Before a packed crowd of oil and gas executives on Monday, Chris Wright, the new U.S. energy secretary, delivered a scathing critique of the Biden administration’s energy policies and efforts to fight climate change and promised a “180 degree pivot.” Mr. Wright, a former fracking executive, has emerged as the most forceful promoter of President Trump’s plans to expand American oil and gas production and dismantle virtually every federal policy aimed at curbing global warming. “I wanted to play a role in reversing what I believe has been a very poor direction in energy policy,” Mr. Wright said as he kicked off the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston, the nation’s biggest annual gathering of the energy industry. “The previous administration’s policy was focused myopically on climate change, with people as simply collateral damage.” Mr. Wright’s speech was greeted with enthusiastic applause. It was quite different from a year ago, when Jennifer Granholm, the energy secretary during the Biden administration, told the same gathering that the transition to lower-carbon forms of energy like wind, solar and batteries was unstoppable. “Even as we are the largest producer of oil and gas in the world,” Ms. Granholm said, “the expansion of America’s energy dominance to clean energy is striking.” Mr. Wright, however, was dismissive of renewable power, which he said played only a small role in the world’s energy mix. Natural gas currently supplies 25 percent of raw energy globally, before it is converted into electricity or some other use. Wind and solar only supply about 3 percent, he said. He noted that gas also had a variety of other uses — it could be burned in furnaces to heat homes or used to make fertilizer or other chemicals — that were hard to replicate with other energy sources. “Beyond the obvious scale and cost problems, there is simply no physical way wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas,” Mr. Wright said. Mr. Wright has argued that there is a moral case for fossil fuels, saying they are crucial for alleviating global poverty and that moving too quickly to cut emissions risks driving up energy prices around the world. He has denounced efforts by countries to stop adding greenhouse gas to the atmosphere by 2050, calling that a “sinister goal.” At a conference in Washington last week, Mr. Wright said that African countries needed more energy of all kinds to lift themselves out of poverty, including coal, the most polluting fossil fuel. “We’ve had years of Western countries shamelessly saying don’t develop coal, coal is bad,” he said. “That’s just nonsense.” In Houston on Monday, other oil and gas executives echoed Mr. Wright’s remarks, pitching oil and gas as the best solution for impoverished people in developing nations around the world. “There are billions of people on this planet that still live sad, short, difficult lives because they live in energy poverty, and that’s a shame,” said Michael Wirth, chief executive of Chevron. “It should be unacceptable but affordability had left the conversation, at least in the West.” In recent years, much of the world has been investing heavily in renewable energy. Last year, nations invested roughly $1.2 trillion in wind, solar, batteries and electric grids, slightly more than the $1.1 trillion they spent on oil, gas and coal infrastructure, according to the International Energy Agency. But Mr. Wright warned against a shift to renewable energy that he said was likely to prove costly. “Everywhere wind and solar penetration have increased significantly, prices went up,” he said. That is not always true. Texas has seen its electricity prices decline slightly over the past decade as wind and solar have grown rapidly and now supply more than one-quarter of the state’s power. The costs of wind turbines and solar panels have dropped precipitously in the last decade. But some places, like California and Germany, have seen electricity prices rise significantly at the same time they ramped up their use of renewable energy. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Some energy executives at the conference were more optimistic about renewable energy. John Ketchum, the chief executive of NextEra Energy, the largest producer of wind and solar power in the United States, said that renewables were essential for meeting growing demand for electricity in the United States over the next few years — especially since there was a large backlog for new turbines that burn natural gas. Renewable energy “is cheaper and it’s available right now,” Mr. Ketchum said. “When you look at gas as a solution, as an example, to get your hands on a gas turbine and to actually get it built throughout the market, you’re really looking at 2030, or later.” In his speech, Mr. Wright sharply criticized the Biden administration for slowing the growth of natural gas exports. Last year, the Energy Department paused approvals of new terminals that export liquefied natural gas, saying that it was concerned about the environmental and price impacts of shipping more gas overseas. Despite the pause, the United States was still the world’s largest exporter of natural gas in 2024. On Monday, Mr. Wright signed the fourth export approval since Mr. Trump took office, extending an approval for the Delfin terminal off the coast of Louisiana. He said the Biden administration’s review of gas exports had found only modest impacts on global emissions and domestic U.S. prices. On the topic of climate change, Mr. Wright said he didn’t deny that the planet was warming, calling himself a “climate realist.” But he added that rising greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels — which have increased global average temperatures to their highest levels in at least 100,000 years — were a “side effect of building the modern world.” “We have indeed raised global atmospheric CO2 concentration by 50 percent in the process of more than doubling human life expectancy, lifting almost all of the world’s citizens out of grinding poverty, launching modern medicine,” he said. “Everything in life involves trade-offs.” Mr. Wright did not dwell on the downsides of climate change, which include the growing risks of heat waves, drought, floods and species extinction. He also did not address the costs of adapting to a hotter planet, which experts estimate could reach trillions of dollars for developing countries alone this decade. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Instead, Mr. Wright rebuked Britain for slashing its greenhouse gas emissions faster than any other wealthy country, saying that doing so had driven key industries overseas. “I find it sad and a bit ironic that once mighty steel and petrochemical industries of the United Kingdom have been displaced to Asia where the same products will be produced with higher greenhouse gas emissions, then loaded on a diesel powered ship back to the United Kingdom,” Mr. Wright said. “The net result is higher prices and fewer jobs for U.K. citizens, higher global greenhouse gas emissions, and all of this is termed a climate policy.” Mr. Wright said he was not against low-carbon energy and supports advanced forms of nuclear power and geothermal power, which multiple startups in the United States are pursuing. But he said that the administration’s “all-of-the-above” approach to energy likely would not extend to wind farms, citing opposition in some communities. President Trump has railed against wind farms, saying falsely they cause cancer. The administration has stopped approvals for wind farms on public land and in federal waters and has threatened to block projects on private land. “Wind has been singled out because it’s had a singularly poor record of driving up prices and getting increasing citizen outrage, whether you’re a farm or you’re in a coastal community,” Mr. Wright said. “So wind is a little bit of a different case.” The Trump administration’s policies are not uniformly popular among oil and gas producers. Many companies have warned that Mr. Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum could raise prices for essential materials like pipes used to line new wells, while the constant threat of tariffs on Canadian oil could raise prices for refineries in the Midwest. Mr. Wright mostly sidestepped questions on the tariffs, saying that “it’s very early on” and pointing out that inflation was low during Mr. Trump’s first term.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s premier agency for weather and climate science, has been told by the Trump administration to prepare to lose another 1,000 workers, raising concerns that NOAA’s lifesaving forecasts might be hindered as hurricane and disaster season approaches. The new dismissals would come in addition to the roughly 1,300 NOAA staff members who have already resigned or been laid off in recent weeks. The moves have alarmed scientists, meteorologists and others at the agency, which includes the National Weather Service. Some activities, including the launching of weather balloons, have already been suspended because of staffing shortages. Together, the reductions would represent nearly 20 percent of NOAA’s approximately 13,000-member work force. Managers within NOAA have been told to draw up proposals for layoffs and reorganizations to trim the agency’s staff by at least 1,000 people, according to eight people who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the plans publicly. The effort is part of the “reductions in force” that President Trump required as part of an executive order last month, as he and the billionaire Elon Musk make rapid, large-scale cuts to the federal bureaucracy. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT NOAA managers have been asked to complete their proposals by Tuesday, one of the people said. The proposals are likely to involve eliminating some of the agency’s functions, though managers have received little guidance about which programs to prioritize for cutting. Representatives for NOAA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. The recent employee departures have already affected NOAA’s operations in many realms: predicting hurricanes and tornadoes, overseeing fisheries and endangered species, monitoring the changes that humans are bringing about to Earth’s climate and ecosystems. NOAA, a $6.8 billion agency within the Commerce Department, has been singled out for cuts by some of Mr. Trump’s allies. Project 2025, the policy blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation that is echoed in many of the Trump administration’s actions, calls NOAA “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” The document calls for the agency to be dismantled and some of its functions eliminated or privatized. Organizations including the American Geophysical Union, which represents earth and space researchers, have called on Congress to oppose the administration’s actions. “Undermining NOAA’s operations could risk the safety of millions of Americans and destabilize countless industries, from farming and fisheries to energy and finance, threatening job losses and economic downturn,” the organizations wrote in a letter. They pointed out that, as the planet warms, extreme weather is becoming more frequent and more damaging, making NOAA’s work more critical. The idea that private companies could replace NOAA in forecasting the weather is a “gross misunderstanding,” said Keith Seitter, a distinguished visiting lecturer in meteorology and climate science at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. “The app on your phone or what you’re watching on TV, those are private-sector companies, but those private-sector companies depend critically on NOAA for all the information that they’re using to create those forecasts,” Dr. Seitter said. “It’s a coordinated effort.” Employees who are still working at NOAA describe feelings of deep anxiety. Their colleagues have been let go unannounced, meaning they have no idea who might simply not show up for work. With their government-issued credit cards frozen, they can’t buy supplies for research projects or travel to retrieve instruments that have been installed at sea. They are scrambling to back up their scientific data, fearful that programs might be shuttered or leases on buildings canceled. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT At least three NOAA facilities were on a list of federal properties that the Trump administration flagged last week for possible sale. The list was later taken down, replaced by a web page that said a new inventory was “coming soon.” The firings of scientists at NOAA and other agencies, plus potential cuts to federal funding for research at universities and hospitals, have fed worries that the administration is undermining the foundations of America’s modern scientific leadership. On Friday, crowds gathered at “Stand Up for Science” rallies in cities around the nation including Austin, Birmingham, Ala., Boston, Chicago, Denver, Nashville and Washington. “This is the most challenging moment I can recall for science,” Michael Mann, a climate researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, told the rally in Washington, where the crowd peaked at 5,000 people, according to the organizers. “Science is under siege,” Dr. Mann said. The National Weather Service has faced budget cuts, hiring freezes and calls for privatization before, Dr. Seitter said. “But nothing where you’ve just arbitrarily whacked whole chunks out of the work force, or potentially taken away whole chunks of budget that support mission-critical things,” he said.

For the past two days, under the soft lights of chandeliers in a Marriott basement a block from the White House, energy ministers and tech founders from across Africa gathered to discuss how best to bring electricity to more than 600 million people on the continent who have none. Much of their hope, and fear, came from the whirlwind of change President Trump has brought to U.S. foreign policy, including the termination of Power Africa, a major initiative that had supported them for a decade. Was Mr. Trump abandoning them? Or might his promises of “global energy dominance” be a boon? Attendees got at least a part of their answer on Friday morning. Chris Wright, the new administration’s energy secretary, took the stage and gave an impassioned speech on how concerns over climate change should not prevent Africa from charging ahead with fossil fuel development. “This government has no desire to tell you what you should do with your energy system,” he said. “It’s a paternalistic post-colonial attitude that I just can’t stand.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT His remarks came just weeks after the administration shuttered Power Africa, which had financed tens of millions of electricity connections since its start under President Barack Obama in 2013. Africa, like the rest of the world, faces an immensely consequential choice: exploit fossil fuels that contribute to global warming, or forge a new path with renewable energy. Mr. Wright said Africa simply needed more energy of all kinds, including and even especially coal, one of the most polluting fossil fuels. “We’ve had years of Western countries shamelessly saying don’t develop coal, coal is bad,” Mr. Wright said. “That’s just nonsense, 100 percent nonsense. Coal transformed our world and made it better.” And while Mr. Wright said climate change was a “real, physical phenomenon,” he said it wouldn’t make a list of his top 10 problems facing the world. Mr. Wright’s appearance on Friday was met with roaring approval. His remarks were in line with what many African energy developers have been urging for years. They say the persistence of energy poverty is a blight on the continent’s development, and Western skittishness to invest in energy projects, whether because of concerns over governance or greenhouse gas emissions, is akin to keeping Africa down. Africa’s population is growing faster than current electrification rates. Officials often buck at the suggestion they should opt for clean-energy technologies to help fight climate change, instead of using their own abundant supplies of fossil fuels, given that their countries have contributed nearly nothing historically to the emissions that cause global warming. Other countries used fossil fuels for generations to build prosperity, the argument goes, so why shouldn’t they? Other U.S. officials