Commercial mining on the miles-deep Pacific Ocean floor came one step closer to reality with an announcement late Tuesday by the U.S. Interior Department that it would evaluate a request from a California-based company to extract metals off the coast of American Samoa. The move follows an executive order last month that urged government agencies to expedite permits for seabed mining in U.S. territorial waters as well as international waters. Most other nations argue that the United States does not have the legal right to mine the seabed beyond its own territorial waters. Parts of the ocean floor are blanketed by potato-size nodules containing valuable minerals like nickel, cobalt and manganese that are essential to advanced technologies that the United States considers critical to its economic and military security. Supply chains of many of these valuable minerals are increasingly controlled by China. No commercial-scale mining of the seabed has ever taken place. The technological hurdles to seabed mining are high, and there have been serious concerns about the environmental consequences. Yet many countries have been impatient to get started as demand grows for the metals found there. Under a United Nations treaty signed by nearly every country except the United States, mining in international waters is supposed to wait until regulations and environmental protections have been agreed upon. President Trump’s executive order last month stirred outrage across a broad swath of governments and activist groups that said permits issued unilaterally by the U.S. government would be in breach of widely accepted international law. The Interior Department’s announcement on Tuesday pertains to a request from a company called Impossible Metals to move toward mining in U.S. territorial waters. In early April, before the executive order was issued, the company had requested that the government consider granting it access to nearly 30,000 square miles of those waters. Testifying in front of a congressional subcommittee in April, the company’s chief executive, Oliver Gunasekara, said the election of a new, Republican governor in American Samoa last November boded well for their plans. An application made last year by the company to the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management was denied and, shortly thereafter, the previous governor of American Samoa, a Democrat, enacted a moratorium on seabed mining in the territory’s waters. American Samoa, which is around 2,600 miles southwest of Hawaii, is not a U.S. state and has no representation in Congress. It is also the only U.S. territory where people born there are not automatically granted citizenship at birth. “As soon as the executive order came out, that very much directed the different groups to accelerate and prioritize deep-sea mining,” Mr. Gunasekara said in an interview on Wednesday. He added that his company’s request was to explore a zone near the United States’ maritime border with the Cook Islands. “It avoids any existing marine sanctuaries, even though there was a recent executive order that rescinded them,” he said, referring to Mr. Trump’s opening of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument to commercial fishing in April. For decades, negotiators at the International Seabed Authority, an agency affiliated with the United Nations, have been drafting and redrafting a rule book for deep-sea mining that would cover everything from environmental regulations to royalty payments. Despite a pledge to finalize it by this year, negotiators seemed unlikely to meet that deadline. Nevertheless, anticipating that mining would eventually be allowed, a handful of companies have invested heavily in developing technologies to mine the ocean floor. They include ships with huge claws that would extend down to the seabed, as well as autonomous vehicles attached to gargantuan vacuums that would scour the ocean bottom. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The furthest along is the Metals Company, a Canadian enterprise that, so far, is the only company to apply for a U.S. permit after Mr. Trump’s executive order. Through a U.S.-based subsidiary, the company is seeking to mine in the so-called Clarion-Clipperton Zone, in international waters, about halfway between Hawaii and Mexico, and has spent more than a half-billion dollars preparing to mine. Its application will go through a separate permitting process run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is part of the Commerce Department. The Metals Company has developed an extraction technology that resembles a vacuum attached to an autonomous vehicle that would trundle across the seafloor, sending up nodules to a ship through a pipe. The company proposing to mine near American Samoa, Impossible Metals, says it has a machine that will pick up nodules individually and without actually landing on the seafloor. An Interior Department news release said the department would now begin the process of seeking input “from the Indigenous Island community, ocean users, industry stakeholders, government agencies and the public,” in its consideration of whether to grant Impossible Metals request. Mr. Gunasekara said this was only the beginning of a “multiyear process” that he hoped would move from public consultation to exploration to environmental assessments and ultimately a production license.

When it passed in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act was hailed by Democrats and environmentalists as the most important piece of climate legislation in American history. But today, as House Republicans debate whether to repeal the hundreds of billions of dollars that the law provides for solar panels, electric vehicles and other technologies designed to fight global warming, supporters of the law rarely mention the planet. Instead, the law’s defenders argue that the tax credits for battery factories or wind farms are creating manufacturing jobs around the country and will reduce electricity prices and help the United States to compete in an A.I. race against China. It’s a sign of how quickly climate has faded from the national agenda under President Trump, who has dismissed the risks of global warming and has rooted out any mention of climate change among federal agencies. “We’re no longer talking about the environment,” said Chad Farrell, the founder of Encore Renewable Energy, based in Vermont. “We’re talking dollars and cents.” Mr. Farrell was among the solar industry leaders who met in Washington last week to lobby Congress to preserve many of the law’s clean energy provisions, saying they were essential for the U.S. economy. The fate of the clean energy tax credits is being hotly debated on Capitol Hill. The most recent version of the House Republicans’ far-reaching domestic policy bill would quickly phase out the biggest incentives for technologies like electric vehicles, batteries, wind turbines, solar panels and nuclear reactors and restrict tax breaks for domestic manufacturing. Some conservative Republicans want to entirely repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. On the other side, three dozen Republicans in the House and four in the Senate say they want to preserve at least some incentives, such as those for nuclear power or domestic manufacturing, to protect jobs and bolster U.S. energy security. “We must ensure certainty for current and future energy