Night fell as the two scientists got to work, unfurling long nets off the end of their boat. The jungle struck up its evening symphony: the sweet chittering of insects, the distant bellowing of monkeys, the occasional screech of a kite. Crocodiles lounged in the shallows, their eyes glinting when headlamps were shined their way. Across the water, cargo ships made dark shapes as they slid between the seas. The Panama Canal has for more than a century connected far-flung peoples and economies, making it an essential artery for global trade — and, in recent weeks, a target of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s expansionist designs. But of late the canal has been linking something else, too: the immense ecosystems of the Atlantic and the Pacific. The two oceans have been separated for some three million years, ever since the isthmus of Panama rose out of the water and split them. The canal cut a path through the continent, yet for decades only a handful of marine fish species managed to migrate through the waterway and the freshwater reservoir, Lake Gatún, that feeds its locks. Then, in 2016, Panama expanded the canal to allow supersize ships, and all that started to change. In less than a decade, fish from both oceans — snooks, jacks, snappers and more — have almost entirely displaced the freshwater species that were in the canal system before, scientists with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have found. Fishermen around Lake Gatún who rely on those species, chiefly peacock bass and tilapia, say their catches are growing scarce. Researchers now worry that more fish could start making their way through from one ocean to the other. And no potential invader causes more concern than the venomous, candy-striped lionfish. They are known to inhabit Panama’s Caribbean coast, but not the eastern Pacific. If they made it there through the canal, they could ravage the defenseless local fish, just as they’ve done in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Already, marine species are more than occasional visitors in Lake Gatún, said Phillip Sanchez, a fisheries ecologist with the Smithsonian. They’re “becoming the dominant community,” he said. They’re “pushing everything else out.” On a recent evening, Dr. Sanchez and a Smithsonian biologist, Víctor Bravo, brought seven nets on the lake. Each one was at least 150 feet long and 10 feet wide, with meshes of varying sizes to snare fish by the gills. The scientists set the nets at different spots then stayed on their boat overnight to make sure the crocodiles didn’t eat their catch. Later, they and other researchers would analyze the captured fish in the lab to figure out where they had swum in from and how they fit into the lake’s food web. Mr. Bravo tied one end of a net to a tree branch. “Vamos!” he called out. The captain threw the boat into reverse, pulling the net taut. Then, they waited. The Panama Canal has a long history of sea creatures voyaging through as stowaways on ships’ hulls and in their ballast tanks: oysters from the Indo-Pacific, jellyfish from the Black Sea, worms from mud flats in the Netherlands. As far as scientists can tell, however, the latest watery trespassers aren’t arriving by boat. As part of the canal’s recent expansion, Panama added a new lane at each entrance, with new locks that can raise and lower today’s king-size cargo ships. Naturally, the new locks are bigger than the old ones. So each time a vessel passes through, more fresh water spills out to the ocean and more seawater sloshes in — and with it, perhaps, more coastal fish. All that extra seawater washing in has also made parts of the lake saltier. So far, though, the increase in salinity hasn’t been big enough to account for the sudden presence of so many marine fish, said Gustavo Castellanos-Galindo, a postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, who studies the canal ecosystem. Instead, he and other scientists reckon it’s the combined effect of bigger locks, bigger ships and bigger water volumes that has allowed more fish to swim or drift into the canal. “There’s just more opportunity for them to move in,” said Diana Sharpe, a freshwater ecologist at Harvard. The fishermen of Gatún, who know the lake better than anyone, say the effects have been sweeping. From his home in Cuipo, a village of rainbow-colored houses on the lake’s western shore, Félix Martínez González has for decades prowled the waters on a powder blue canoe. On a recent day, he harpooned 16 pounds of fish in six hours. Before the canal was expanded, he would have caught twice as much, he said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT He blames the salt. Rising salinity might be killing off the vegetation where the tilapia and peacock bass like to live. (Another possible factor, Dr. Sharpe said, is that the lake’s fish now have to compete against the marine invaders for food.) Over coffee on his porch, Mr. Martínez González, who is in his mid-60s, takes the long view. “I’m not worried for myself; I’m worried for the next generation,” he said. “All this affects them, too.” The canal’s peacock bass are also a popular game fish. But with the population under strain, Oswaldo Alberto Robles, 54, a fishing guide, wonders whether it makes sense for tournaments to keep giving prizes for them. “Imagine 20, 30, 40 boats searching for one fish,” he said. “We’ll just keep running out of them even faster.” The fish problem is hardly the only headache the canal expansion has created for Panama. Saltwater intrusion is threatening Lake Gatún’s other main function — namely, providing drinking water for half the country’s people. The canal authority is examining ways to desalinate portions of the lake. It is also planning to dam another river to create a new freshwater reservoir, and in the process displace 2,000 or so people, most of them poor. To critics, the situation suggests a lack of foresight by the Panamanian authorities: The costly, disruptive canal expansion created problems that only another costly, disruptive project can fix. “The truth is, before the expansion, the problem of salinity in the lake wasn’t discussed,” said Manuel Cheng Peñalba, a member of Panama’s legislature and former officer for the canal. Now, he said, Panamanians are worrying about drinking water despite living in one of the rainiest countries on Earth. When asked whether the canal should have been expanded without first securing a new water supply, Ricaurte Vásquez Morales, the canal administrator, emphasized how vital the expansion had been for Panama. Ships were outgrowing the canal’s original locks. The nation had a choice: keep up or “lag behind,” he said. Juan Carlos Navarro, Panama’s environment minister, used a Spanish expression to describe how the government would resolve the canal’s environmental