The Agriculture Department will restore information about climate change that was scrubbed from its website when President Trump took office, according to court documents filed on Monday in a lawsuit over the deletion. The deleted data included pages on federal funding and loans, forest conservation and rural clean energy projects. It also included sections of the U.S. Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service sites, and the U.S. Forest Service’s “Climate Risk Viewer,” which included detailed maps showing how climate change might affect national forests and grasslands. The lawsuit, filed in February, said the purge denied farmers information to make time-sensitive decisions while facing business risks linked to climate change, such as heat waves, droughts, floods and wildfires.The suit was brought by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York along with two environmental organizations, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group. The plaintiffs had sought a court order requiring the department to restore the deleted pages. On Monday, the government said it would oblige. Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote to Judge Margaret M. Garnett that he was representing the Agriculture Department in the lawsuit, and that the department had already begun restoring the pages and interactive tools described in the lawsuit. He said the department “expects to substantially complete the restoration process in approximately two weeks.” Mr. Clayton asked the judge to adjourn a hearing scheduled for May 21. He said the department proposed to submit a report on its progress restoring the data after three weeks, and sought to address “appropriate next steps in this litigation.” Jeffrey Stein, associate attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law nonprofit that represented the plaintiffs, along with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said, “We’re glad that U.S.D.A. recognized that its blatantly unlawful purge of climate-change-related information is harming farmers and communities across the country.”

In 2023, sewage plants in Maryland started to make a troubling discovery. Harmful “forever chemicals” were contaminating the state’s sewage, much of which is turned into fertilizer and spread on farmland. To protect its food and drinking water, Maryland has started restricting the use of fertilizer made from sewage sludge. At the same time, a major sludge-fertilizer maker, Synagro, has been applying for permits to use more of it across the state border, on farms in Virginia. A coalition of environmentalists, fishing groups and some farmers are fighting that effort. They say the contamination threatens to poison farmland and vulnerable waterways that feed the Potomac River. These sewage sludge fertilizers “aren’t safe enough for farms in Maryland, so they’re coming to Virginia,” said Dean Naujoks of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network, which advocates for clean water. “That’s wrong.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Virginia finds itself at the receiving end of a pattern that is emerging across the country as states scramble to address a growing farmland contamination crisis: States with weaker regulations are at risk of becoming dumping grounds for contaminated sludge. In Virginia, Synagro, one of the nation’s leading providers of sludge for use as fertilizer, has sought permission to apply more sludge in rural Virginia, according to local filings. Synagro is controlled by a Goldman Sachs investment fund. Kip Cleverley, the chief sustainability officer at Synagro, said in a statement that the fact that the fertilizer “may contain trace levels of PFAS does not mean that they are contaminated.” He said that Synagro continually adds new farms to its fertilizer program and that its decision to seek additional permits in Virginia was independent of any Maryland guidelines. The fertilizer industry says more than 2 million dry tons of sewage sludge were used on 4.6 million acres of farmland in 2018. And it estimates that farmers have obtained permits to use sewage sludge on nearly 70 million acres, or about a fifth of all U.S. agricultural land. But a growing body of research shows that this black sludge, also known as biosolids and made from sewage that flows from homes and factories, can contain heavy concentrations of harmful chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Those chemicals are thought to increase the risk of some cancers and to cause birth defects and developmental delays in children. For people in regions like Virginia’s Northern Neck, the “Garden of Virginia” that is the birthplace of George Washington, the threat feels doubly unfair: Much of the