speaking at the summit said that, with Mr. Trump in office, the days of shying away from fossil fuel investment in favor of renewables were over. “When we say ‘all of the above,’ you might ask, is that code for carbon? And yes, it is code for carbon,” said Troy Fitrell, a senior State Department official and former ambassador to Guinea. “There are no restrictions anymore on what kind of energy we can promote.” African executives in their own speeches said that they hoped they would get more investment and fewer regulatory hurdles. “We can’t wait for three years, or even half that time,” to do environmental or social impact assessments on a project, said Akinwole Omoboriowo II, who leads Genesis Energy, a company focused on renewable energy. “People are dying without the chance to watch TV,” he said, to a murmur of chuckles. “I just think we should think about that.” Mr. Wright’s remarks left major questions unanswered and did not detail how much or where the U.S. government would invest in African energy access. Would he seek to revive Power Africa but change its mandate? Might he bring its responsibilities under his own department? (Previously, Power Africa’s budget fell under the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration has all but eliminated.) What he did offer was a pro-Africa message at a time when his boss has unnerved Africans. Mr. Trump froze aid to South Africa last month and accused its government of using a new land law to discriminate against white citizens. Many African officials fear his administration will end the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a decades-old trade agreement that allows 32 African countries to send billions of dollars of goods to the United States duty-free. And in his speech to Congress on Tuesday, Mr. Trump made a dismissive mention of Lesotho, saying “nobody has ever heard of” the country. Conspicuously missing from the gathering were representatives of the American agencies that had taken a lead on energy initiatives in Africa: U.S.A.I.D. and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which Mr. Trump created in his first term but whose billions of dollars of investments are currently frozen. The meeting rooms were full of former Power Africa officials, however, and they questioned whether the Trump administration would muster much follow-through. “The biggest question is whether the U.S. can be a credible partner when we’ve just dismantled our main mechanism for investing in African energy,” said Katie Auth, the former deputy director of Power Africa. She and others acknowledged that an increasing focus on low-carbon energy made the program a target for an administration that is hostile to what its officials often call the “climate change alarm industry.” But Ms. Auth also noted that not only did Power Africa invest in gas, but that the plummeting cost of renewable energy technology has made those forms of power the fastest and cheapest to deploy in many African countries. “I think they don’t realize that Power Africa was never a climate initiative,” Ms. Auth said. “It was driven by economic viability and driven by U.S. firms.” She added, “If anything, this is the encapsulation of the kind of assistance this administration should want to do.” Planet-warming emissions aside, gas investment also collides with an additional hurdle: weak power grids. Building more gas-burning power plants would require building far more electrical transmission lines. That’s a key difference with solar, which can be built on a much smaller scale locally, so it doesn’t necessarily require huge, sprawling networks of power lines. Rosemary Oduor, a top official at Kenya Power and Lighting Company, the country’s state-owned utility, described African grids as “old trees growing heavy with fruit.” Without huge investment in their modernization, and without major subsidies, she said, bringing new power sources online might only make them more likely to fail.

The Trump administration has moved to rewrite rules designed to prevent disasters at thousands of chemical facilities across the country. The Environmental Protection Agency filed a motion in federal court on Thursday saying it was pulling back the safety regulations, introduced last year under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. The rules, which took effect in May, require sites that handle hazardous chemicals to adopt new safeguards including explicit measures to prepare for storms, floods and other climate-related risks. They also require some facilities to scrutinize their use of particularly dangerous chemicals and switch to safer alternatives as well as to share more information with neighbors and emergency responders. In addition, facilities that have suffered prior accidents also must undergo independent audits. President Trump’s E.P.A. intends to rewrite those rules, the agency said in a filing with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. That essentially makes moot a legal challenge launched last year by a group of Republican Attorneys-General, as well as the chemicals industry, which argued that the rules imposed undue burdens on companies with little safety benefit. The American Chemistry Council, a main industry group and participant in the legal challenge, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Earthjustice, a nonprofit law group that sued the first Trump organization more than 200 times in support of environmental rules, condemned the move. “Chemical explosions force entire neighborhoods to evacuate. First responders have died rushing into disasters they weren’t warned about,” said Adam Kron, an attorney at the advocacy organization. “Workers have suffered burns, lung damage, and worse, all because companies cut corners to save money.” The move comes as the Trump administration has embarked on a broad dismantling of climate and environmental policy across the federal government. The E.P.A. did not detail in its filing the specifics of its planned rewrite, and Molly Vaseliou, an agency spokeswoman, said the agency would not have comment beyond the filing. While the rule took effect last May, some requirements were to be phased in over several years, which means some of the practices it requires might not yet be in place. In a letter sent to the agency’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, in January, industry groups including the American Chemistry Council asked for a reconsideration of many of the rules’ main components. “The facilities affected by this program are vital components of the U.S. economy, supporting millions of jobs, driving innovation and maintaining our global competitiveness,” the groups said. “It is imperative that E.P.A. take immediate action to fix critical areas of this rule.” They also asked the agency to immediately shut down a public data tool that had allowed communities to look up details of local sites that store hazardous chemicals, including information on past accidents. The planned rewrite is the latest in a prolonged policy tussle over strengthening what is known as the Risk Management Program. First introduced in 1996, the RMP regulates nearly 12,000 facilities that handle hazardous chemicals, including factories, wholesalers, oil refineries, natural gas plants, wastewater treatment plants and fertilizer distributors. Many of those facilities are critical infrastructure, but also a risk to nearby communities, storing large quantities of highly hazardous substances like chlorine, anhydrous ammonia and vinyl chloride. More than 130 million people live within three miles of sites that handle hazardous chemicals that were covered by the Biden-era rule, the E.P.A. has estimated. A 2020 Congressional Research Service report said that a “worst-case scenario” accident at any of 2,000 of the most hazardous sites could endanger 100,000 people or more. Former President Barack Obama tried to strengthen the rules after a deadly 2013 explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas killed 15 people and injured more than 160. The first Trump administration halted the tougher requirements before they took effect. President Biden then reintroduced tougher rules in 2021, and finalized them last year.