issues: “I get dressed slowly because I’m in a hurry.” In other words, urgently, but with care. “We will not get the canal wrong,” Mr. Navarro said. “Panama is the canal, and the canal is Panama.” When it comes to the fish, however, it’s not exactly clear what getting it right would entail. Adding more fresh water wouldn’t necessarily stop invaders from swimming through the new locks. Putting up electric barriers or curtains of air bubbles might keep some species out but not others. Barriers might also impede ship traffic. With many invasive species, you can’t predict whether they’ll live quietly in their new homes or “blow up,” said Bella Galil, the curator emerita of crustaceans at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Dr. Galil has for decades studied invasions of non-native species that traveled through the Suez Canal, including jellyfish, mussels, puffer fish, rabbit fish — hundreds of them in all. The jellyfish weren’t known to congregate en masse in their old home in the Red Sea, she said. Yet in the Mediterranean they gather in swarms, stinging children on the beach, clogging fishermen’s nets and plastering the intakes of desalination plants with their sticky bodies. Regulators have occasionally gotten serious about controlling such intruders, Dr. Galil said. Even then, success is neither cheap nor quick nor assured. “It takes a lifetime,” she said. But “if you don’t start, you are left with a destroyed sea.” Back on the scientists’ boat in Lake Gatún, it was almost midnight: time for Mr. Bravo and Dr. Sanchez to check their nets. They roused themselves and began retracing their path across the dark water. At their first stop, they each grabbed one side of the net and pulled it aboard. The night’s first catch was a sea catfish from the Pacific. The second: a snook, another coastal species. When the scientists reached the end of the net, they lifted it and shook. Tiny anchovies and silversides rained onto the deck. “These are marine species, too,” Mr. Bravo said. “Now these little fish are found throughout the lake.” He slipped the silvery bodies into a Ziploc bag, which he labeled and tossed into a cooler. The other nets held similarly mixed-up smorgasbords of species and origins: one snook from the Caribbean and another from the Pacific. A slender, elegant ladyfish and a long-nosed needlefish, both Caribbean. More stubby forage fish, some native, others not. Smithsonian researchers have been sampling the fish of Gatún this way for more than a decade. They examine the fishes’ eye lenses, their muscle tissue and the contents of their stomach. Dr. Sanchez is analyzing their otoliths, the calcified structures in their inner ear that, like tree rings, record vivid histories of their surroundings. At sunrise, he and Mr. Bravo hauled up their nets a second time. Dawn’s light was gentle and rosy. The scientists’ boat looked toylike next to the tankers making morning crossings through the canal. Mr. Bravo pondered the changing lake and the communities that live off it. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “You feel a little sad,” he said, “because many people who have dedicated themselves to fishing for subsistence, for food, who have no other kind of work — they have to fish.” But some of the new trespassers, like jacks, are harder to catch than the species they’re replacing. The new fish are faster, more aggressive — less “stupid,” Mr. Bravo said. Even now, Gatún might not be done changing. All the jumbling of species could lead some of them to crossbreed, scientists say — with effects on the lake, and the two vast oceans beyond, that are very hard to predict.

Roughly 2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire was flourishing. But something sinister was in the air. Literally. Widespread pollution in the form of airborne lead was taking a toll on health and intelligence, researchers reported on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. During the roughly two centuries starting in 27 B.C., a period of relative stability and prosperity known as the Pax Romana, the empire extended throughout Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Its economy relied on silver coinage, which required huge mining operations. But extracting silver from the Earth creates a whole lot of lead, said Joseph McConnell, an environmental scientist at the Desert Research Institute, a nonprofit group based in Nevada, and the lead author of the new research. “If you produce an ounce of silver, you’d have produced something like 10,000 ounces of lead.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT And lead has a host of negative effects on the human body. “There is no such thing as any safe level of lead exposure,” said Deborah Cory-Slechta, a neurotoxicologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center who was not involved in the research. Dr. McConnell and his colleagues have now detected lead in layers of ice collected in Russia and Greenland that date to the time of the Roman Empire. Lead entered the atmosphere from Roman mining operations, hitched a ride on air currents and eventually fell out of the atmosphere as snow in the Arctic, the team surmised. The levels of lead that Dr. McConnell and his collaborators measured were extremely low, roughly one lead-containing molecule per trillion molecules of water. But the ice samples were collected thousands of miles from southern Europe, and lead concentrations would have been highly dispersed after such a long journey. In order to estimate the amount of lead originally emitted by Roman mining operations, the researchers worked backward: Using powerful computer models of the planet’s atmosphere and making assumptions about the location of the mining sites, the team varied the amount of lead emitted to match the concentrations they measured in the ice. In one case, they assumed that all silver production took place at a historically important mining site in southwestern Spain known as Rio Tinto. In another case, they presumed that silver mining was equally spread out across dozens of sites. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The team calculated that anywhere from 3,300 to 4,600 tons of lead were being emitted into the atmosphere each year by Roman silver-mining operations. The researchers then estimated how all that lead would be scattered across the Roman Empire. “We ran the model in the forward direction to see how those emissions would be distributed,” Dr. McConnell said. With those atmospheric-lead concentrations in hand, the researchers next used modern-day data to estimate how much lead would have entered the bloodstreams of people in ancient Rome. Dr. McConnell and his colleagues focused on infants and children. Young people are particularly susceptible to taking up lead from their environment via ingestion and inhalation, said Dr. Bruce Lanphear, a public heath physician at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who was not involved in the research. “Pound for pound, children, particularly infants, eat more and breathe more.” In recent decades, lead levels in children’s blood have been correlated with a slew of physical and mental health metrics, including I.Q., Dr. Cory-Slechta said. “We have actual data on I.Q. scores in kids with different blood-lead concentrations.” Using those modern-day relationships, Dr. McConnell and his team estimated that children across much of the Roman Empire would have had around 2 to 5 additional micrograms of lead, per deciliter of blood. Such levels correspond to I.Q. declines of roughly 2 or 3 points. For comparison, American children in the 1970s had average blood-lead-level enhancements of around 15 micrograms more lead per deciliter of blood before the phasing out of leaded gasoline and leaded paints. Their corresponding average I.Q. decline was about 9 points. But lead exposure would have had other negative effects on Romans as well. Higher levels of lead in the blood have also been linked to higher incidences of preterm births and reduced cognitive functioning in old age. “It follows you throughout life,” Dr. Lanphear said. Some scholars have hypothesized that lead poisoning played an important role in the decline of the Roman Empire. But that idea has been called into question, at least when it comes to water contaminated by lead pipes. A 2014 study showed that, while the pipes used to distribute water in Rome increased lead levels, the water was unlikely to be truly harmful. These new findings make sense, said Hugo Delile, a geoarchaeologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who was not involved in the research. “They confirm the extent of lead pollution resulting from Roman mining and metallurgical activities.” According to Dr. McConnell, the research also confers a dubious honor on Roman mining. “To my knowledge, it’s the earliest example of widespread industrial pollution,” he said.

The Biden administration on Friday made final its long-awaited plan to offer billions of dollars in tax credits to companies that make hydrogen, in the hopes of building up a new industry that might help fight climate change. When burned, hydrogen mainly emits water vapor, and it could be used instead of fossil fuels to make steel or fertilizer or to power large trucks or ships. But whether or not hydrogen is good for the climate depends on how it is made. Today, most hydrogen is produced from natural gas in a process that emits a lot of planet-warming carbon dioxide. The Biden administration wants to encourage companies to make so-called clean hydrogen by using wind, solar or other low-emission sources of electricity. In 2022, Congress approved a lucrative tax credit for companies that make clean hydrogen. But the Treasury Department needed to issue rules to clarify what, exactly, companies had to do to claim that credit. The agency released proposed guidance in 2023 but many businesses have been waiting for the final rules before making investments. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The final guidelines that were released Friday followed months of intense lobbying from lawmakers, industry representatives and environmental groups and roughly 30,000 public comments. They include changes that make it somewhat easier for hydrogen producers to claim the tax credits, which could total tens of billions of dollars over the next decade. “Clean hydrogen can play a critical role decarbonizing multiple sectors across our economy, from industry to transportation, from energy storage to much more,” said David Turk, the deputy secretary of energy. “The final rules announced today set us on a path to accelerate deployment.” Initially, Treasury had imposed strict conditions on hydrogen subsidies: Companies could claim the tax credit if they used low-carbon electricity from newly built sources like wind or solar power to run a machine called an electrolyzer that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Starting in 2028, those electrolyzers would have to run during the same hours that the wind or solar farms were operating. Without those conditions, researchers had warned, electrolyzers might draw vast amounts of power from existing electric grids and drive a spike in greenhouse gas emissions if coal- or gas-fired power plants had to run more often to meet the demand. Yet many industry groups and lawmakers in Congress complained that the proposed rules were so stringent, they could throttle America’s nascent hydrogen industry before it even got going. Among the concerns: The technology to match hydrogen production with hourly fluctuations in wind and solar power is still in its infancy. Owners of nuclear reactors also said that they had been left out. So the final rules contain several significant tweaks: Hydrogen producers will get two extra years — until 2030 — before they are required to buy clean electricity on an hourly basis to match their output. Until then, they can use a looser annual standard and still claim the tax credit. In certain states that require utilities to use more low-carbon electricity each year, hydrogen producers will now have an easier time claiming the credit, on the theory that those laws will prevent a spike in emissions. For now, Treasury said, only California and Washington meet this criterion, but other states could qualify in the future. Under certain conditions, companies that own nuclear reactors that are set to be retired for economic reasons can now claim the credit to produce hydrogen if it would help the plants stay open. Existing reactors that are profitable would not be able to claim the credit. The final rules also lay out criteria under which companies could use methane gas from landfills, farms or coal mines to produce hydrogen — if, for instance, the methane would have otherwise been emitted into the atmosphere. The guidelines “incorporate helpful feedback from companies planning investments,” said Wally Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary. Some hydrogen producers said that many, though not all, of their biggest concerns had been addressed in the final guidance, which runs nearly 400 pages. “There’s a degree of relief that the rules are, on balance, an improvement from the original draft,” said Frank Wolak, chief executive of the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association, a trade group. “But there’s a lot in the details that needs to be evaluated.” The lack of clear guidance had been holding up investment, said Jacob Susman, chief executive of Ambient Fuels, a clean hydrogen developer that is planning roughly $3 billion in projects across the United States. “Now that we actually have something solid, we