biosolids moving across state lines come from big industrial cities like Baltimore. The contamination, locals fear, will wash off the farmland and into the region’s rivers and creeks, and will hurt the farmers and watermen who live side by side. “The water just runs off from the farmland into the water,” said Lee Deihl, a seventh-generation waterman who owns the Northern Neck Oyster Company, as he maneuvered an oyster boat through a winding tributary of the Potomac. “And we get some pretty big rains this time of year.” His concerns are not unfounded. New research published in the scientific journal Nature found that PFAS in sludge applied as fertilizer can contaminate both farms and surrounding rivers and streams. “That stream might be the headwaters to your drinking water, further downstream, or the chemicals might be bioaccumulating in fish,” said Diana Oviedo Vargas, a researcher at the nonpartisan Stroud Water Research Center, who led the federally funded study. “There’s a lot we don’t know. But these contaminants are definitely reaching our surface water.” It is a tricky problem. Fertilizer made from sewage sludge has benefits. The sludge is rich in nutrients. And spreading it on fields cuts down on the need to incinerate it or put it in landfills. It also reduces the use of synthetic fertilizers made from fossil fuels. But the sludge can be contaminated with pathogens as well as chemicals like PFAS, research has shown. Synthetic PFAS chemicals are widely used in everyday items like nonstick cookware and stain-resistant carpets, and are linked to a range of illnesses. The E.P.A. regulates some pathogens and heavy metals in sludge used as fertilizer, but it does not regulate PFAS. This year, for the first time, the E.P.A. warned of the health risks of PFAS in fertilizer made from sewage sludge. The Biden administration last year also set the first federal PFAS drinking water standards, saying there was virtually no safe level of the chemicals. The lack of federal rules on PFAS in sludge has left states in charge, leading to a hodgepodge of regulations and the diversion of contaminated sludge to states with weaker regulations. Maine banned the use of sludge fertilizer in 2022. Since then, some of its sewage sludge has been shipped out of state because local landfills can’t accommodate it, local officials have said. Maryland temporarily halted new permits for the use of sludge as fertilizer. The Maryland Department of the Environment also ordered PFAS testing at sewage treatment plants across the state. It found contamination in the wastewater and sludge, even after the treatment process, and now has adopted guidelines, albeit voluntary, that say sludge with high levels of PFAS should be reported and disposed of. In Virginia, the groups opposed to Maryland’s sewage imports are urging the state to start regulating PFAS in sludge. But in the meantime, tens of thousands of tons of Maryland sludge are already heading to Virginia, according to data from Virginia. Biosolids from 22 wastewater treatment plants in Maryland have been approved for use as fertilizer in Virginia, and all 22 of those plants have reported PFAS contamination in their biosolids, according to an analysis by the Potomac Riverkeeper Network. In Westmoreland, a rural county in the Northern Neck, Synagro has reported applying sludge from 16 wastewater treatment plants in Maryland, all from facilities that have reported PFAS contamination. In December, Synagro applied for a permit expansion that would allow it to apply sludge on 2,000 additional acres of agricultural land in Westmoreland, more than doubling the total. After comments filed by local residents prompted a public hearing, Synagro withdrew its application, though it has told Virginia regulators it intends to reapply. In neighboring Essex County, Synagro is seeking to apply sludge to an additional 6,000 acres, increasing the acreage by nearly a third, according to its permit application. Mr. Cleverley of Synagro said the biosolids the company applied in Virginia met Maryland’s PFAS guidelines. Irina Calos, spokeswoman for Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality, said her state had yet to see a significant increase in the amount of Maryland biosolids being applied in Virginia. She said the state was still reviewing Synagro’s applications to increase its acreage in Virginia. Ms. Calos also said Virginia was not aware of any Maryland biosolids with levels of PFAS higher than what was recommended in Maryland. Environmental groups have countered that it is difficult to verify. Jay Apperson, a spokesman for Maryland, said the state’s guidelines and testing requirements aimed to protect public health while also supporting utilities and farmers.