investments to meet the nation’s growing power demand and protect our constituents from higher energy costs,” Representative Jen Kiggans, Republican of Virginia, wrote in a recent letter joined by 13 colleagues from her party. Ms. Kiggans has been a vocal supporter of a giant wind farm under construction off the coast of her district. In their pitch to lawmakers, many renewable energy companies have cast their industries as essential for achieving national energy dominance, a goal repeatedly mentioned by Mr. Trump. One common argument: America’s demand for electricity is soaring, driven by a boom in A.I. data centers, and it’s difficult to build enough gas-fired power plants to supply all the extra power that the nation needs. Adding more solar, wind and batteries could be the country’s best hope for averting energy shortages, since they are relatively quick to construct, proponents say. “Maybe before it was tie-dye T-shirts and hugging trees, but today we are a mature energy sector and a critical part of energizing America,” said Constantino Nicolaou, the chief executive of PanelClaw, a solar company based in Massachusetts that supplies mounting systems for rooftop solar projects. “Yes, we love the environment, but don’t look at us like the environmentalists,” Mr. Nicolaou said. Other companies warn that thousands of good-paying manufacturing jobs could disappear if Congress repealed the tax credits. Since the Inflation Reduction Act passed, businesses have announced more than $843 billion in clean energy investments, from wind farms in Wyoming to battery factories in Georgia. More than three-fourths of that spending is expected to occur in Republican-controlled districts. If Republicans phase out the tax credits, “nearly 300 U.S. factories — mostly in red states — could close or never open,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. On Monday, the solar association released a report estimating that 292,000 jobs and $220 billion in local investments might be lost if Congress ended the tax breaks for solar power, while warning of blackouts and higher electricity bills. The report does not mention climate change. It’s a marked contrast with 2022, when the solar association released an analysis showing that additional solar deployment brought on by the Inflation Reduction Act would offset more than 655 million tons of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that is driving global warming. Even many environmental groups defending the law now sound like a green-tinged version of the Chamber of Commerce. Repealing the tax credits “means higher gas and electricity costs for struggling families and businesses, tanking the U.S. manufacturing resurgence and ceding leadership to China,” said Sara Chieffo, the vice president of government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters. Other companies, including makers of electric vehicles, are trying to persuade lawmakers that the United States could lose a technology race with China if the law were gutted. “We can’t lose sight of the fact that the automotive industry is global, and consumers all over the world are increasingly preferring electric vehicles for a variety of reasons,” said Michael Tubman, director of federal affairs at Lucid Motors, a start-up manufacturing electric cars in Arizona. “The American auto industry is in fierce competition with foreign competitors, particularly Chinese automakers.” The shift away from focusing on climate change is a throwback to an earlier era of clean energy politics, said Alex Trembath, the deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research organization. For many years, subsidies for new energy technologies like wind, solar and nuclear power had broad bipartisan support and were often renewed under Republican presidents, in part because they were seen as essential to accelerate technological innovation and improve U.S. energy security. That changed during the Biden administration, when Democrats made fighting climate change a top political priority and dramatically expanded the tax credits as part of a push to quickly pivot the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels. “Once all these tax credits started getting described as once-in-a-generation climate policy, that went a long ways toward turning Republicans away,” Mr. Trembath said. But in the wake of Mr. Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, he has written, climate change looks less like a winning issue for Democrats. Whether Republicans are swayed by the economic arguments for the Inflation Reduction Act remains to be seen. Conservative critics have pushed back hard, saying that clean energy subsidies could cost taxpayers trillions of dollars. “The Inflation Reduction Act has ballooned into one of the biggest government boondoggles in history,” said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, a conservative research group focused on energy. “That’s real money that could be returned to taxpayers, fueling private-sector innovation, job creation and consumer-driven growth instead of funneling taxpayer dollars into a narrow, government-directed vision of the economy.” Some Senate Republicans have suggested phasing out the subsidies for wind and solar — on the grounds that those industries are mature and don’t need further help — while maintaining tax credits for earlier-stage technologies like advanced nuclear reactors or enhanced geothermal plants. That could result in more planet-warming emissions. An analysis by the Rhodium Group, a research firm, found that repealing tax credits for electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels could lead to hundreds of millions of tons of extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere each year by 2035. Yet others say that the broader effect that the tax credits would have on emissions has been overstated. That’s because many solar and wind projects across the country are currently being held up by delays in local permitting or regulations that make it difficult to build large transmission lines, blunting the law’s climate impact. “There are a lot of reforms we could make that would have a much bigger impact on decarbonization than the I.R.A.,” said Devin Hartman, director of energy and environmental policy at the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank. “In some ways the fight over subsidies has hijacked that conversation.” Whatever happens to the Inflation Reduction Act, many supporters say it was a promising attempt at creating a durable climate policy in the United States. Before the law, climate activists often favored restrictions and penalties, such as taxes on emissions from oil, gas and coal. But countries, like Canada and Australia, that enacted such policies later overturned them because they were unpopular. The Inflation Reduction Act was designed to be a “carrot” rather than a “stick,” said Leah Stokes, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who helped craft parts of the law. It led to investment, and that has made the policies stickier. “Climate policy is hard,” Ms. Stokes said. “We’re trying to wean ourselves off a product that is represented by the most powerful industry on the planet.” But the tax incentives for clean energy, she added, still have a better shot at surviving “than anything else ever has.” Referring to the law’s fate in Congress, Ms. Stokes said, “It’s not dead yet.”