Los Angeles County sued Southern California Edison and its parent company on Wednesday, blaming the utility’s equipment for causing the deadly Eaton fire in January. The county’s lawsuit is the most prominent case brought against Edison, which is also facing scores of lawsuits filed by victims of the fire that killed 17 people and destroyed more than 9,400 buildings near Altadena and Pasadena, Calif. The cities of Pasadena and Sierra Madre are also filing suits against Edison for damages that include the use of taxpayer resources and destruction of public infrastructure during the fire, the county said. “We are committed to seeking justice for the Altadena community and the taxpayers of Los Angeles County,” Dawyn R. Harrison, counsel for Los Angeles County, said in a statement. The official cause of the Eaton fire remains under investigation by the State Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. An Edison spokeswoman, Kathleen Dunleavy, said the utility had been reviewing the lawsuits and would respond to the complaints in court. “Our hearts continue to be with the communities affected by the wildfires,” Ms. Dunleavy said. In its lawsuit, Los Angeles County said videos, eyewitness accounts and other evidence made clear that Edison equipment caused the Eaton fire on Jan. 7. Preliminary reviews by fire investigators placed the origin of the fire in Eaton Canyon, where Edison maintains four active and three inactive transmission lines. A gas station video that appeared to show the beginnings of the fire and data that suggest there were electrical faults on Edison’s transmission system, both of which were first reported by The New York Times, prompted the utility to expand its own investigation into the cause of the fire. In a letter to state regulators, the utility said it was examining the available evidence and equipment to determine if its equipment might have been involved in starting the fire. Edison also noted in the letter that there might be a connection between its equipment and another fire that started the same day, the Hurst fire in Sylmar. The Eaton and Hurst fires were among several blazes that burned across the Los Angeles area in January as a storm ripped through Southern California with winds reaching as high as 100 m.p.h. In addition to the Eaton fire, 12 people died in the Palisades fire, which devastated the coastal neighborhood of Pacific Palisades. The Palisades fire also remains under investigation.

The boom in artificial intelligence, a pressing need for more data centers and the energy transition story — particularly in transportation — are all spurring demand for electricity, and the existing power infrastructure is struggling to keep up. Businesses are facing five to eight-year wait times to connect to Europe’s ageing and strained electricity grids, experts told CNBC, as the emergence of new areas of demand drives an unprecedented rise in permit requests for power. According to the IEA, at least 1,500 gigawatts of global clean energy projects have been stopped or delayed because of a lack of grid connections and about $700 billion of grid investment is needed for countries to meet their green goals. Data centers, the large facilities that house servers for computing processes and often require huge amounts of power, are the “primary director” of that growing competition to connect to the grid, said Diego Hernandez Diaz, partner at McKinsey. He told CNBC that clients have quoted wait times of up to eight years to connect to the grid. “There are certain transmission system operators in Europe, that are already facing two, three or more folks all attempting to interconnect to the same node at the same time. ... There is a literal queue within individual connection points to see who gets to connect first,” he explained. Hernandez, whose work focuses on electro-intensive industries, said that over the last 18 months, nearly all of his work has focused on data centers, a sector that he expects to grow at an annual compound growth rate of 20% over the next six years. Demand for the facilities required to train large language models (LLMs) is expected to continue its exponential increase as tech giants race to dominate in AI. Energy management firm Schneider Electric warned in a January report that Europe faces a looming power crunch, with three to five-year waiting lists for grid connections in energy-constrained regions. “It’s kind of a race,” Steven Carlini, chief advocate of AI and data centers at Schneider Electric, told CNBC. “You have all these companies that are trying to deploy as much capacity as they can. But it’s constrained by the number of GPUs [graphics processing units] and the available power and the permitting.” “We’re going from a situation where you have one application or two applications [to connect to the grid] per year, in some countries, to 1,000,” Carlini said. It’s not just the amount of investment needed — but also the speed with which it can be deployed — which will be key to addressing the issue, McKinsey’s Diaz said. He also pointed to the growing complexity of the work of high-voltage grid operators and the example of Germany, which needs to go from building 400 kilometers of power lines a year to 2,000 kilometers. Diaz sees the competition to connect to the grid “either maintaining or intensifying” in 2025. Jerome Fournier, vice president of innovation at subsea cable manufacturer Nexans, said his firm has a “huge” order backlog in the range of seven-to-10 billion euros ($7.28 billion-$10.40 billion). Nexans’ cables are used to transmit electricity generated by wind and solar farms, and to supply power to homes and businesses. “Everybody’s considering: do we still have some room in our plans to manufacture other projects?” he said. Fournier told CNBC that firms like Nexans should also keep slots available for smaller projects such as interconnections for offshore wind turbines. “You’ve got to have the right balance between the load of the plans, the profitability and this type of electrification,” he said. A new power ecosystem Power constraints are leading data center operators to evolve their own “ecosystem of power backup,” according to Schneider Electric’s Carlini. In the future, data centers are expected to be at the center of that grid ecosystem, particularly if they are able to generate their own power with small modular reactors — mini nuclear reactors that produce electricity. Battery storage and strategic charging are also becoming increasingly important, Carlini said. These systems allow for the temporary storage of energy from the power grid to provide extra backup. The CEO of power solutions provider AVK, Ben Pritchard, said some European countries are facing large, 100-megawatt grid connection requests of a size that they’ve never seen before. He advocates for transition-linked energy solutions such as the use of microgrids, which are a separate islanded power system. In Norway, they’re trialing flexible connection agreements where customers limit their connection to the grid based on certain conditions, Beatrice Petrovich, senior energy and climate analyst at think tank Ember, highlighted. This allows them to adjust their energy usage depending on how the grid is faring at certain times. Ember also called for the implementation of rules on what it calls “anticipatory” grid investments. These would allow electricity grid operators to plan in a forward-looking way, taking into account the market trends of key technologies, such as growth in renewables and battery storage, Petrovich explained. Countries that move forward with improving legislation on enabling firms to have a fully decarbonized energy stack will be the “winner of the race,” putting forward a more “friendly ecosystem” around data centers, AVK’s Pritchard said. Ultimately, a bottleneck in the grid “encourages people to think differently, and when people are encouraged to think differently, they’re more open to different solutions. That, I think, is teeing up for the market to shift quite significantly,” said Pritchard. Modest EU growth Despite a growing need for power from some new and developing industries, Europe is still lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to growth in power demand. High electricity prices and operational costs are hampering overall demand in the region, leading to a more fragmented market. The International Energy Agency (IEA) this month hailed the rise of a “new Age of electricity,” as it upped its forecasts for global demand, predicting growth of 3.9% for 2025-2027 — the fastest pace of growth in recent years. The forecasts for Europe are more modest, however. Following two years of sharp declines in power demand, the region saw an increase of just 1% in 2024, according to a January report from energy think tank Ember. “2024 marks a turning point for electricity demand,” said Ember’s Petrovich, one of the authors of their report. “What we saw is the first rebound — even if it was a small rebound after many years of decline — it was widespread across the block.” McKinsey’s Diaz explained that since the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions, electricity prices have settled around 60 to 80 euros per megawatt hour. This is still 50-100% more expensive than prices seen in the previous two decades, however. As a result, costs for consumers have soared, leading to signs of a deceleration in demand for heat pumps and electric vehicles, he said. Diaz added that for manufacturers in Europe, the energy requirements “tower above those of any other geography in the world, it’s not only potentially more expensive, but even potentially more challenging,” Hernandez said. The “unprecedented” growth in data centers is “helping the overall curve ever so slightly, but everything else is fighting against it,” Hernandez said.

