eighth the size of Central Park. It’s smaller than a single data center campus like Meta’s Hyperion data center project in Louisiana, which is on track to draw as much as 5 gigawatts of power by 2030. Home to roughly 800 residents and nearly 3,000 commuting lay workers, it’s the smallest country on Earth by a wide margin.

It’s so small that the plant won’t fit within the country’s 109 acres: It’s being built on the roughly 1,050-to-1,100-acre Santa Maria di Galeria estate the Vatican owns outside Rome, land close in size to the campus for OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas. But where Stargate’s footprint is built to support 1.2 gigawatts of AI computing, the Vatican’s similarly sized site is expected to generate just 80 to 90 megawatts of capacity, per Reuters, or roughly a dozen times less power on similar acreage. But that’s because it’s built to run a few hundred residents’ worth of lights and a radio transmitter, not racks of GPUs.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/09/03/pope-leo-vatican-world-smallest-nation-117-million-carbon-neutral-solar-panels/?utm_source=reddit/

Across the developed world, yields on government debt are rising, driving up the cost of borrowing with potentially particularly dire effects for renewable and clean energy.

The bulk of spending on a renewable project — say a solar farm — comes up front as capital expenditure that often has to be financed through borrowing. For a gas-fired power plant, on the other hand, the spending is split more evenly between upfront costs and operational costs (namely fuel), which can be paid for out of cash flow from operating the plant. Where the cost of operating a gas plant is at the mercy of natural gas prices, for a renewables project, interest rates can dominate the economics.

Sure enough, that inflationary pressure showed up in the second-quarter results of America’s renewables companies.

The silver lining for renewable energy — and all energy developers — is that, while the costs of capital, materials, and labor are going up, electricity itself has never been in greater demand.