In Europe, the weedkiller atrazine has been banned for nearly two decades because of its suspected links to reproductive problems like reduced sperm quality and birth defects. In the United States, it remains one of the most widely used pesticides, sprayed on corn, sugar cane and other crops, the result of years of industry lobbying. It has been detected in the drinking water of some 40 million Americans. Now, American environmental groups that have long sought a ban are finding some unexpected allies: the Trump administration and its MAGA supporter base. This week, a “Make America Healthy Again” commission led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is set to issue a report on the causes of chronic illnesses in the United States. And Mr. Kennedy, who worked for years as an environmental lawyer fighting chemical companies, wants the report to highlight the harms of pesticides like atrazine, according to three people with knowledge of his efforts. It is an unwieldy coalition, extending even to some men’s rights influencers on alternative media, where commentary abounds on how toxic chemicals are threatening masculinity. They are taking on an influential agricultural and chemicals lobby that has long rebuffed attempts to strengthen restrictions on atrazine and other pesticides, at a time when the Trump administration is rolling back government restrictions on industries, not imposing new ones. Mr. Kennedy has a vocal movement behind him. “We’re calling for a ban of 85 pesticides that have already been banned in other countries,” said Zen Honeycutt, who leads a coalition of mothers opposed to pesticides and genetically modified organisms, at a national conference of Make America Healthy Again supporters ahead of the report’s publication. “These pesticides cause reproductive damage, and we have a reproductive crisis in our country today,” she said at the meeting, attended by farmers, health influencers and conservative activists, as well as several administration officials. “Do we want the American population to be able to procreate or not?” Lori Ann Burd, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, a group that has long sought a ban in the United States of atrazine and other pesticides, sees an uneasy but potentially powerful alignment of interests. “There’s an epic battle brewing over the direction that the administration is going to take on toxic chemicals,” she said. “This is the movement that helped to elect Trump,” she said. “But we’re also up against some of the most powerful corporate lobby groups in the country.” The showdown is the latest chapter in a long battle over pesticides like atrazine, long valued for its efficacy and affordability in controlling weeds and increasing crop yields. Each year, American farmers spray the pesticide on about 75 million acres of farmland, roughly equivalent to the area of New Mexico. But atrazine can also run off into streams and rivers, contaminating water sources and harming aquatic life. In humans, it is an endocrine disruptor linked to preterm delivery, birth defects and low sperm counts, and possibly to thyroid, ovarian, and other cancers. Some sixty countries ban the use of atrazine, manufactured by Switzerland-based Syngenta, which was acquired by the Chinese state-owned chemical company ChemChina in 2017. Syngenta contested those concerns, saying atrazine was one of the most studied and thoroughly tested chemicals in the world and that, at trace levels found in the environment, the pesticide would not “have any impact on hormones or human health.” The federal agency led by Mr. Kennedy, Health and Human Services, referred questions to the White House. Kush Desai, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said the president had “campaigned on Making America Healthy Again and standing up for America’s farmers, and the administration is aligned on delivering on both of these goals.” In America, the farming lobby has fought attempts to regulate the chemical. During the first Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency rolled back restrictions on the use of several pesticides, including atrazine. That rollback came under Nancy Beck, a former chemical-industry lobbyist who at that time led the agency’s toxic chemicals program. Today, Dr. Beck, who holds a doctorate in environmental health and toxicology, is back at the E.P.A. as principal deputy assistant administrator overseeing the Office of Chemical Safety. In recent weeks she has pushed back against mentioning pesticides in the MAHA commission report, according to the three people with knowledge of the commission’s discussions. Kailee Tkacz Buller, a former seed oil lobbyist who is chief of staff at the Department of Agriculture, has also pushed back against focusing on pesticides in the MAHA report, citing concerns over disruptions to the food supply chain, one of the three people said. That came after 79 Republican lawmakers, led by Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, urged the Trump administration to resist efforts from “activist groups promoting misguided and sometimes malicious policies masquerading as health solutions.” In their letter, the Republican lawmakers accused environmental activists of all stripes of “advancing harmful health, economic or food security policies under the guise of human health.” On Tuesday, a coalition of farm groups, including the National Corn Growers Association, issued a statement urging the Trump administration to “consider the consequences” of a report that suggested U.S. farmers were harming Americans through their production practices. ‘We urge President Trump to ensure that the MAHA Commission report is based on sound science and evidence-based claims rather than opinions and preferences of social influencers and single-issue activists with little to no experience in actual farming or food production,” the groups said. MAHA supporters are unfazed. “Big Ag, Big Food, Big Pharma, the pesticide companies, all of these companies are the delivery mechanisms for toxins,” said Tony Lyons, co-president of the newly established MAHA Institute, which hosted the MAHA conference. “Our government agencies shouldn’t be protecting a handful of the most powerful companies on earth, protecting their profits over the welfare of its own citizens.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT MAHA advocates say recent remarks from Mr. Trump and Mr. Kennedy signal a different approach under the second Trump administration. Since allying with Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Trump has complained about how the United States spends “billions and billions of dollars on pesticides,” compared to the European Union, yet has worse health outcomes. He has pledged that his administration would “ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides.” Mr. Kennedy is looking into pesticides seriously, Mr. Trump said, “because maybe it’s not necessary to use all of that.” For his part, Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly called atrazine “extraordinarily toxic” and has said that pesticides are significant contributors to chronic health problems and cancer. The anti-pesticide cause is finding supporters among online commentators who speak out on issues they consider important to men, such as infertility. “There has never been an era in human history where men are losing more. More men than ever are infertile,” Jackson Hightower, a men’s health influencer with more than a million followers across various social platforms, said in a recent video. “No one seems to be talking about how a major contributing factor to this is our food supply. And we have so much evidence to support the dangers of spraying our crops with chemicals like atrazine.” Research has shown there is some evidence globally of declining fertility among men. Studies have pointed to numerous factors that could be causing a decline, including chemical exposure and lifestyle choices like alcohol consumption, poor diet and lack of physical activity. Calley Means, an adviser to Mr. Kennedy who played a key role in orchestrating his endorsement of Mr. Trump, said he believed the country was “seeing one of the most significant realignments in American politics in American history.” He is the brother of Dr. Casey Means, Mr. Trump’s nominee for Surgeon General and another Kennedy ally. “We’ve galvanized a movement of moms, of independents, of young people,” Mr. Means said, “a revolutionary coalition of people who are going to change American politics.” All of this is happening as the Trump administration pursues a deregulatory drive that has few parallels in American history. The E.P.A., under Administrator Lee Zeldin, is revising or repealing more than 30 regulations aimed at protecting the air, water and Earth’s climate. There is also the question of how much influence Mr. Kennedy, as health secretary, can have over pesticide policy. Though the Food and Drug Administration, which is under his agency, can regulate pesticide residues in food, it is a different agency, the E.P.A., that regulates pesticide use. The E.P.A. is currently updating its mitigation proposals for atrazine, including revising its levels of concern for atrazine in water. But whether pesticides are targeted in the MAHA commission report, set to be issued on Thursday, is seen as an early test of the government’s approach. The report is expected to be a broad overview of the potential causes of chronic disease in children, including chemical exposures, food, lack of exercise and too much screen time. “I think if President Trump stands up and gets this out to the American people, he will go down as a historical figure who changed the trajectory of chronic disease,” said Vani Hari, widely known as the Food Babe, a popular author and activist close to Mr. Kennedy. The E.P.A. said in a statement that the Trump administration was “having robust conversations across government about how to drive economic growth while protecting human health and the environment.” The agency pointed to Dr. Beck’s extensive civil service career before her time working as an industry lobbyist, saying Mr. Trump had made “a fantastic choice” in selecting her to work at the agency. Traditional environmentalists, meanwhile, remain wary of MAHA’s controversial positions on lifesaving vaccines and more. As health secretary, Mr. Kennedy has broken with his predecessors by not advocating for vaccination, for example casting the decision to vaccinate against measles as a personal one. During an appearance last month by Mr. Kennedy at a conference focused on solving the global plastic trash crisis, environmentalists said they had steered him away from talk of vaccines. Even on pesticides, Mr. Kennedy’s scientific justifications aren’t always sound. He has suggested that chemicals in the water might be responsible for “sexual dysphoria” in children. In a segment aired by CNN, he said that atrazine could “forcibly feminize” frogs. “What this does to sexual development in children, nobody knows,” he said. (While there is research on atrazine feminizing male frogs, there is no evidence that the chemical similarly affects humans.) Jay Feldman, executive director of the environmental advocacy group Beyond Pesticides, said he hoped Mr. Kennedy’s unorthodox claims did not undermine the effort to regulate pesticides. For years he worked alongside Mr. Kennedy to raise awareness of the risks of pesticide exposure. “It’s unfortunate when you have an active player who has been a leading voice on environmental protection for most of his life attach himself to something so controversial,” he said. “The question is, will everything he does now be dismissed?”