Two weeks after their bank accounts were frozen amid a swirl of investigations by the Trump administration, nonprofit organizations that were supposed to receive $20 billion to help curb climate change are still unable to withdraw money, raising concerns about their ability to pay staff. The accounts were frozen by Citibank, which holds the money, after Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, suggested there was potential fraud and the F.B.I. and Department of Justice launched investigations. Those inquiries went forward despite the determination by a top federal prosecutor that there was not enough evidence to open a grand jury criminal probe. “Citi was designated as the financial agent of the United States pursuant to the authority of the U.S. Treasury Department and has been working with the federal government in its efforts to address government officials’ concerns regarding this federal grant program,” the bank said in a statement. “Our role as financial agent does not involve any discretion over which organizations receive grant funds. Citi will of course comply with any binding instructions from the federal government.” Mr. Zeldin has criticized the policy and the structure of the program that was created by Congress and run by the Biden administration. He called for the money to be returned to the federal government, but has presented no evidence that a crime has been committed. This week, he asked for a third, concurrent investigation by his agency’s acting inspector general. Climate United, which received almost $7 billion under the program to distribute to other organizations, said Tuesday that it is struggling to make payroll, and individual project developers cannot withdraw the money they were promised. “These relationships take many months to build and are in jeopardy if funding freezes continue,” said Brooke Durham, a Climate United spokeswoman. On Tuesday, lawyers for Climate United asked the E.P.A. to justify its actions. In a letter to the agency, the lawyers detailed Climate United’s efforts to meet with E.P.A. representatives, adding that the agency canceled a Feb. 25 meeting after learning that Climate United’s lawyers would be present. The Trump administration has for the last six weeks attempted to find malfeasance connected to the distribution of money from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate law. The law provides tax incentives for clean energy manufacturing, and also calls for the E.P.A. to issue billions of dollars worth of grants to states, tribes, nonprofit groups and others to reduce emissions from fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change. Mr. Zeldin has taken particular aim at $20 billion obligated in April that came from a program called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which is sometimes known by the shorthand “green bank” funding. Editors’ Picks It’s Time to Put Away Your Winter Clothes. Here’s How to Store Them Safely. Is ‘Reef Safe’ Sunscreen Really Better? Murder, Lust and Obscene Wealth in a City on Edge Under it, Congress required the E.P.A. to award grants to organizations that in turn would offer loans and grants to businesses, homeowners and others to spur clean energy across the country, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. Funds were held in Citibank accounts under the names of the grantees. Former Vice President Kamala Harris was a champion of the program, calling it “the largest investment in financing for community-based climate projects in our nation’s history.” The Trump administration has run into roadblocks in its efforts to claw back the funding. Denise Cheung, a top federal prosecutor in D.C., refused to order that Citibank freeze the funds, citing a lack of evidence of possible criminal activity. Last month, she wrote in a letter, obtained by The New York Times, that she was asked to step down by the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, Ed Martin, after she determined there was not enough evidence to open a grand jury criminal investigation or to order a bank to freeze the accounts. The Trump administration appears to be basing its portrayal of the program as somehow criminal on a hidden-camera video produced last year by Project Veritas, a right-wing group known for trying to entrap political opponents with covert recordings. In the video, shot at a bar or restaurant toward the end of the Biden administration, Brent Efron, then an E.P.A. employee, is asked about his job by an unidentified male who gushed “amazing,” when Mr. Efron said he worked on climate change. At one point in the video, Mr. Efron refers to “green banks,” which he tells the person covertly recording him are nonprofit institutions that make it more financially feasible to build renewable energy projects. Project Veritas edited the video to then cut to a different part of their conversation in which Mr. Efron was describing how there was a rush to finish obligating funds that had been authorized by Congress before the Trump administration took office. “It truly feels like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing like gold bars off the edge,” Mr. Efron said in the video. Mr. Zeldin and other Trump officials now frequently invoke the “gold bars” phrase to suggest the prior administration was rushing to spend tax dollars in ways that were vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse. But a lawyer for Mr. Efron, Mark Zaid, said his client, whom he portrayed as “the victim of a Project Veritas attack,” was not referring to the frozen funds. “He is the one who made that ‘gold bars’ statement that Zeldin keeps seizing on, but it has nothing to do with this Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund,” Mr. Zaid said. “He wasn’t talking about that. Those funds were already allocated and obligated.” In the Project Veritas video, after using the “gold bars” phrase, Mr. Efron was asked who was getting the gold bars. He replied “nonprofits, states, tribes, cities” adding: “a lot of them are small, like, local nonprofits.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Efron has been contacted by both the office of the E.P.A. inspector general and by an agent with the Washington field office of the F.B.I., according to Mr. Zaid. The F.B.I. agent left a card at Mr. Efron’s home. Mr. Zaid said that on behalf of his client, he called the agent, who told him he had been sent by a prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida. But “that disappeared very quickly, and I am in discussion with the D.O.J. right now to better understand what is actually going on,” Mr. Zaid said. There had been, he said, a “strange bouncing around of which U.S. attorney was going to handle this case.” The person with the office of the E.P.A. inspector general — one of the many watchdog agencies whose leaders have been purged by Mr. Trump — sent Mr. Efron an email to which Mr. Zaid replied, the lawyer said, but he had not heard back. Right-wing media outlets have labeled the green bank a slush fund and highlighted a link between fund recipients and Stacey Abrams, a Democratic organizer and former candidate for governor in Georgia. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Ms. Abrams served for one year as a senior counsel for Rewiring America, one of the nonprofit groups that stood to receive control of $2 billion to administer loans to different climate programs. The Trump administration has also claimed that funding was awarded to organizations with ties to the Biden White House. Mr. Zeldin repeated these conflict of interest claims in his Monday letter to the Office of the Inspector General seeking further investigation. John Podesta, who oversaw implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act as a senior climate adviser to the Biden administration, said in an interview that the process for issuing grants was “extremely” stringent and called the Trump administration attacks politically motivated. “We knew it was a possibility that they’d try to interfere with people getting access to their money,” Mr. Podesta said of the Trump administration. In recent weeks the Trump administration also has frozen billions of dollars that were appropriated by Congress for clean energy projects, releasing some of the money only after two judges ordered it. “We followed the law and they are breaking the law,” Mr. Podesta said.