can get down to the business of building,” he said. Environmentalists said that most of the safeguards in the original proposal to prevent emissions from surging had been kept in place. “The extra flexibilities granted to the green hydrogen industry are not perfect from a climate perspective,” said Erik Kamrath at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But the rule maintains key protections that minimize dangerous air and climate pollution from electrolytic hydrogen production.” The Energy Department estimates that the use of cleaner forms of hydrogen could grow to 10 million tons per year by 2030, up from virtually nothing today. But political uncertainty looms. A new Congress could repeal the tax credits, although hydrogen generally enjoys support from both Democrats and Republicans and a number of oil and gas companies have invested in hydrogen technologies. The Trump administration could also revise the rules around the credits, although that could take years. Economics are another hurdle. Producing cleaner hydrogen still costs $3 to $11 per kilogram, according to data from BloombergNEF. By contrast, it costs about $1 to $2 per kilogram to make hydrogen from natural gas. The new tax credit will be worth up to $3 per kilogram, which could bridge the gap in some cases but not all. Technology costs would have to decline sharply. Even with hefty subsidies to produce hydrogen, it’s not clear that enough buyers will emerge. Around the world, hydrogen companies have canceled several major projects over the last few years because of lack of demand. Steel makers and electric utilities that might have interest in the fuel often balk at the costly equipment required to use it. “These new rules will probably help, even if they don’t go as far as many in industry wanted,” said Aaron Bergman, a fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan Washington research organization. “But there’s still the challenge of finding the people to consume the hydrogen you produce.”

It was a novel idea at the time, but one that made sense: In 1979, President Jimmy Carter had 32 solar panels installed on the roof of the White House. They were removed just seven years later, under President Ronald Reagan. But that wasn’t the end of their story. They were picked up at a bargain price by a small college in Maine, where they continued to generate power for years, and eventually ended up scattered around the United States and China. When the panels were first set up on the roof of the West Wing, energy independence was a big issue in America. An oil embargo imposed by Arab countries in 1973, in part to pressure the United States over its support for Israel in a brief war that year, had sent shock waves though the American economy. “This dependence on foreign sources of oil is of great concern to all of us,” Mr. Carter said at an event to introduce the solar array. “No one can ever embargo the sun or interrupt its delivery to us.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT It was a decade before the first congressional hearing on climate change. “There’s no doubt Jimmy Carter was well ahead of his time,” said Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary under President Barack Obama and now chief executive of Energy Futures Initiative, a nonprofit group focused on renewable energy. In 1986, the Reagan administration had the panels removed during work on the White House roof. They were never reinstalled. The rejected panels, which had been used to heat water in the White House, were shipped to the suburbs of Washington, where they languished in a Virginia warehouse for years. Then, in 1991, Peter Marbach, a director at Unity College in Maine, was trying to figure out how to dig the school out of a financial hole. He spotted a picture of the panels in a magazine and decided he wanted to bring them back to life. “It was a combination of utter disbelief and anger that Reagan had taken them down, and a simultaneous crazy ‘lightbulb’ idea to get the panels and draw attention to Unity’s mission as an environmental college,” said Mr. Marbach, who is now a landscape photographer based in Oregon. He wrote a letter to Mr. Carter to ask for his blessing. The former president promptly responded with a handwritten note saying it would please him very much to see the panels put to use again.Within six weeks, Mr. Marbach had removed the seats from a blue bus used by Unity’s soccer team and driven down to Virginia. He rode a golf cart through a building that reminded him of the warehouse scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” He found the panels piled haphazardly in a corner among a jumble of crates and surplus furniture. Some were broken. But Mr. Marbach loaded all the ostracized panels into the bus and brought them home to Maine. Unity College paid the United States government an administrative fee of $500 for the panels, which cost about $28,000 when first installed. Half ended up on the roof of the Unity College cafeteria, heating water. The other half, which didn’t fit on the building, were stored in a former chicken barn and used for spare parts. While acquiring the panels was “more symbolic,” Mr. Marbach said, they did help the college save money. They remained in place until 2010, after they’d reached their end of lives. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Since then, at least six have continued on their journey beyond Maine. In 2007, one to two panels were driven in the back of a pickup truck from Unity College down to the Carter Library in Atlanta by a team of documentarians making a film on Mr. Carter’s solar legacy called “A Road Not Taken.” In 2009, another was donated to the National Museum of American History in Washington. A Smithsonian spokeswoman said that panel remains on display today. The Solar Science and Technology Museum in Dezhou, China, acquired another panel in 2010. In the same year, another was donated to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Others are held by NRG Systems, Inc., a clean energy manufacturer in Vermont, by the U.S. Department of Energy, with the rest still held by Unity College, which has changed its name to Unity Environmental University. Mr. Carter seemed to know that the transition to clean energy would face obstacles. “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people,” he said in 1979. But even though the panels didn’t last long at the White House, Mr. Carter’s decision to support renewable energy helped position the United States for the clean power boom currently underway, experts said. “It was fundamental to the development and the growth of the use of solar energy in the U.S.,” said Frederick Morse, a senior Energy Department official under Mr. Carter and Mr. Reagan and now chief executive of SolStor Energy, a solar development company.