Some of the sunscreen you slather on this summer will end up in lakes, streams or the ocean, even if you don’t go swimming. And a growing body of evidence suggests that ultraviolet filters, the active ingredients in sunscreens, can harm creatures that live in the water. Some products are marketed as “reef safe” or friendly to aquatic life. But has that been proved? We talked to a dermatologist, several ecologists and toxicologists, and a chemical engineer to find out the best way to protect your skin and the environment, too. Your sunscreen options There are two kinds of UV filters in sunscreens on the market today. Mineral sunscreens create a physical barrier on your skin that reflects UV rays like a mirror, while chemical sunscreens are absorbed into the skin and convert the UV radiation into harmless heat. (Chemical sunscreens are also sometimes labeled “organic,” but that’s a chemistry term, not a claim of environmental friendliness.) Any sunscreen you apply will eventually end up in water. Researchers estimate that between 25 and 50 percent of sunscreen comes off during a dip. The rest goes down the drain when you shower or enters the wastewater system through the laundry when you wash your beach towels. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most standard treatment plants aren’t effective at removing trace levels of UV filters from wastewater, said Dunia Santiago, a chemical engineer at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in Spain who studies how treatment plants process contaminants. That means the chemicals are still in the water that flows out of the plant and into the world. And, since many UV filters don’t biodegrade well, levels can build up over time in the environment, floating around, settling into sediment and being eaten by animals, especially in shallow areas popular with swimmers. What we know and don’t know There’s a growing body of evidence that both chemical and mineral UV filters have the potential to harm wildlife, including coral reefs, at high concentrations. A 2016 study on the potential for a chemical UV filter called oxybenzone to make coral more vulnerable to bleaching made a particularly big splash in the public consciousness, increasing demand for gentler alternatives and leading some places to ban the sale of some chemical sunscreens. In response, some manufacturers started marketing mineral sunscreens as “reef safe.” But researchers generally agree you shouldn’t put too much stock in these labels, which aren’t regulated. Calling one UV filter safer than another “implies that we have information to make a comparison, which we do not have,” said Sandy Raimondo, an ecologist at the Environmental Protection Agency who studies chemical contaminants. The science on UV-filter toxicity isn’t rock-solid because the laboratory methods used to test them haven’t been standardized, according to ecologists and toxicologists we interviewed. One important issue is the “stickiness” of chemical UV filters. They cling to the surface of the water, the sides of tanks and the inside of tools designed to measure their concentrations. When researchers can’t be certain of the concentration of a chemical in water, Dr. Raimondo said, the resulting data isn’t reliable. While the data on mineral UV filters is more reliable, new formulations designed to minimize that ghostly white cast on the skin cause their own problems. Some manufacturers use so-called nano versions of zinc oxide and titanium dioxide. These even-tinier particles can get embedded in the tissues of plants and animals in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand, Dr. Raimondo said. Trying to fill in the blanks The E.P.A. is currently funding studies to fill the gaps in our understanding of UV-filter toxicity. Top priorities include resolving measurement issues and developing standardized methods to make comparisons easier. But President Trump’s plans for deep cuts at the agency have put the future of many environmental studies in doubt. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Even if those studies continue, they will probably take years to complete, and the agency could take several more years to conduct an official ecological risk assessment for any particular UV filter. Some researchers say that, even with our incomplete knowledge of the impacts of UV filters, the existing evidence on certain chemical UV filters is damning enough for us to switch to alternatives that use non-nano mineral UV filters. Indeed, the stickiness of chemical UV filters may mean that existing research underestimates their environmental toxicity. What you can do right now Thankfully, you don’t have to broil to help the environment. Dermatologists and toxicologists agree on the best form of sun protection. But it’s not mineral or chemical sunscreen. It’s clothing. Sunscreen is an important component of protection, “but it’s not the only component,” said Dr. Henry Lim, a dermatologist at Henry Ford Health in Detroit and a former president of the American Academy of Dermatology. “Staying in the shade, wearing photoprotective clothing, a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses are very, very important.” Cover as much real estate as you can with UPF rated clothing (that’s the SPF equivalent for fabric). “Sunscreen should be applied only in the areas that cannot be covered,” Dr. Lim said.