Fifteen states sued the Trump administration over its declaration of an “energy emergency,” arguing that there is no emergency and that the order instructs regulators to illegally bypass reviews of fossil fuel projects, potentially damaging the environment. The president’s Jan. 20 executive order, “Declaring a National Energy Emergency,” directed federal agencies to speed up energy projects like drilling for oil and natural gas and mining for coal, although it excluded wind and solar energy. It stated that energy production was not meeting the nation’s needs, even though U.S. production has been at record highs. The Friday lawsuit, filed in federal court for the Western District of Washington State, argued that President Trump’s declaration meant that reviews required by environmental laws like the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Historic National Preservation Act were being shortened or skipped. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Traditionally, the lawsuit said, emergency procedures were employed only in the aftermath of major disasters. “But now, prodded onto the shakiest of limbs by the President’s unsupported and unlawful executive order, multiple federal agencies now seek to broadly employ these emergency procedures in nonemergency situations,” the complaint said. The suit asked the court to declare the directive illegal and to stop agencies from issuing expedited permits under the order. It was filed by the attorneys general of Washington, California, Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin, all of whom are Democrats. “The president’s attempt to bypass important environmental protections is illegal and would cause immense harm to Washingtonians,” Attorney General Nick Brown of Washington said. “This won’t lower prices, increase our energy supply, or make our country safer.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, Taylor Rogers, said that the president alone “has the authority to determine what is a national emergency, not state attorneys or the courts.” She said Mr. Trump “recognizes that unleashing American energy is crucial to both our economic and national security.” In addition to Mr. Trump, the lawsuit names Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll and the heads of the Army Corps of Engineers and a federal agency called the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. An Army spokesman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The lawsuit said that invoking emergency powers was reserved “for actual emergencies — not changes in presidential policy,” and that the changes would result in harm to the states’ interests, including clean drinking water, wildlife habitats and historic and cultural resources.

The Trump administration has moved to end federal protections for the lesser prairie chicken, a showy grouse with the misfortune of inhabiting southern and central grasslands long sought-after for agriculture and energy development. In a court filing on Wednesday, officials said the Fish and Wildlife Service had erred in a Biden-era decision that placed the bird on the endangered species list. It’s the latest in a blur of actions by the White House seeking to weaken or eliminate environmental regulations that constrain President Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda. And it’s the latest twist for a species whose fate has been fought over for three decades. Lesser prairie chickens — known for the males’ quirky courtship displays of stamping, fanning their tail feathers and “flutter jumping” — have declined from historic estimates of hundreds of thousands or even millions to only about 30,000 today. Habitat loss is the main culprit. “President Trump will always fight to end burdensome regulations on America’s agriculture industry, especially as many ranchers participate in voluntary protections of the lesser prairie chicken’s habitat,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said. The filing, in United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, said the Fish and Wildlife Service expected to re-evaluate the bird’s status by Nov. 30, 2026. Although the species would lack federal protections under the Endangered Species Act in the interim, the motion stated that “at least sixteen different conservation efforts and programs administered by state, federal, and private entities exist that benefit the lesser prairie chicken.” But conservationists said the service would be under no obligation to reconsider the species on that timeline and predicted that they would have to sue to make it happen. “The Trump administration is again capitulating to the fossil fuel industry, ignoring sound science and common sense, and dooming an imperiled species to extinction,” Jason Rylander, a lawyer with the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “Removing Endangered Species Act protections is a purely political act that won’t stand up in court,” he continued. His group has intervened in the case. As far back as 1998, federal wildlife officials found that the lesser prairie chicken merited protection, but initially said other species were a higher priority. Later, the bird bounced on and then off the list of threatened and endangered species, caught up in lawsuits. In 2022, under President Biden, lesser prairie chickens were again protected. That decision divided the species into two distinct populations, categorizing the southern one (in eastern New Mexico and Southwest Texas) as endangered and the northern one (in central and western Kansas, central Oklahoma and the northeast panhandle of Texas) as threatened, a less imperiled finding that still affords some protections. The petroleum and ranching industries sued in 2023, as did the states of Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma. 