The U.S. economy contracted 0.3% in the first quarter of 2025, the first negative reading since 2022, according to an initial measurement released Wednesday by the Commerce Department. The decline in gross domestic product was fueled by a massive surge in imports, while other parts of the U.S. economy showed signs of slowing. Consumer spending climbed 1.8%, the weakest pace since mid-2023. The report also showed inflation remained firm. Stocks were down for much of the day but finished higher. The GDP figures cover just the first three months of the year, and other data in the report shows business investment remained firm. Economists were expecting the GDP to have grown 0.4% for the first three months of 2025, compared with an increase of 2.4% in the fourth quarter of 2024. The report is among the last data points to capture a snapshot of the U.S. economy before President Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs announcement sent shock waves around the world. More recent data has begun to capture some of that fallout. Earlier Wednesday, payroll processor ADP reported just 62,000 new roles added in April — well below both estimates. Meanwhile, many companies have lowered their forecasts for 2025 or have withdrawn their financial guidance entirely. The U.S. economy thus appears to be entering a period of instability — one that is largely self-inflicted. In a new interview with ABC News, Trump continued to downplay concerns about the economy, claiming he had signaled during his campaign that there would be a “transition period” as his policies took hold. “Well, they did sign up for it,” Trump countered. “This is what I campaigned on.” Many analysts are warning the economy is now undergoing a slow-motion swoon. Shipments to West Coast ports are plunging, while price increases are expected to begin eating into sales data and incomes as heightened uncertainty freezes investment. "A period of stagnation now likely lies ahead if the current set of tariffs is maintained, with recession the most likely outcome if the additional reciprocal tariffs are imposed in full in July," Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said in a note Wednesday. Following, the GDP report, stock markets saw heavy declines in opening selling. In a Truth Social post Wednesday, Trump blamed former President Joe Biden for the weakness. "This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s," he wrote. "I didn’t take over until January 20th. Tariffs will soon start kicking in, and companies are starting to move into the USA in record numbers. Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden 'Overhang.' This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!"In most circumstances, advanced economies like the U.S. try to aim for GDP of around 2% to 3% per quarter, adjusted for inflation. The U.S. has been doing slightly better than 2% for the past two years — and until Trump began his tariffs rollout, it was expected to have performed at about that pace. But shock over Trump’s tariffs has begun to rattle economic data. On Tuesday, the Commerce Department reported the U.S. trade deficit in merchandise unexpectedly widened in March to an all-time high as companies began ramping up imports to get ahead of Trump’s import duties. Having a large volume of imports that results in a trade deficit does not necessarily signal economic weakness, assuming the imports are balanced out by consumption and investment. Although the U.S. has been operating at historically wide trade deficits for many years, they have not substantially affected GDP performance. But the latest surge in imports likely swamped the ability of the rest of the economy to absorb them in the short term, something that would result in lower GDP. Still, the measurement does not reflect overall consumer and business performance, analysts with Morgan Stanley wrote in a note to clients. “It’s important to note that this reflects front-running and not current economic weakness,” they wrote. What about the rest of the economy? Analysts say consumption and investment likely slowed but did not reverse. “The story, in our view, is one of a US economy that exited the first quarter on solid footing,” the Morgan Stanley analysts said. Analysts with JP Morgan note that if Q1 GDP is unexpectedly weak, Q2 GDP could be unexpectedly strong. “If imports collapse in coming months, there will be a temporary bounceback in measured GDP in 2Q,” they wrote in a note. CORRECTION (May 1, 2025, 2:35 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated in a headline of the chart how the changes in GDP will be tracked. The chart has been updated using the percentage change in GDP from the previous quarter, not year over year.