Individuals and small business have been paying more for power in recent years, and their electricity rates may climb higher still. That’s because the cost of the power plants, transmission lines and other equipment that utilities need to serve data centers, factories and other large users of electricity is likely to be spread to everybody who uses electricity, according to a new report. The report by Wood MacKenzie, an energy research firm, examined 20 large power users. In almost all of those cases, the firm found, the money that large energy users paid to electric utilities would not be enough to cover the cost of the equipment needed to serve them. The rest of the costs would be borne by other utility customers or the utility itself. The utilities “either need to socialize the cost to other ratepayers or absorb that cost — essentially, their shareholders would take the hit,” said Ben Hertz-Shargel, who is the global head of grid edge research for Wood MacKenzie. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT This is not a theoretical dilemma for utilities and the state officials who oversee their operations and approve or reject their rates. Electricity demand is expected to grow substantially over the next several decades as technology companies build large data centers for their artificial intelligence businesses. Electricity demand in some parts of the United States is expected to increase as much as 15 percent over just the next four years after several decades of little or no growth. The rapid increase in data centers, which use electricity to power computer servers and keep them cool, has strained many utilities. Demand is also growing because of new factories and the greater use of electric cars and electric heating and cooling. In addition to investing to meet demand, utilities are spending billions of dollars to harden their systems against wildfires, hurricanes, heat waves, winter storms and other extreme weather. Natural disasters, many of which are linked to climate change, have made the United States’ aging power grids more unreliable. That spending is one of the main reasons that electricity rates have been rising in recent years. American homes that use a typical 1,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity a month paid, on average, about $164 in February, according to the Energy Information Administration. That was up more than $30 from five years ago. Dominion Energy, a large investor-owned utility based in Richmond, Va., is one of those that Wood MacKenzie expects will spend more on new infrastructure than it will be able to recover from selling electricity to data centers and other large users. More data centers have opened in Virginia than in any other state. Asked about Wood MacKenzie’s filings, Dominion said that on April 1 it filed a proposal to electricity regulators in Virginia for requiring large-load customers to pay their “fair share” of utility costs. “Ensuring a fair allocation of costs and mitigating financial risk are not new concepts to the company,” Edward H. Baine, president of Dominion Energy Virginia, said in testimony that Dominion submitted to state regulators and provided to The New York Times. “Addressing both the needs and the risks associated with growth in high-load electric customers with high-load factors is both a public policy and a regulatory priority for Virginia.” A 2024 analysis by Virginia officials concluded that data centers paid the full cost of the service they received. But that report warned that the addition of many more large users of electricity could raise rates for all users if the state did not make policy changes to protect individuals and small businesses. Wood MacKenzie’s report found that some states do have policies to protect individuals and small businesses from higher rates. Chief among them is Texas, where customers can pick a power source that is different from the utility that maintains the lines that deliver electricity to their homes. This arrangement, according to Wood MacKenzie, helps protect individuals from having to pay for grid upgrades that mainly or entirely benefit large users. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Hertz-Shargel said many utilities also had programs that allowed large electricity users to buy emissions-free energy directly from power producers like solar and wind farms. Such programs, he said, could be refashioned to help ensure that the cost of new power projects is largely or entirely borne by the users responsible for major grid upgrades. The policies that states and utilities have put in place will significantly reduce risks of spreading the costs of improvements for the large-load customers, but “they do not provide complete protection,” Mr. Hertz-Shargel said. “Only by removing data-center-caused infrastructure from utilities books, such as by allowing large loads to contract with third parties for generation via clean transition tariffs, are both ratepayers and utility shareholders fully protected.”

The Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday that it would uphold drinking water standards for two harmful “forever chemicals,” present in the tap water of millions of Americans. But it said it would delay deadlines to meet those standards and roll back limits on four other related chemicals. Known as forever chemicals because of their virtually indestructible nature, PFAS are a class of thousands of chemicals used widely in everyday products like nonstick cookware, water-repellent clothing and stain-resistant carpets, as well as in firefighting foams. Exposure to PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, has been associated with metabolic disorders, decreased fertility in women, developmental delays in children and increased risk of some prostate, kidney and testicular cancers, according to the E.P.A. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had, for the first time, required water utilities to start bringing down levels of six types of PFAS chemicals to near zero. He set a particularly stringent limit of four parts per trillion for two of those chemicals, called PFOA and PFOS, which are most commonly found in drinking water systems. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The Trump administration said it would uphold the limits for those two types of PFAS, but would delay a deadline for water utilities to meet those limits by two years, to 2031. The E.P.A. said it would rescind the limits for the other four chemicals. “We are on a path to uphold the agency’s nationwide standards to protect Americans from PFOA and PFOS in their water,” Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said in a statement. “At the same time, we will work to provide common-sense flexibility in the form of additional time for compliance,” he said. “EPA will also continue to use its regulatory and enforcement tools to hold polluters accountable.” The move to weaken some PFAS limits came after trade groups representing the chemicals industry, as well as water utilities, had challenged the Biden-era limits, saying they created an impossible standard that would cost municipal water agencies billions of dollars to meet. The chemicals are so ubiquitous that they can be found in the blood of almost every person in the United States. Government studies of private wells and public water systems have detected PFAS chemicals in nearly half the tap water in the country. In 2022, the E.P.A. found the chemicals could cause harm at levels “much lower than previously understood” and that almost no level of exposure is safe. In 2022, the E.P.A. found the chemicals could cause harm at levels “much lower than previously understood” and that almost no level of exposure is safe.

Sprawling wind farms in Wyoming. A huge solar factory expansion in Georgia. Lithium mines in Nevada. Vacuums that suck carbon from the air in Louisiana. Over the past three years, companies have made plans to invest more than $843 billion across the United States in projects aimed at reducing planet-warming emissions, driven by lucrative tax credits for clean energy provided by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. But only about $321 billion of that money has actually been spent, with many projects still on the drawing board, according to data made public on Tuesday by the Clean Investment Monitor, a joint project of the Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now, much of the rest, about $522 billion, will depend on action playing out on Capitol Hill. Starting on Tuesday, Republicans in Congress will begin a contentious debate over proposals to roll back tax credits for low-carbon energy as they search for ways to pay for a roughly $4 trillion tax cut package favored by President Trump. A draft bill issued on Monday by Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee would effectively end most of the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax incentives. A tax credit for low-carbon electricity sources like wind, solar, nuclear or geothermal power would be phased out over the next few years. Rebates for consumers to buy electric vehicles would mostly disappear by the end of 2025. Tax breaks for domestic factories that make batteries or solar panels would end by 2031 and would contain new restrictions that could make them extremely difficult to access. Incentives for producing hydrogen fuels would end this year. While shrinking those tax credits could help Republicans save hundreds of billions of dollars, it could also cause companies to abandon plans for new nuclear reactors or battery factories. More than three-quarters of pending investments were planned in Republican-held congressional districts. “It’s jobs, it’s tax revenue into local communities,” said Ben King, an associate director at the Rhodium Group, a research firm that tracks investment data with M.I.T.’