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 Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Now the Trump Administration is arguing that the Fish and Wildlife Service was mistaken in assessing the species as distinct populations, and that doing so “taints the very foundation” of the decision to list it. The leading global scientific authority on the status of species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, classifies the lesser prairie chicken as vulnerable, akin to the U.S. listing of threatened. Mr. Rylander with the Center for Biological Diversity said he planned to file an opposition to the federal motion in the coming days. The fight over the lesser prairie chicken is taking place as scientists warn that the planet is facing levels of biodiversity loss that are unprecedented in human history. Temperate grasslands are among the world’s most imperiled ecosystems.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Thursday it would stop tracking the cost of the country’s most expensive disasters, those which cause at least $1 billion in damage. The move would leave insurance companies, researchers and government policymakers without information to help understand the patterns of major disasters like hurricanes, drought or wildfires, and their economic consequences, starting this year. Those events are becoming more frequent or severe as the planet grows hotter, although not all disasters are linked to climate change. It’s the latest effort from the Trump administration to restrict or eliminate climate research. In recent weeks the administration has dismissed the authors working on the nation’s biggest climate assessment, planned to eliminate National Parks grants focused on climate change, and released a budget plan that would cut significantly climate science from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Energy and Defense departments. Researchers and lawmakers criticized Thursday’s decision. Jesse M. Keenan, associate professor and director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University in New Orleans, said ending the data collection would cripple efforts by federal and state governments to set budgets or make decisions on investment in infrastructure. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “It defies logic,” he said. Without the database, “the U.S. government’s flying blind as to the cost of extreme weather and climate change.” In a comment on Bluesky, Senator Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote “It’s anti-science, anti-safety, and anti-American.” Few institutions can duplicate the kind of information provided by the database, said Virginia Iglesias, a climate researcher at the University of Colorado. “It’s one of the most consistent and trusted records of climate-related economic loss in the country,” she said. “The power of the database lies in its credibility.” So-called billion-dollar disasters — those with costs that balloon to 10 figures or more — have been increasing over time. In the 1980s, when the record begins, there were just over three per year, on average, when adjusted for inflation. For the period from 2020 to 2024, the average was 23 per year. In total, at least 403 such events have occurred in the United States since 1980. Last year there were 27, a tally second only to 2023 (which had 28). 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 Last year’s disasters included hurricanes Helene and Milton, which together caused about $113 billion in damages and more than 250 deaths, a severe hailstorm in Colorado that caused about $3 billion in damages and a yearlong drought across much of the country that caused $5 billion in damages and claimed the lives of more than 100 people from heat exposure. NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information plans to stop tracking these billion-dollar disasters in response to “evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes,” the agency said in an email. When asked, the agency did not say whether another branch of NOAA or federal agency would continue tracking and publicly reporting the price tag of such disasters. The announcement said the agency would make archived data from 1980 to 2024 available. But the dollar amount of disasters from 2025 on, such as the Los Angeles wildfires and their estimated billions of dollars of damage, would not be tracked and reported to the public. “You can’t fix what you don’t measure,” said Erin Sikorsky, the director of The Center for Climate and Security. “If we lose this information about the costs of these disasters, the American people and Congress won’t know what risks climate is posing to our country.” Other institutions or agencies would likely be unable to duplicate the data collection because it includes proprietary insurance information that companies are cautious to share, Ms. Sikorsky said. “It’s a pretty unique contribution.”