It kills more people each year than car crashes, war or drugs do. This invisible killer is the air pollution from sources like cars and trucks or factory smokestacks. But as wildfires intensify and grow more frequent in a warming world, the smoke from these fires is emerging as a new and deadly pollution source, health experts say. By some estimates, wildfire smoke — which contains a mixture of hazardous air pollutants like particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, ozone and lead — already causes as many as 675,000 premature deaths a year worldwide, as well as a range of respiratory, heart and other diseases. Research shows that wildfire smoke is starting to erode the world’s progress in cleaning up pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks, as climate change supercharges fires. “It’s heartbreaking, it really is,” said Dr. Afif El-Hasan, a pediatrician who specializes in asthma care at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California and a board director of the American Lung Association. Wildfires “are putting our homes in danger, but they’re also putting our health in danger,” Dr. El-Hasan said, “and it’s only going to get worse.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Those health concerns were coming to the fore this week as wildfires ravaged the Los Angeles area. Residents began to return to their neighborhoods, many strewed with smoldering ash and rubble, to survey the damage. Air pollution levels remained high in many parts of the city, including in northwest coastal Los Angeles, where the air quality index climbed to “dangerous” levels. Los Angeles, in particular, has seen air pollution at levels that could be raising daily mortality by between 5 to 15 percent, said Carlos F. Gould, an expert in the health effects of air pollution at the University of California, San Diego. That means current death counts, “while tragic, are likely large underestimates,” he said. People with underlying health issues, as well as older people and children, are particularly vulnerable. The rapid spread of this week’s fires into dense neighborhoods, where they burned homes, furniture, cars, electronics and materials like paint and plastic, made the smoke more dangerous, said Dr. Lisa Patel, a pediatrician in the San Francisco Bay Area and the executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT A recent study found that even for homes that are spared destruction, smoke and ash blown inside could adhere to rugs, sofas and drywall, creating health hazards that can linger for months. “We’re breathing in this toxic brew of volatile organic compounds and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and hexavalent chromium,” Dr. Patel said. “All of it is noxious.” Intensifying and more frequent fires, meanwhile, are upending experts’ understanding of smoke’s health effects. “Wildfire season is no longer a season,” said Colleen Reid, who researches the effects of air pollution from wildfires on health at the University of Colorado Boulder. “We have fires all year round that affect the same population repeatedly.” “The health impacts are not the same as if you were exposed once, and then not again for 10 years,” she said. “The effects of that is something that we still don’t really know.” A United Nations report from 2022 concluded that the risk of devastating wildfires around the world would surge in coming decades. Heating and drying caused by climate change, along with development in places vulnerable to fire, was expected to intensify a “global wildfire crisis,” the report said. Both the frequency and intensity of extreme wildfires have more than doubled in the past two decades. In the United States, the average acreage burned a year has surged since the 1990s. Now, pollution from wildfires is reversing what had been a decades-long improvement in air quality brought about by cleaner cars and power generation. Since at least 2016, in nearly three-quarters of states in the U.S. mainland, wildfire smoke has eroded about 25 percent of progress in reducing concentrations of a type of particulate matter called PM 2.5, a Nature study in 2023 found. In California, wildfire smoke’s effect on air quality is offsetting public health gains brought about by a decline in air pollution from automobiles and factories, state health officials have found. (By releasing carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases into the atmosphere, wildfires are themselves a big contributor to climate change: The wildfires that ravaged Canada’s boreal forests in 2023 produced more greenhouse gases than the burning of fossil fuels in all but three countries.) ”It’s not a pretty picture,” said Dr. Gould of U.C. San Diego, who took part in the Nature study. If planet-warming gas emissions continue at current levels, “we’ve got some work that suggests that mortality from wildfire smoke in the U.S. could go up by 50 percent,” he said. One silver lining is that the Santa Ana winds that so ferociously fueled the flames in recent days have been blowing some of the smoke toward the ocean. That stands in contrast to the smoke from the 2023 Canadian wildfires that drifted to New York and other American states hundreds of miles away, causing spikes in emergency room visits for asthma. At one point that year, more than a third of Americans, from the East Coast to the Midwest, were under air quality alerts from Canadian wildfire smoke. “We’re seeing new and worsening threats in places that are not used to them,” Dr. Patel, the pediatrician, said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The new normal is bringing about changes to health care, Dr. Patel said. More health systems are sending out air quality alerts to vulnerable patients. In the small community hospital where she works, “every child that comes in with wheezing or asthma, I talk to them about how air pollution is getting worse because of wildfires and climate change,” she said. “I teach them how to look up air quality, and say they should ask for an air purifier,” Dr. Patel added. She also cautions that children should not participate in cleanup after a wildfire. Scientists are still trying to understand the full range of wildfire smoke’s health effects. One big question is how much of what researchers know about vehicle exhaust and other forms of air pollution apply to wildfire smoke, said Mark R. Miller, a researcher at the Center for Cardiovascular Science at the University of Edinburgh who led a recent global survey of climate change, air pollution and wildfires. For example, exhaust particles “are so small that when we breathe them in, they go deep down into our lungs and are actually small enough that they can pass from our lungs into our blood,” he said. “And once they’re in our blood, they can be carried around our body and start to build up.” That means air pollution affects our entire body, he said. “It has effects on people who have diabetes, has effects on the liver and the kidney, it has effects on the brain, on pregnancy,” he said. What’s still not clear is whether pollution from wildfires has all of those same effects. “But it’s likely,” he said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Experts have a range of advice for people living in areas with smoke. Keep an eye on air quality alerts, and follow evacuation orders. Stay indoors as much as possible, and use air purifiers. When venturing outside, wear N95 masks. Don’t do strenuous exercise in bad air. Keep children, older people and other vulnerable groups away from the worst smoke. Ultimately, tackling climate change and cutting back on all kinds of air pollution is the way to reduce the overall burden on health, said Dr. El-Hasan of the American Lung Association. “Can you imagine how much worse things would be if we hadn’t started cleaning up emissions from our cars?” he said. “I’m trying to think, glass half full, but it does break my heart and it does worry me.” A correction was made on Jan. 11, 2025: An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly the surname of an expert in the health effects of air pollution at the University of California, San Diego. He is Carlos F. Gould, not Gold.