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. “It does represent a meaningful economic change in some of these places.” The prospect of repeal has set off a furious lobbying battle in Washington, with energy companies pleading with lawmakers to preserve the tax breaks. At least three dozen Republicans have asked their colleagues to keep at least some tax credits to protect jobs in their districts and reduce electricity prices. But a nearly equal number of conservative House members are pushing publicly to kill the climate law altogether. One Republican supporter is Representative Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, whose district includes an electric vehicle factory and several solar projects under construction. “When I looked initially at the energy tax credits and how they were benefiting Arizona, a lot of those projects were underway, the jobs had been created, the ball was more than rolling at that point,” Mr. Ciscomani, who was elected in 2022, said. “So it made sense for me to stand up for that.” If the tax credits are completely rescinded, it would sharply reduce future demand for electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels and wind turbines, according to projections by the Rhodium Group. The effect would be compounded if the Trump administration moved forward as planned with undoing Biden-era tailpipe pollution limits for cars and trucks, which would have pushed automakers to sell more electric vehicles. The uncertainty around the tax credits, as well as confusion over Mr. Trump’s tariffs, has led many low-carbon energy companies to put their investment plans on hold. In the Midwest, Heliene, a solar manufacturer, has paused plans to build a $350 million factory that would produce cells for solar panels, which today mostly come from China. Martin Pochtaruk, Heliene’s chief executive, said it was too risky to finance the plant without clarity on whether Congress would maintain tax credits for domestic energy manufacturing. “Right now, we see a lot of folks just waiting,” said Jason Grumet, chief executive of the American Clean Power Association, a renewable industry trade group. “People are not canceling things, but they’re also not breaking ground.” “There is a remarkable tension right now, between probably the best fundamentals for investment in the energy sector that we’ve seen in a generation and the greatest amount of uncertainty that we’ve seen in the generation,” Mr. Grumet said. “That is a collision that all manufacturing now is trying to navigate.” The Fate of Low-Carbon Electricity The biggest tax breaks in the Inflation Reduction Act were for companies that build power plants that generate electricity without emitting any planet-warming greenhouse gases. Those credits were set to remain in place for many years to come, until emissions from the U.S. electricity sector fell 75 percent from 2022 levels. So far, power companies have mainly taken advantage of these credits to propose new solar, wind and battery plants in places like Texas, California, Wyoming and Arizona, since those technologies are ready today. But the credit was designed to also spur a wave of innovative nuclear reactors, advanced geothermal plants, fusion plants, hydroelectric dams and novel types of batteries over the next decade. The credits have already allowed developers to install solar panels on sites as varied as a carport in New Mexico and a shuttered coal plant in Illinois, said Russ Bates, chief executive of NXTGEN Clean Energy Solutions, a low-carbon energy developer. Yet those credits may wind down much faster than many companies expected. Under the House bill issued on Monday, the full clean-electricity credits would only apply to new power plants that are “in service” by 2028, which would exclude a large array of wind, solar, nuclear and geothermal plants that are under development but won’t be completed by then. The credits would then phase down and disappear after 2031. In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, recently warned that, without the tax credits, efforts to expand nuclear power in his state “are dead.” What Congress decides could reshape the nation’s power grids. If the credits are repealed entirely or severely restricted, one study found, wind and solar installations would likely fall by half over the next decade, while electric utilities would burn more fossil fuels like coal and gas instead. That could lead to higher electricity prices, since renewables are often the quickest and easiest source of power for utilities to build. Emissions would also rise. Risks for Domestic Supply Chains Perhaps the most visible effect of the Inflation Reduction Act so far has been a surge of domestic manufacturing. Four years ago, the United States had hardly any capacity to build solar panels, wind turbines or lithium-ion batteries. Most of that happened in China and elsewhere. That’s quickly changing. The law gave hefty tax breaks to wind and solar developers if they used components made in the United States. It also doled out additional tax credits for domestic clean-energy factories. In addition, billions of dollars in funding from a 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law allowed the Biden administration to support domestic supply chains, including mining for key elements like lithium. That has had a major effect in places like Dalton, Ga., once known as the nation’s carpet manufacturing capital. In 2023, Hanwha Qcells, a Korean solar company, announced it would invest $2.5 billion to expand its factory in Dalton, creating the largest solar panel manufacturing facility in the Western Hemisphere. “It’s a newer technology for us, but it’s one we’re excited to be making right here,” said Jason Mock, president of the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce. If all the solar factories currently planned in the United States get built, the country would have the capacity to produce three times as many solar panel modules as were installed in 2024, according to an analysis by the Rhodium Group and M.I.T. Yet the solar industry is still reliant on countries like China for many underlying components, such as the polysilicon wafers. It’s a similar story for batteries: The number of U.S. factories that are currently planned would build enough lithium-ion modules and cells to satisfy future demand for electric vehicles, although progress has been much slower in building up domestic supplies of raw ingredients like graphite and lithium. It’s not clear if those supply chains will survive. In the House draft bill, Republicans proposed sharp new restrictions on the use of materials from China, which could make it difficult for many U.S. factories to qualify. The bill would also end by next year a $7,500 consumer tax credit for electric cars that is available for buyers of cars largely produced in the United States. That would reduce demand for electric vehicles, which would in turn affect a broad swath of battery manufacturing and demand for critical minerals like lithium. At least 24 factories have been set up in the United States to produce electric cars that qualify for the credit, including a Ford plant making plug-in hybrids in Louisville, Ky., and a General Motors battery plant in Ohio, according to a study from Atlas Public Policy, a research firm. Near Savannah, Ga., Hyundai invested in a $7.5 billion factory to build some of its most popular electric vehicle models, which qualify for the consumer credit. Local politicians, who spent years persuading Hyundai to come to the site, are concerned about possible changes to law. “It’s difficult for a company to invest somewhere and then conditions change,” said Bert Brantley, chief executive of the Savannah Area Chamber of Commerce. “So our take is that some consistency is helpful for companies as they make large investments.” Still, Mr. Brantley said he hoped that Georgia could continue to be a leader in electric vehicle production regardless of what happens to the tax credits. “This is a long-term play, we hope to be at it for a long time,” he said. Other Energy Technologies in Limbo Over the past three years, the federal government has also been supporting a broad array of emerging energy technologies that are less mature, including low-carbon hydrogen fuels that could power trucks, new processes to make cement and steel without emissions, as well as technologies to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Many of these projects could potentially qualify for tax breaks in the Inflation Reduction Act. Others have been supported by billions of dollars in grants and loans from the Department of Energy. In Western Minnesota, DG Fuels plans a $5 billion plant to produce aviation fuel from agricultural waste. In Indiana, Heidelberg Materials, a cement maker, wants to capture the carbon dioxide it emits and bury it underground. In Louisiana, a company is planning to make a low-carbon ammonia that could be used for fertilizer. New Orleans, which has become a major hub for exporting natural gas, has seen a boom in new industries like carbon capture and hydrogen that could help cut emissions in the future. “We’re becoming very diversified,” said Michael Hecht, president of Greater New Orleans, Inc., the economic development agency for southeast Louisiana. But as part of the tax bill, House Republicans on the Energy and Commerce committee have proposed ending a tax credit for hydrogen fuels by the end of this year. At the same time, the Trump administration has proposed deep cuts and encouraged widespread layoffs at the Energy Department, which historically has played a leading role in nurturing new technologies. The debate in Congress over the future of federal energy spending could affect the direction of entire industries. “Other countries are rapidly scaling up investments in green steel, green cement, low-carbon manufacturing,” said Lindsey Baxter Griffith, chief executive of Clean Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization focused on technological innovation in energy. “Without a clear strategy here, we risk falling behind.”