Humans have visually documented about 1,470 square miles, or a mere 0.001 percent, of the deep seafloor, according to a new study. That’s a little larger than the size of Rhode Island. The report, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, arrives as nations debate whether to pursue industrial mining of the seabed for critical minerals. Some scientists argue that so little is known about the undersea world that more research on the deep seafloor is needed to responsibly move forward with extractive activities. “More information is always beneficial, so we can make more informed and better decisions,” said Katy Croff Bell, a deep ocean explorer who led the study and is the founder of the Ocean Discovery League, a nonprofit group that promotes seafloor exploration. Learning more about the deep sea is essential for understanding how climate change and human activities are affecting oceans, she said. But the study also highlights the fundamental excitement of exploration that drives many marine scientists. “You can just imagine what’s in the rest of the 99.999 percent,” Dr. Bell said. The era of visual documentation included in the study began in 1958, with the deep-sea submersible Trieste. The images collected since then let biologists discover new organisms and observe how they interact with each other and their environments, providing insights into ocean ecosystems. Bringing deep-sea organisms to the surface to study is challenging. Adapted for high pressures, few animals, if any, survive the journey, so photos and videos are crucial. “There are some habitats you can’t sample from a ship,” said Craig McClain, a marine biologist at the University of Louisiana who was not involved in the study. “You have to go there in an R.O.V. and do it,” he said, referring to remotely operated vehicles. Getting seafloor visuals helps geologists, too. Before the advent of remotely operated undersea vehicles and crewed submersibles, researchers had a more limited approach: drop a big bucket off a ship, drag it along, haul it up and see what was inside. “They’d just have a jumble of rocks and try to sort it out, with no context,” said Emily Chin, a geologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was not involved in the new study. “It’s like people who study meteorites, trying to understand a process on another planet.” Seeing seafloor rock outcrops in photos and videos has allowed scientists to learn how fundamental Earth processes work. It also helps companies assess potential sites for mining and oil and gas activities. But getting to the seafloor is expensive, both in funds and time. Exploring one square kilometer of deep seafloor can cost anywhere from $2 million to $20 million, Dr. Bell estimated. The dives can take years to prepare for, and just hours to go wrong. And once a dive is underway, it progresses slowly. A rover tethered to a ship has a limited radius of exploration, moving at a crawl, and relocating the ship is tedious. With so many barriers, Dr. Bell wanted to know how much seafloor we’ve seen, and how much is left to explore. Dr. Bell and her collaborators collected more than 43,000 records of deep-sea dives and assessed the photos and videos that have been collected, estimating how much seafloor area the dives documented. All together, they estimated that between 2,130 and 3,823 square kilometers of the deep seafloor have been imaged. That works out to about 0.001 percent of the entire deep seafloor. “I knew it was going to be small, but I’m not sure if I expected it to be quite that small,” Dr. Bell said. “We’ve been doing this for almost 70 years.” The study excludes proprietary dives where the data are not publicly available, such as from military operations or oil and gas exploration. Even if those increased the documented area by an order of magnitude, Dr. Bell said, “I don’t think it’s enough to move the needle.” Much of what deep-sea marine biologists know about the seafloor is based on that small fraction. The situation is akin to extrapolating information from an area smaller than Houston to all of Earth’s land surfaces, the authors say. The study also found that high-income countries led 99.7 percent of all deep dives, with the United States, Japan and New Zealand topping the charts. Most dives were within 200 nautical miles of those three countries. That means that dives are being led by a small group of countries, potentially biasing what is researched and where, the authors said. “There are many people around the world that have deep sea expertise,” Dr. Bell said. “They just don’t have the tools to be able to do the kind of research and exploration that they want to do.” Dives tend to be in the same areas, such as the Mariana Trench or Monterey Canyon, or target the same kinds of features of interest, like hydrothermal vents, the study found. And since the 1980s, most deep dives have been in shallower, more coastal waters. That leaves many areas in the deep sea unexplored. “The study is a good assessment of where we’re at and, quite literally, where we need to go in the deep sea,” Dr. McClain said.