Humans are living in a plankton world. These minuscule organisms are spread across the oceans, covering nearly three-quarters of the planet, and are among the most abundant forms of life on Earth. But a warming world is throwing plankton into disarray and threatening the entire marine food chain that is built on them. A year ago, NASA launched a satellite that provided the most detailed view yet of the diversity and distribution of phytoplankton. Its insights should help scientists understand the changing dynamics of life in the ocean. “Do you like breathing? Do you like eating? If your answer is yes for either of them, then you care about phytoplankton,” said Jeremy Werdell, the lead scientist for the satellite program, called PACE, which stands for “Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem.” Historically, research from ships has captured limited snapshots in time, offering only glimpses of the ever-changing oceans. The advent of satellites gave a fuller picture, but one still limited, like looking through glasses with a green filter. “You know it’s a garden, you know it’s pretty, you know it’s plants, but you don’t know which plants,” explained Ivona Cetinic, a NASA oceanographer. The PACE satellite effectively removes the filter and finally reveals all the colors of the garden, she said. “It’s like seeing all the flowers of the ocean.” These flowers are phytoplankton, tiny aquatic algae and bacteria that photosynthesize to live directly off energy from the sun. They are eaten by zooplankton, the smallest animals of the ocean, which, in turn, feed fish and larger creatures. It may seem implausible that a satellite orbiting high above the planet’s surface could make out microscopic organisms. But different phytoplankton have unique ways of scattering and absorbing light. PACE measures the whole spectrum of visible color and slightly beyond, from ultraviolet to near infrared, allowing scientists to identify different kinds of phytoplankton. Older satellites measured limited colors and could only reveal how much phytoplankton was underneath them, not what kind. Phytoplankton form the foundation of the marine food chain, and climate change is shaking that foundation. Phytoplankton in the open ocean appear to be dwindling. In the early 2000s, scientists detected that enormous zones of ocean with fewer nutrients and sparser phytoplankton, known as ocean deserts, are expanding. At the same time, coastal phytoplankton blooms, especially at higher latitudes, have grown and become more frequent, according to a 2023 study. Warmer sea surface temperatures are stimulating their growth, the researchers found. These blooms are also happening earlier in the year, disrupting coastal fisheries and people’s livelihoods. And while marine life depends on phytoplankton, sometimes it can create harmful blooms. Understanding what kinds of phytoplankton are where can help coastal residents protect themselves. Some phytoplankton blooms grow so big, so quickly, that when they eventually decay, they deplete oxygen in the surrounding water, creating “dead zones” where nothing else can live. And some phytoplankton produce toxins that can sicken and kill fish, birds and mammals, including humans. Researchers estimate, conservatively, that harmful blooms cost the U.S. economy about $50 million each year through damage to public health, fisheries and coastal recreation. In the winter of 2021, millions of pounds of oysters on the coast of Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana suddenly died, striking a major economic blow to local fishermen. Subsequent investigation revealed that toxic phytoplankton had bloomed following a storm, according to Bingqing Liu, an oceanographer and assistant professor at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. Dr. Liu is part of the PACE “early adopter” group, working on incorporating the satellite’s data into a model that can simulate future scenarios. If people can see toxic blooms coming, they can try to mitigate economic and environmental losses, she said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Digging Deeper While satellites help some oceanographers zoom out to get the biggest possible picture, other researchers are zooming in, collecting plankton from the ocean and studying them under microscopes. These scientists aren’t just looking at the garden Dr. Cetinic described, but stepping into it, examining both plants and animals. And they are digging around, looking beneath the surface where satellites can’t see. Across the North Atlantic in winter, the ocean’s garden conceals a curious phenomenon. Stretching from the United States and Canada all the way to Europe, quadrillions of tiny creatures are asleep, suspended in the ocean’s twilight zone. They are Calanus finmarchicus, a type of zooplankton, animals that drift in the ocean’s currents and tides. In the North Atlantic, Calanus funnel energy from the sun and phytoplankton into larger animals like fish, whales and birds. You can think of Calanus as “little batteries that are floating in the ocean,” said Jeffrey Runge, a zooplankton ecologist who recently retired as a professor from the University of Maine. Calanus hibernate through winter, hiding from predators in the dim light of deeper waters. But in November in the Gulf of Maine, as the days shortened, the temperature dropped, and the winds and waves rose, David Fields, a zooplankton ecologist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, was out hunting these tiny creatures. He aims to understand what’s happening to Calanus and other planktonic species as the ocean warms and its currents shift. “It’s really hard to get these kinds of signals,” he said, “because of the lack of data, of sampling.” That’s why, on a cold November morning before sunrise, he and a small group of local scientists assembled at the Bigelow dock in East Boothbay, Maine. They loaded a 48-foot catamaran and set out for a long day of plankton hunting. At each stop, the scientists worked furiously to preserve everything, rinsing the nets over and over into buckets to get the plankton out, all while getting soaked in frigid ocean water and battling seasickness as the boat bounced up and down. Back at the lab, after dark, the scientists peered at a captured Calanus finmarchicus under a microscope. The specimens had big oil sacs, full of the calorie-rich lipids that fish and right whales seek out. In experimental studies, Dr. Fields and his colleagues have found that as the temperature rises, Calanus get smaller and have less fat relative to their body size. Dr. Fields calls the layer of sleeping Calanus the ocean’s fat layer, a valuable resource for other life. “That’s the whole reason the Gulf of Maine runs the way it does, because of that beautiful fat layer,” he said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT One of the people on the November plankton hunting trip in Maine was Amy Wyeth, a zooplankton ecologist starting a new plankton sampling and habitat monitoring program for the Maine Department of Marine Resources. The goal, she said, is to eventually give the state “a little more predictive power,” to forecast the movements of right whales and help Maine’s lobster fishery avoid entanglements with whales. North Atlantic right whales are an endangered species, with only about 370 individuals left. They eat Calanus finmarchicus, sometimes consuming hundreds of millions of the tiny creatures every day. The Gulf of Maine is historically a rich summer feeding ground for right whales. But in 2010, a marine heat wave began forming in this normally cold ecosystem. It started in the deep waters, where warm and cold ocean currents shifted. Then, in 2012, New England experienced unusually warm air temperatures as well. Suddenly, there were fewer of the larger, lipid-rich adult Calanus around in the late summer and fall. Ever since, right whales have been swimming farther north in search of more and fatter Calanus. They’ve gone to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, where busy commercial fisheries and large high-speed ships weren’t ready for them. Many whales were struck by ships or entangled in fishing gear. “One can make the link between relentless CO2 increase and what’s happening to the right whales right now. And what’s happening to Calanus,” Dr. Runge said. “It’s one of these really complex mechanisms of how CO2 increase and warming, the resulting warming, is affecting the ecosystems of the world.