3M is set to pay New Jersey up to $450 million over the next quarter-century to settle claims it contaminated the state with harmful “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, affecting drinking water. The Minnesota-based chemicals giant manufactured the PFAS, which were used for decades at the Chambers Works facility in Deepwater, N.J., a nearly 1,500-acre complex on the banks of the Delaware River. The site was owned by DuPont, a rival company. It is the largest single clean-water settlement in New Jersey’s history, the state said. New Jersey sued 3M, DuPont and other PFAS manufacturers in 2019, saying the facility had contaminated drinking water. PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, is used in a range of everyday products like nonstick cookware, water-repellent clothing and stain-resistant carpets. Exposure to the chemicals has been linked to metabolic disorders, decreased fertility in women and developmental delays in children, as well as increased risk of some prostate, kidney and testicular cancers. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Under the settlement announced Tuesday, 3M will pay New Jersey between $400 million to $450 million over 25 years to pay for damages, as well as cleanup and drinking water treatment. DuPont and its chemical spinoff Chemours, which now owns the Chambers Works facility, were not part of the settlement, New Jersey said. The remaining parties are expected to proceed to trial in the case. DuPont declined to comment. “Corporate polluters must be held accountable when they contaminate our state’s water supply,” New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin said in a statement. “For decades, 3M knew that their PFAS chemicals were forever contaminating the New Jersey environment. But they continued to pollute the environment and escape accountability,” he said. “That ends now.” According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Chambers Works facility once manufactured gunpowder as well as radiological material, and contributed to the development of the atomic bomb. It more recently manufactured a variety of chemicals, including PFAS. Shawn M. LaTourette, New Jersey’s Commissioner of Environmental Protection, said contamination in the state went well beyond drinking water. “We find PFAS everywhere in the state of New Jersey, leeching from landfills, and even in the soils of distant remote New Jersey forests that should be pristine,” he said. New Jersey is the second known state to settle with 3M over PFAS drinking water contamination claims. In 2018, 3M agreed to pay Minnesota $850 million for contaminating drinking water and natural resources in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. In 2023, 3M also reached a nationwide settlement with public water suppliers for up to $12.5 billion to address PFAS contamination in drinking water. 3M said the agreement was an “important step toward reducing risk and uncertainty” around historical PFAS contamination. The company said in 2000 that it was voluntarily phasing out the production of two major types of PFAS, and it has said it is on track to discontinue all PFAS manufacturing by 2025. The company said the settlement did not amount to an admission of guilt. It is taking a pretax charge of $285 million in the second quarter. Editors’ Picks In Her Follow-Up to ‘American Dirt,’ Jeanine Cummins Turns to Puerto Rico Is All of This Self-Monitoring Making Us Paranoid? What Travelers Should Know About This Messy Memorial Day Weekend The E.P.A. had been expected to indicate this week whether it intends to stick to strict PFAS drinking water standards set by the Biden administration last year, which would require water utilities to all but remove six different types of PFAS from their water supply. Chemical companies and utilities sued the agency over the move. The Trump administration had been due to say on Monday whether it would continue to defend the standards in court. Instead, it asked for a 21-day extension to decide on its planned course of action.

Robert B. Shapiro, a former law professor turned corporate executive who performed a marketing miracle by brashly branding aspartame as the sugar substitute NutraSweet and making it a household name that consumers demanded in thousands of products, died on May 2 at his home in Chicago. He was 86. The cause was pancreatic cancer, his son James Shapiro said. Aspartame was invented by chemists at the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle in Illinois in 1965 and approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in soft drinks in 1983, a year after Mr. Shapiro became chief executive and chairman of what the company was already calling its NutraSweet subsidiary. Unlike its chief rival, saccharin, which had dominated the market in the 25 years since it was approved, aspartame leaves no bitter aftertaste and wasn’t suspected of being linked to cancer. (In 2023, however, the World Health Organization identified aspartame, on the basis of “limited evidence,” as “possibly carcinogenic.”) It has virtually no calories and, despite its brand name, virtually no essential nutritional value. In 1985, Searle sold $700 million worth of aspartame, identified as NutraSweet by the tiny but distinctive red-and-white swirl logo that appeared on the packaging of food and drink products that appealed to dieters and other consumers who wanted to avoid sugar. “Shapiro built a marketing campaign around that trademark, convincing consumers that NutraSweet (and no other company’s version of the very same sweetener) was the key to losing weight,” Daniel Charles wrote in “Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food” (2001). Mr. Shapiro’s role in branding and marketing NutraSweet, which costs more than saccharin, earned him a place in the “business history books,” Jesse Meyers, the publisher of the industry newsletter Beverage Digest, told The New York Times in 1989. Products had been branded routinely, but a single ingredient that they contained rarely had been. The federal authorities approved Simplesse, a fat substitute developed by NutraSweet, as an ingredient in frozen desserts in 1988 and, later, in other products. Searle was bought by Monsanto in 1985. Mr. Shapiro was named president of the parent company in 1993 and chief executive in 1995, as Monsanto transitioned from mostly manufacturing chemicals to making drugs and genetically modified seeds, fertilizer and food additives. Mr. Shapiro and his colleagues insisted that biotechnology products created by the company reduced the need for pesticides and weed control, expanded the food supply and reduced the amount of land needed to farm. When Mr. Shapiro became Monsanto’s chief executive, “he carried the company’s already serious commitment to biotechnology to a whole new level, both psychologically and financially,” Rachel Schurman and William A. Munro wrote in “Fighting for the Future of Food: Activists Versus Agribusiness in the Struggle Over Biotechnology” (2010). “Shapiro was by all accounts a persuasive, inspiring and motivational leader,” the authors added. “Indeed, Monsanto employees described him as a ‘visionary’ who swept people up with his larger sense of purpose and broad perspective on the technology.” But environmental critics accused Monsanto of tampering with nature by concocting potentially dangerous vegetation and monopolizing the market for seeds. The company soon found itself struggling in the face of legal challenges, regulatory rulings and adverse public opinion in the United States and Europe. In a video address to the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace in 1999, Mr. Shapiro acknowledged: “Our confidence in this technology and our