A coalition of states led by Washington, Colorado and California sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, charging that it was unlawfully withholding billions of dollars allocated by Congress for electric-vehicle charging stations across the United States. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law provided $5 billion to states to build stations around the country. So far, 71 stations have been built, with many more in development, according to the research firm Atlas Public Policy. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, states that federal agencies have unlawfully frozen those funds and halted approvals for new stations, depriving states of critical resources and damaging the growing electric-vehicle industry. The White House budget proposal released last week said that it was canceling funding for “failed electric-vehicle-charger grant programs.” President Trump had already taken aim at the program in a January executive order, and the Transportation Department followed with a similar memo the next month. But cutting the funding entirely would require approval from Congress, the lawsuit argued. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “The president continues his unconstitutional attempts to withhold funding that Congress appropriated to programs he dislikes,” said Rob Bonta, the California attorney general. “This time he’s illegally stripping away billions of dollars for electric vehicle charging infrastructure, all to line the pockets of his Big Oil friends.” Nearly two million “zero-emission vehicles” have been sold in California, one-third of the nationwide total and part of a longstanding effort in the famously car-centric state to reduce air pollution. California had been relying on $384 million from the federal program for charging stations, according to Mr. Bonta’s office. The state has also invested heavily in charging infrastructure from its own general fund and from the proceeds of carbon credits sold to polluters, to the point that public and shared private chargers in California now outnumber nozzles on gas pumps. Across state lines, however, charging is spottier. The federal program, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or NEVI program, started by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., had aimed to build charging networks beyond urban areas and states like California as part of its effort to combat climate change by accelerating the nation’s transition to electric vehicles. California officials noted on Wednesday that one of the biggest beneficiaries of a stalled domestic E.V. program would be China, which has a substantial lead in E.V. manufacturing and sales abroad. The biggest losers would be rural states that had expected the federal dollars and Tesla, the E.V. company whose billionaire chief executive, Elon Musk, is a supporter of Mr. Trump. Tesla has the biggest market share of electric vehicles in the United States, although sales were down in the first quarter of 2025. “When America retreats, China wins,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said, calling the withholding of federal funds “yet another Trump gift to China.” “Instead of hawking Teslas on the White House lawn, President Trump could actually help Elon — and the nation — by following the law and releasing this bipartisan funding,” Mr. Newsom said. Joining the complaint were the attorneys general of Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Vermont and the District of Columbia, all of whom are Democrats. The memo from the Transportation Department to state officials in February said the administration was reviewing the NEVI program and suspending approvals of state plans. The lawsuit asks the court to declare that memo unlawful and to order the administration to release the funds. A website tracking NEVI funding run by Atlas Public Policy shows that at least $521 million of the money has been awarded, and some $44 million has been spent. Many of the stations already opened are clustered in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the data shows. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Loren McDonald, the chief analyst at Paren, an E.V. analytics company, said the federal government had been a minor player in the E.V. charging space, with most stations built by private companies. Mr. McDonald said it took many states a long time to decide where to build stations and find companies to bid on the contracts, resulting in a lag time in construction. States that already had experience in building charging stations, like Ohio and Pennsylvania, were able to move faster, he said. Nonetheless, the plaintiffs said, the president’s order has been disruptive. Attorney General Phil Weiser of Colorado said in a statement that his state stood to lose tens of millions of dollars in funding after making “significant progress,” in laying the foundation for widespread E.V. adoption. Officials had planned to use the federal support to fill gaps in rural Colorado and underserved communities, he said. “Congress had the foresight to authorize funding to build this important infrastructure,” Mr. Weiser added, “and it must be restored immediately.” In Washington State, the lawsuit contends, the president’s order has held up $55 million in approved congressional funding for E.V. charging, stalling 40 proposed projects. The White House and the Transportation Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Seventeen states sued the Trump administration Monday over its halting of permits for wind-energy projects, arguing that its actions posed an existential threat to the burgeoning industry. “This administration is devastating one of our nation’s fastest-growing sources of clean, reliable and affordable energy,” said Attorney General Letitia James of New York, which is one of the plaintiffs. She said the halt threatened “the loss of thousands of good-paying jobs and billions in investments” and was “delaying our transition away from the fossil fuels that harm our health and our planet.” The halt on federal permits for wind energy was first laid out in a Jan. 20 executive order, one of a barrage that President Trump signed immediately upon taking office. It directed agencies to stop all permits for wind farms pending federal review. The lawsuit says that, by complying, federal agencies have put major investments that have already been made at risk. The order also instructed the United States attorney general and the interior secretary to explore “terminating or amending” existing leases to wind farms, further increasing uncertainty for companies. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The wind industry provides about 10 percent of the nation’s electricity, and has many new projects under development, particularly in the Great Plains and the Atlantic Ocean. Last month, the Trump administration halted a major wind farm under construction off the coast of Long Island, the Empire Wind project. It was designed to provide enough electricity to power a half-million homes. It had already received the permits it needed, but Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested the Biden administration’s analysis during the approval process was rushed and insufficient. Ms. James noted that Mr. Trump had also declared an energy emergency. Energy experts have called that declaration overstated. Nevertheless, she said, the moratorium on wind permits is harming the ability to provide a new source of energy. New York also has a new law on the books requiring it to dramatically increase the amount of electricity that comes from renewable sources. Achieving that goal will become more complicated without wind sources. The lawsuit, by 17 states and Washington, D.C., names numerous federal officials and agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department. The E.P.A. didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, accused the Democratic attorneys general who sued of using “lawfare” to thwart the president’s energy agenda. “Americans in blue states should not have to pay the price of the Democrats’ radical climate agenda,” she said. The Interior Department said in a statement that it was committed to “overseeing public lands and waters for the benefit of all Americans, while prioritizing fiscal responsibility for the American people.” The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, asks a judge to prevent federal agencies from taking any action to block wind-energy development and to declare the executive order unlawful. “The Trump administration’s directive to halt the development of offshore wind energy is illegal,” said Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California. His office said the federal policy would “derail the clean energy transition” and lead to higher costs for Americans. In addition to onshore wind sites, the state has five federal offshore wind leases, the office said. Offshore operations are more complicated and expensive to operate. Timothy Fox, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington consulting firm, said that he expected the lawsuit to face an uphill climb in convincing the court to block the executive order. The firm’s “best-case scenario” for the offshore wind industry is that facilities that are already operating, or far along in development, may continue without opposition from the Trump administration, he said.

Oil prices resumed their slide after the OPEC Plus cartel of oil producers said over the weekend that it would pump more oil, even though analysts say demand could fall if President Trump’s trade war curbs economic growth. The U.S. benchmark oil price settled at $57.13 a barrel on Monday, the lowest level in more than four years and down more than 25 percent since just before Mr. Trump took office. Mr. Trump has said he would reduce energy costs for Americans and called for increased drilling. But for many oil and gas executives in the United States, who were big donors to the president’s campaign, the steady price decline means it will not be profitable to drill new wells. The leaders of OPEC Plus appear to be making a calculated decision to raise production even if that reduces prices — and, thus, how much money they make from selling oil — for geopolitical reasons. They want to punish cartel members that have been producing more than the quotas they agreed to, analysts said. Saudi Arabia, the cartel’s de facto leader, also wants to strengthen its ties to Mr. Trump, according to energy experts. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Prices briefly fell to around $55 a barrel in midday trading in early April, just before Mr. Trump said he would pause reciprocal tariffs on most countries for 90 days. That announcement led to rallies in both the stock and the oil markets, though oil prices have since waned. That is partly because OPEC Plus is raising output at the same time that economists are warning that higher tariffs on most American trading partners will slow global economic growth and potentially cause a recession in the United States. The countries that make up OPEC Plus said on Saturday that they would further ramp up production in June. The oil cartel had agreed to production cuts as a way to bolster prices, but analysts said Saudi Arabia has grown weary of pumping less oil while other countries, like Kazakhstan and Iraq, surpass their production quotas. OPEC Plus has pressured Kazakhstan to curb its output, which was 400,000 barrels a day above its ceiling in March, according to the International Energy Agency. But the country seems unwilling to constrain investors like Chevron, which spent nearly $50 billion to expand its Tengiz oil field in Kazakhstan with the intention to pump an additional one million barrels a day. The increased production may also be a sop to Mr. Trump, who has pushed producers to pump more oil to cut prices. The president is expected to travel to Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East soon. While lower prices help American consumers, they hurt the large and politically important U.S. oil industry, which has an outsize presence in states like Alaska, Louisiana, New Mexico and Texas. Some companies are already pulling back. There are about 9 percent fewer rigs drilling wells in the Permian Basin, the top U.S. oil field, than there were this time last year, when oil was trading near $80 a barrel, according to Baker Hughes. On Friday, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the two largest U.S. oil and gas companies, reported their lowest first-quarter earnings in years. Those results reflect the market before Mr. Trump further escalated tariffs on China in early April. “It is clear that this uncertainty is weighing on economic forecasts, causing significant volatility and raising the prospects of slower growth,” Darren Woods, Exxon’s chief executive, told analysts.