The Federal Reserve is expected to hold interest rates steady at the end of its two-day meeting next week, despite some encouraging news on inflation. Although inflation receded last month, an escalating trade war threatens to cause prices to rise on a wide range of consumer goods going forward. “This is likely just the beginning with tariffs on Europe and universal ones to follow suit over the coming weeks,” Andrzej Skiba, head of U.S. fixed income at RBC Global Asset Management, said in an email. “This will be inflationary, and the Fed won’t likely be able to cut rates in this environment.” The federal funds rate sets what banks charge each other for overnight lending, but also affects many of the borrowing and savings rates Americans see every day. “Consumers are stretched and stressed,” said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com. Once the federal funds rate comes down, consumers may see their borrowing costs decrease across a variety of consumer debt such as auto loans, credit cards and mortgages, making it cheaper to borrow money. But even with the Fed on the sidelines for now, households could see some relief. Already, rates for mortgages, auto loans and credit cards are edging lower. Still, these rates remain relatively elevated compared to recent highs, with credit card APRs down only slightly from an all-time record. Here’s a look at where consumer borrowing costs stand. Mortgages Although 15- and 30-year mortgage rates are fixed, and largely tied to Treasury yields and the economy, rates have been trending lower for weeks. Recommended Business News A man once sued by the SEC wins Trump crypto contest to have dinner with the president Autos Cadillac's EVs are attracting new buyers, including more customers trading in Teslas Worries about a possible recession and increased uncertainty over President Donald Trump’s tariff plans have soured consumers’ outlook and dragged down rates, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. “The good news is that even though the Fed has taken its foot off the gas when it comes to rate cuts, mortgage rates have fallen,” said Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree. The average rate for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage is now 6.77%, down from 7.04% at the beginning of the year, according to Bankrate. Credit cards Most credit cards have a variable rate, so there’s a direct connection to the Fed’s benchmark. But even though the central bank held rates at the last few meetings, the average annual percentage rate has moved lower too — it’s currently, down to 20.09%, from 20.27% at the start of the year, thanks to the lingering effects of last year’s rate cuts. “March was the sixth straight monthly decline, but the decreases have slowed as Fed rate cuts get further back in the rearview mirror,” Schulz said of credit card APRs. In the meantime, credit card debt continues to be a pain point for consumers struggling to keep up with high prices. Revolving debt, which mostly includes credit card balances, is up 8.2% year over year, while nonrevolving debt, such as auto loans and student loans, is 3% higher, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest consumer credit report. Auto loans Although auto loan rates are fixed, those payments continue to grow because car prices are rising, in addition to pressure from trade policy uncertainty. “That’s troubling news for potential car buyers, who are already beset on all sides by high rates and high prices and also face the possibility of tariffs pushing car costs even higher,” Schulz said. However, auto loan rates have also backed down from recent highs. The average rate on a five-year new car loan is now 7.42%, down from 7.53% in January, according to Bankrate. Student loans Federal student loan rates are fixed, as well, so most borrowers are somewhat shielded from Fed moves and recent economic turmoil. Undergraduate students who took out direct federal student loans for the 2024-25 academic year are paying 6.53%, up from 5.50% in 2023-24. Interest rates for the upcoming school year will be based in part on the May auction of the 10-year Treasury note. Private student loans tend to have a variable rate tied to the prime, Treasury bill or another rate index.

A measure of consumers’ short-term expectations has fallen to its lowest level in 12 years, ticking a figure that has historically signaled recessions ahead. The measure of the short-term outlook for income, business and labor market conditions published by The Conference Board, a business membership group, fell 9.6 points from February to 65.2, the worst result since 2013 and well below the threshold of 80 that has historically augured negative growth for the economy. "Consumers’ expectations were especially gloomy, with pessimism about future business conditions deepening and confidence about future employment prospects falling to a 12-year low,” Stephanie Guichard, senior economist of global indicators at The Conference Board, said in a release. “Meanwhile, consumers’ optimism about future income — which had held up quite strongly in the past few months — largely vanished, suggesting worries about the economy and labor market have started to spread into consumers’ assessments of their personal situations.” The board said overall consumer confidence had declined for a fourth consecutive month in March and fell below the relatively narrow range that had prevailed since 2022. Stock market declines likely proved a significant role in the worsening outlook, it said; earlier this month, the S&P 500 entered correction territory — down 10% from its recent high — for the first time since 2022. Measures of consumer confidence and expectations have been declining across the board in recent weeks amid growing uncertainty about the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs strategy and his attempts to downsize federal agencies. Last week, the University of Michigan said its confidence index had declined for the third-consecutive month in March; its future expectations index, meanwhile, fell to the lowest level since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. And the New York Federal Reserve said earlier this month that the share of households expecting a worse financial situation one year from now had climbed to 27.4%, the highest level since November 2023. Consumers also remain concerned that inflation is not slowing. The Conference Board said median year-ahead inflation expectations climbed for the fourth-straight month to the highest level since May 2023 and noted that write-in responses to the survey “showed that inflation is still a major concern for consumers.” It also said that “worries about the impact of trade policies and tariffs in particular are on the rise.” Recommended Business News A man once sued by the SEC wins Trump crypto contest to have dinner with the president Autos Cadillac's EVs are attracting new buyers, including more customers trading in Teslas The University of Michigan’s year-ahead inflation expectations also jumped to the highest reading since November 2022 in March and marked three consecutive months of unusually large increases of 0.5 percentage points or more. Yet within the broad declines and concerns, evidence that different groups feel more uneasy than others emerges. The Conference Board said March’s declines were driven by older consumers, especially those who are at least 55 years old. By contrast, it said, confidence actually rose slightly among consumers under 35 thanks to an uptick in their assessments of the present situation. And the confidence among households earning more than $125,000 a year has continued to hold steady. And the University of Michigan’s survey continues to show profound divisions on ratings of the economy according to political affiliation. Among Democrats, expectations are now at their lowest levels on record, while Republicans maintain a much more favorable outlook. In fact, Republicans’ views of current conditions are now at their highest since August 2023. In an appearance on CNBC on Tuesday, Stephen Miran, current chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, dismissed the latest consumer confidence data, pointing to the influence of the deep political cleavages in survey responses while also highlighting more recent positive economic data like low layoffs, steady retail sales, and stable housing demand. “I just don’t think that there’s been a very strong correlation between the confidence data … and actual consumer spending in recent years,” Miran said. “And if … you go out in the street, people are going about their lives, you know, they’re getting their paychecks, they’re spending their paychecks. The economy is marching on ahead.”