enthusiasm for it has, I think, widely been seen, and understandably so, as condescension or indeed arrogance. Because we thought it was our job to persuade, too often we forgot to listen.” William C. Miller acknowledged in his book “Flash of Brilliance: Inspiring Creativity Where You Work” (1998) that “some of Monsanto’s products are controversial.” But, he added, “What you can’t argue about Bob Shapiro is that within his belief system, he’s absolutely sincere about doing what he thinks is the way to go to address hunger and address nutrition, as the world population explodes from six billion to 10 billion.” Robert Bernard Shapiro was born on Aug. 4, 1938, in Manhattan. His father, Moses Shapiro, was the chairman and chief executive of the electronics company General Instrument. His mother, Lilly (Langsam) Shapiro, had worked for ASCAP, the music licensing organization. Robert attended the Horace Mann School in the Bronx before earning a bachelor’s degree in 1959 from Harvard College, where he studied English and history. He received a law degree in 1962 from Columbia Law School. Mr. Shapiro practiced law in New York (he represented rent strikers in East Harlem and the poet Allen Ginsberg, among others, without fee) and taught at the law schools of Columbia, the University of Wisconsin and Northeastern University. He was a lawyer for the U.S. Transportation Department during the Johnson administration before joining General Instrument, where he was vice president and counsel from 1972 to 1979, the year he joined Searle. After Monsanto merged with Pharmacia & Upjohn in 1999, he served as chairman of the combined company, Pharmacia Corporation, until early 2001. A liberal Democrat who had no formal training in science, Mr. Shapiro was more comfortable playing the casual college professor than the high-powered lawyer. He offered his employees free silent meditation retreats and performed as a folk guitarist. (His children Nina and James were in the alternative rock band Veruca Salt in the 1990s.) After stepping down as chairman of Pharmacia Corporation, he was a founder of Sandbox Industries, a venture capital firm. He was also an early board member of Theranos, the blood-testing company established by Elizabeth Holmes, who was later convicted of fraud. In addition to his son James and his daughter Nina Gordon, both from an earlier marriage, to Berta Gordon, he is survived by his wife, Ginger Farley; two children, Kai and Gabe Shapiro, from another earlier marriage, to Kemery Bloom; his stepchildren, Harley Mac Cionaodha and Lydia Link; his sister, Susan Garfield; his brother, Bill Shapiro; and four grandchildren. “We did proceed on the basis of our confidence in the technology,” Mr. Shapiro said of Monsanto in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 1999. “And we saw our products as great boons both to farmers and to the environment. I guess we naïvely thought that the rest of the world would look at the information and come to the same conclusion.”

The Energy Department said on Monday that it was preparing to roll back energy and water conservation standards for a long list of electric and gas appliances, targeting 47 regulations that it said were “driving up costs and lowering quality of life for the American people.” The moves follow an executive order last week from President Trump directing the Energy Department to “eliminate restrictive water pressure and efficiency rules that make household appliances less effective and more expensive.” But energy-efficiency experts and climate advocates said the Energy Department’s moves would increase the cost of running household appliances like dehumidifiers and portable air-conditioners as well as air compressors used in industry. “If this attack on consumers succeeds, President Trump would be raising costs dramatically for families as manufacturers dump energy- and water-wasting products into the market,” said Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a coalition of environmental and consumer groups, utilities and government agencies. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Mr. deLaski also said that the effort violated an anti-backsliding provision in a decades-old underlying statute, which prohibits the federal government from adopting standards that are more lenient than ones already on the books. “It’s patently illegal, so hold your horses,” he said in a statement. Like many other countries, the United States has for decades adopted standards that govern how much energy or water that appliances — including lightbulbs, dishwashers, water heaters and washing machines — can use. By government scientists’ own accounting, efficiency standards saved the average American household about $576 in 2024 on water and gas bills while cutting the nation’s annual energy consumption by 6.5 percent and public water use by 12 percent. Thanks in part to those measures, the total amount of energy and water used by American households has not grown nearly as fast as the population. But the Trump administration has framed the standards as an example of governmental overreach. Mr. Trump has also made a habit of complaining about shower heads with weak water pressure, or toilets that don’t flush properly, and has blamed efficiency standards for those issues. Conservative groups have also argued that efficiency standards hurt the performance of appliances like dishwashers. The Energy Department’s list of appliance regulations it has targeted includes air cleaners, battery chargers, compressors, cooking tops, dehumidifiers, external power supplies, microwave ovens, dishwashers and faucets. Getting rid of the standards would “cut more than 125,000 words from the Code of Federal Regulations,” the department said. Still, rolling back the standards would require a new rule-making process thatcould take months or longer. The rollback is also likely to face legal challenges. The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, is planning to eliminate Energy Star, the popular energy-efficiency certification for dishwashers, refrigerators, dryers and other home appliances. In the past, manufacturers have been supportive of government efficiency standards, but now they are moving to take advantage of Mr. Trump’s deregulatory drive. The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, which represents 150 manufacturers behind 95 percent of the household appliances shipped for sale within the United States, said it was still evaluating Monday’s announcements. But Jill A. Notini, a spokeswoman for the association, pointed to a statement in which the association said that the standards had “helped achieve decades of successful improvements in appliance efficiency.” The association added, “With most appliances operating near peak efficiency, additional meaningful savings are unlikely for some products” without some loss of performance. In addition to repealing efficiency measures, the Energy Department is planning to eliminate several clean energy and climate change programs. It will rescind reporting requirements for a voluntary program under which companies can report their greenhouse gas emissions, and end a program that provides payments for electricity produced with renewable power. The Energy Department is also getting rid of what it calls “unscientific” diversity, equity and inclusion requirements for grant recipients. Specifically, it is proposing to repeal regulations to ensure grant recipients are not discriminated against on the basis of sex, race or age. Some proposals seem to have little to do with the department’s purview. One proposed repeal, for example, is for “Ending Requirements for Members of One Sex to Be Able to Try Out for Sports Teams of the Opposite Sex.”