The two largest U.S. oil companies reported their lowest first-quarter profits in years on Friday as they braced for the economic fallout from President Trump’s trade war, which has weakened consumer confidence and pushed oil prices down. U.S. crude prices slipped under $60 a barrel this week, a threshold below which many companies cannot make money drilling new wells. Crude oil is now about $20 a barrel cheaper than it was just before Mr. Trump took office. Not only is oil fetching less, companies are paying more for steel and other materials because of tariffs the president has imposed. There are signs that some companies are already pulling back. As of last week, the number of rigs drilling wells in the Permian Basin, the largest U.S. oil field, had fallen 3 percent in a month, according to Baker Hughes, an oil field service provider. That company’s customers have been putting off discretionary expenses, and spending across the industry is likely to fall this year, Baker Hughes executives said last week. “We are seeing significant downward pressure on prices and margins. In this environment, it is more important than ever to focus on what we can control,” Darren Woods, chief executive of Exxon Mobil, told analysts on Friday. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The financial results reported by Exxon, the largest U.S. oil and gas company, and Chevron reflect the market before Mr. Trump announced his latest round of tariffs. Around the same time, the oil cartel known as OPEC Plus surprised the market by saying its members would speed up plans to pump more oil. Exxon’s reported profit of $7.7 billion in the first three months of the year, down about 6 percent from a year earlier. Chevron’s first-quarter profit fell more than a third, to $3.5 billion, as the company earned less for each barrel of oil it produced. Lower margins in refining also hurt earnings. Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company, said months ago that it would spend less in 2025, and it as not changed its annual production or capital spending forecasts since. But the company said that it would pare its spending on share buybacks in the second quarter, compared with the first three months of the year. “We’re comfortable with where we are right now,” Eimear Bonner, the company’s chief financial officer, said in an interview. “We’ve navigated cycles before. We know what to do.” Editors’ Picks Is Whole Milk Propaganda? What About Gracie Abrams? Kristen Stewart Thinks the Critics at Cannes Are Being Too Nice A Long Life in Harlem, Made Possible by an Affordable Apartment Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Chevron’s stock price was up around 2 percent Friday afternoon, roughly in line with the broader market, which gained on a report that showed the U.S. economy added more jobs in April than analysts had expected. Exxon’s share price was little changed. The question for many energy companies is how long oil prices will remain around $60 a barrel or less. If they slip to $50, domestic production could fall roughly 8 percent in a year, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights. The United States is the world’s largest oil producer. Companies are cutting costs where they can as they wait for greater clarity on U.S. trade policy, said Joseph Esteves, chief executive of Maine Pointe, a consulting firm that specializes in operations and supply chain issues. “It’s getting to the point of no rock unturned, no couch cushion unexplored,” Mr. Esteves said. Mr. Woods said lower commodity prices could make other companies attractive acquisition targets for Exxon, which last year bought Pioneer Natural Resources for around $60 billion. “We want to make sure that we’re taking advantage of any of the opportunities that we see out there,” he said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Ms. Bonner said Chevron was experiencing a “limited direct impact” from tariffs. The company has been working to mitigate the effects by buying supplies such as steel locally, she said. Chevron estimated that the cost of wells in the United States would change by 1 percent because of tariffs. Chevron faces a deadline of late May to wind down activity in Venezuela after Mr. Trump took steps to reverse a Biden-era policy that allowed more oil to be produced in the country. The new rules are already having an effect. The company has been unable to load oil onto ships to be exported to the United States from Venezuela because of changes to its license, executives said. “The barrels are flowing, they’re just not flowing to the U.S. today,” Mike Wirth, Chevron’s chief executive, told analysts.