Two Evangelical Christian leaders sent an open letter to President Trump on Wednesday, warning of the dangers of out-of-control artificial intelligence and of automating human labor. The letter comes just weeks after the new Pope, Leo XIV, declared he was concerned with the “defense of human dignity, justice and labor” amid what he described as the “new industrial revolution” spurred by advances in AI. “As people of faith, we believe we should rapidly develop powerful AI tools that help cure diseases and solve practical problems, but not autonomous smarter-than-human machines that nobody knows how to control,” reads the open letter, signed by the Reverends Johnnie Moore and Samuel Rodriguez. “The world is grappling with a new reality because of the pace of the development of this technology, which represents an opportunity of great promise but also of potential peril especially as we approach artificial general intelligence.”Rodriguez, the President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, spoke at Trump’s first presidential inauguration in 2017. Moore, who is also the founder of the public relations firm Kairos, served on Trump’s Evangelical executive board during his first presidential candidacy. The letter is a sign of growing ties between religious and AI safety groups, which share some of the same worries. It was shared with journalists by representatives of the Future of Life Institute—an AI safety organization that campaigns to reduce what it sees as the existential risk posed by advanced AI systems. The world’s biggest tech companies now all believe that it is possible to create so-called “artificial general intelligence”—a form of AI that can do any task better than a human expert. Some researchers have even invoked this technology in religious terms—for example, OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, a mystical figure who famously encouraged colleagues to chant “feel the AGI” at company gatherings. The emerging possibility of AGI presents, in one sense, a profound challenge to many theologies. If we are in a universe where a God-like machine is possible, what space does that leave for God himself? “The spiritual implications of creating intelligence that may one day surpass human capabilities raises profound theological and ethical questions that must be thoughtfully considered with wisdom,” the two Reverends wrote in their open letter to President Trump. “Virtually all religious traditions warn against a world where work is no longer necessary or where human beings can live their lives without any guardrails.” Though couched in adulatory language, the letter presents a vision of AI governance that differs from Trump’s current approach. The president has embraced the framing of the U.S. as in a race with China to get to AGI first, and his AI czar, David Sacks, has warned that regulating the technology would threaten the U.S.’s position in that race. The White House AI team is stacked with advisors who take a dismissive view of alignment risks—or the idea that a smarter-than-human AI might be hostile to humans, escape their control, and cause some kind of catastrophe.We believe you are the world’s leader now by Divine Providence to also guide AI,” the letter says, addressing Trump, before urging him to consider convening an ethical council to consider not only “what AI can do but also what it should do.” “To be clear: we are not encouraging the United States, and our friends, to do anything but win the AI race,” the letter says. “There is no alternative. We must win. However, we are advising that this victory simply must not be a victory at any cost.” The letter echoes some themes that have increasingly been explored inside the Vatican, not just by Pope Leo XIV but also his predecessor, Pope Francis. Last year, in remarks at an event held at the Vatican about AI, Francis argued that AI must be used to improve, not degrade, human dignity. “Does it serve to satisfy the needs of humanity, to improve the well-being and integral development of people?” he asked. Or does it “serve to enrich and increase the already high power of the few technological giants despite the dangers to humanity?”

Bridgewater Associates founder and billionaire Ray Dalio warned Monday that Moody’s downgrade of the U.S. sovereign credit rating understates the threat to U.S. Treasurys, saying the credit agency isn’t taking into account the risk of the federal government simply printing money to pay its debt. “You should know that credit ratings understate credit risks because they only rate the risk of the government not paying its debt,” Dalio said in a post on social media platform X. “They don’t include the greater risk that the countries in debt will print money to pay their debts thus causing holders of the bonds to suffer losses from the decreased value of the money they’re getting (rather than from the decreased quantity of money they’re getting),” the Bridgewater founder said. Moody’s on Friday cut the U.S. credit rating one notch to Aa1 from Aaa, citing the federal government’s ballooning budget deficit and soaring interest payments on the debt. It was the last of the three major credit agencies to downgrade the U.S. from the highest possible rating.