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT A Fuller Picture In January, a group of European researchers called for continued support for long-term plankton monitoring programs. Since the 1930s, scientists have given commercial ships devices called continuous plankton recorders to tow and automatically collect plankton on long nets that roll up like scrolls. These methods, and many routes, have stayed consistent for decades, allowing researchers to see changes in plankton populations over time. In the United States, NOAA has conducted plankton surveys similar to Dr. Fields’s since the 1960s, helping fisheries managers track the health of the ecosystems their industry depends on. The latest State of the Ecosystem Report for New England, produced by NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, documented a record-high phytoplankton bloom in 2023 and also found that zooplankton in parts of the Northeast continental shelf are diversifying, a potential sign of ecosystem restructuring, according to the report. In particular, smaller, more gelatinous and less energy-rich species are increasing. Scientists emphasize the need to keep long-running data sets going. “Monitoring really isn’t sexy science,” said Michael Parsons, a biological oceanographer at Florida Gulf Coast University. “It’s hard to keep consistent funding in place to routinely be out there collecting samples and looking at what’s there.” Enrique Montes, a biological oceanographer at the University of Miami Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies and NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, is in the midst of analyzing plankton data from recent marine heat waves off the coast of Florida as well as the current red tide outbreak. He is also involved in national and international efforts to share and standardize data on marine biodiversity. “We don’t really know how biodiversity is changing across the world ocean,” he said. One way he collects data is through an underwater microscope that photographs plankton in their natural environment. He and other scientists emphasize the need to combine these kinds of local observations with satellite data. Satellites show scientists the big, whole-ocean picture, but they have limitations. PACE has a resolution of one kilometer, and “telling you what happens in a one-kilometer pixel is really different from drilling down to somebody’s backyard, which is often the information people need to know,” said Clarissa Anderson, a biological oceanographer at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Dr. Anderson is another member of the PACE early adopter group and a co-chair of the National Harmful Algal Bloom Committee, which advises Congress and other federal and state entities on these blooms. “We’re just trying to make this seamless,” she said, “so you can go from that satellite view and drill down all the way to the very near shore: What’s happening at my pier? What’s happening at my dock?”

The opening week of the landmark trial of Greenpeace in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit by Energy Transfer over the Dakota Access Pipeline protests did not bode well for the defense. Lawyers for Greenpeace said so themselves in a petition filed in North Dakota’s Supreme Court. They asked the court on Thursday to move the trial out of Morton County, arguing the jury is not impartial. Daily life was disrupted there for nearly a year, in 2016 and 2017, by protesters heading toward the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, just south of the county line. The protests against the pipeline, which since 2017 has carried oil from North Dakota across several states to Illinois, garnered international attention, attracted thousands of people and, at times, led to violent clashes. The company that built the pipeline, Energy Transfer, first sued Greenpeace in 2019. The suit accuses the environmental group of playing a key role in protests that delayed construction, as well as attacking workers and equipment and defaming Energy Transfer. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Greenpeace, one of the world’s most widely known environmental groups, says it played only a minor role in the protests, in support of Native American activists, and that the organization promotes nonviolence. Lawyers for Greenpeace said jury selection showed that the county court had erred in denying its previous motions to move the trial to the bigger city of Fargo. “With jury selection complete, it is clearer now than ever that Greenpeace Defendants will not get a fair and impartial trial in the county where the protests occurred,” they wrote in the motion. If Greenpeace were to lose the lawsuit, a judgment could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars and force it to shut down operations in the United States. The petition also pointed to a newspaper called Central ND News that had been sent to Morton County residents in recent months containing negative articles about the protests. The three Greenpeace entities named in the lawsuit said in their petition to the State Supreme Court that they believe the newspapers “may have emanated from plaintiffs or from someone closely connected to them.” The newspaper did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The lead lawyer for Energy Transfer, Trey Cox of the firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, said in an email Monday that the newspaper allegations were “another attempt by Greenpeace to manipulate the media. This is in fact, a newspaper that features a variety of local stories.” He added that the motion to transfer venue had already been rejected by the county court three times. “North Dakota law is very clear that when potential jurors say under oath they can be fair and impartial and give all parties a fair trial, then the law-abiding, justice-respecting citizens of North Dakota are qualified to sit,” he wrote. As of Monday afternoon, the court had not responded to the Greenpeace petition. The trial is scheduled to last five weeks. Testimony began Wednesday in Mandan, N.D., just across the Missouri River from Bismarck, the capital. The protests took place about a 45-minute drive south. Energy Transfer began to call witnesses on Wednesday. Joey Mahmoud, who was a vice president at Energy Transfer overseeing Dakota Access, testified that the pipeline serves a crucial purpose in bringing oil from western North Dakota to refineries in the Midwest and beyond. The pipeline construction came amid a historic boom in fracked oil from the area that helped lead the United States to become the world’s biggest oil producer. The protests by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and its allies escalated in spring 2016, he testified. Tribal leaders said the project went through burial sites and other sacred land and that construction would endanger the tribe’s water supply. The company countered it had hired experts to survey the route and argued that those claims were unsupported. It also said pipelines were a safer way to transport oil than trucks or rail. Energy Transfer’s lawyers also called the county sheriff to the stand and showed video depositions of former Greenpeace employees. Much of their questioning centered on the use of “lockboxes” — devices protesters can use to lock themselves to one another, or to items like fences or equipment — that Greenpeace sent to the protests. The Morton County sheriff, Kyle Kirchmeier, testified that law enforcement had to scramble to respond to the influx of protesters and the escalation of conflicts. He had to ask for an emergency declaration from the state and to train officers in tactics like disabling lockboxes, he said. Harmony Lambert, a former Greenpeace employee, said in her deposition that she traveled to Standing Rock in 2016 and also worked with an Indigenous activist group. Emails were shown that she had sent to Greenpeace colleagues at the time detailing her activities, including training people in blockade techniques and donating about 20 lockboxes. A petition from media organizations, including The New York Times, to stream the proceedings online is pending with the State Supreme Court. Another petition for online access, from a group of lawyers who traveled to North Dakota to observe the proceedings, has been denied.

President Trump’s promise during last year’s election to make it far easier to drill for oil and gas thrilled energy executives who believed his policies would lower their costs and help them make a lot more money. Those hopes are now fading. Thanks to Mr. Trump’s tariffs, the oil and gas industry is contending with rising prices for essential materials like steel pipes used to line new wells. That has not yet translated into a meaningful change in U.S. drilling activity or production expectations, but companies have begun revising budgets to reflect higher materials costs. Decisions made today about which wells to drill will affect production many months from now. Oil refineries are separately bracing for a tariff on Canadian oil, which some of them need to produce gasoline, diesel and other fuels. At the same time, consumers have grown jittery about the economy and the price of oil has fallen about 10 percent since just before Mr. Trump took office, to around $70 a barrel. Oil companies tend to drill less when prices fall. The combination could complicate Mr. Trump’s stated desire to juice U.S. oil and natural gas production, which is already at or near record highs. “Our ability to ‘drill, baby, drill’ is directly tied to the economics of the well,” said Lori Blong, the mayor of Midland, Texas, which is at the heart of the most prolific U.S. oil basin. “We can’t drill ourselves into a bind.” A planned 25 percent tariff on imported steel, set to take effect March 12, is very consequential to U.S. oil and gas producers, whose wells often stretch miles into the earth. The steel pipe that they use to line those holes can account for 10 percent of the total well cost. Mr. Trump said in early February that he would impose tariffs on steel and aluminum. The price of steel pipe was already rising before that announcement and has climbed since. Editors’ Picks It’s Time to Put Away Your Winter Clothes. Here’s How to Store Them Safely. Is ‘Reef Safe’ Sunscreen Really Better? Murder, Lust and Obscene Wealth in a City on Edge The steel pipe used in wells was 10 percent more expensive on average in February than it was in October, according to an Argus Media price index that reflects domestic and imported products. The kind of pipe used to move oil and gas around the country also costs more than it did last fall. Both products remain less expensive than they were coming out of the pandemic, when supply-chain disruptions sent prices soaring across the economy. Elevation Resources, a private oil and gas producer in West Texas, is among those facing a big jump in costs. As of late February, the company was expecting to pay around 30 percent more for the pipe it uses to line wells, partly because a less expensive variety is no longer available. “When Trump announced the tariffs, a switch flipped on availability and pricing,” said Steve Pruett, Elevation’s chief executive. That has not yet caused Elevation to change its drilling plans for this year, but “it’s a zero-sum game,” Mr. Pruett said. “If you have a fixed budget and the wells cost more, then you’re going to drill fewer wells.” The United States is also scheduled, on Tuesday, to begin charging tariffs on energy imported from Canada and Mexico, threatening oil refineries — and potentially causing prices at the pump to rise. Those levies were originally set to take effect in early February, but Mr. Trump put them off for a month. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Trump has downplayed concerns about the potential economic risks of tariffs, saying the benefits “will all be worth the price that must be paid.” Mr. Trump’s term is just a month old, and the full effects of his policies will become clearer over the coming months and years. The cost of materials is one of many variables that determine how profitable oil companies are. Overall, rates for drilling and fracking have fallen because companies have become more efficient. Oil prices could also swing based on geopolitical developments, including a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, which Mr. Trump is pushing for. The Trump administration has already helped the oil and gas industry in some ways. In February, the Army Corps of Engineers moved to accelerate permitting for oil and gas projects. The Energy Department signed off on a proposed natural-gas export facility on the Gulf Coast that had been waiting for a green light for several years. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. paused gas export permitting in January 2024, a move that appealed to environmental groups but upset oil and gas companies. Natural gas prices have also been much higher than they were this time last year, in part because it has been quite cold in many parts of the country, making some executives optimistic that it will become more profitable to produce the fuel. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Still, in energy, as in other parts of the economy, executives say they are confronting significant uncertainty because it is so hard to predict Mr. Trump’s actions. “What do you react to? Which direction do you go? That’s part of the dilemma,” said Taylor Potts, a West Texas-based sales manager for B&L Pipeco Services, which stocks and distributes steel pipe to oil and gas companies. “You don’t know if next week all bets are off.” The early effects of tariff-related price increases are being felt unevenly. Liberty Energy, which fracks wells for many large U.S. oil companies, has not yet seen tariffs affect its customers’ production plans, said Ron Gusek, Liberty’s chief executive. Fracking involves shooting sand, water and chemicals into wells at high pressure to unlock oil and natural gas. Mr. Gusek’s predecessor, Chris Wright, is Mr. Trump’s energy secretary.