Vermont made history last year when it enacted the country’s first climate superfund law. It’s designed to let the state recover money from fossil fuel companies to help pay the rising costs of climate change. If the law can survive intensifying legal challenges, that is. On Thursday, the Justice Department filed federal lawsuits against Vermont and New York, the only other state to have enacted a climate superfund law, arguing that the measures were “a brazen attempt to grab power from the federal government” and force others to pay for the states’ infrastructure spending. Hours later, West Virginia’s attorney general, John B. McCuskey, announced that he was leading another challenge to Vermont’s law, saying the measure would “fine America’s coal, oil and natural gas suppliers into oblivion.” Mr. McCuskey had already filed a similar lawsuit against New York’s law, which seeks $75 billion from oil and gas companies over the next 25 years. On Thursday, he said Vermont’s version might be “even more dangerous” because it has no monetary cap. He and 23 other attorneys general are seeking to join a lawsuit filed late last year by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, in federal court in Vermont. West Virginia is a major producer of natural gas and coal. Its complaint argues that the activities of fossil-fuel companies are legal and that “Vermont seeks to have its cake and eat it too, by both reaping the benefits of affordable and reliable fuel, yet penalizing the entities that help produce such fuel.” The climate superfund laws are modeled on the federal Superfund program to clean up hazardous waste sites. Under that program, which has been in existence for decades, old waste dumps or contaminated industrial sites are cleaned up and the companies that contributed to the contamination must help pay the cleanup bill. The new climate superfund laws are based on the fact that the burning of fossil fuels, which produces planet-warming carbon dioxide and other gases, is the main driver of climate change. So the laws allow states to seek money from fossil fuel producers to help cover the costs of global warming. Similar bills are gaining momentum in several other states, including California, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Patrick Parenteau, an environmental law expert at Vermont Law and Graduate School, called the Justice Department cases “virtue signaling” and said he expected them to be dismissed. In the Chamber of Commerce lawsuit, he expects the state to argue that the lawsuit is premature, since officials are still in the midst of deciding how to apply the law, and that the chamber has no standing to sue since it is not directly affected by the measure. Julie Moore, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, who is named in both filings, said her office was reviewing the details of the cases. She added that the Justice Department action was “not unexpected” given President Trump’s April 8 executive order, “Protecting American Energy From State Overreach.” That order specifically cited the new Vermont and New York laws, calling them akin to extortion and saying they threaten the country’s economic and national security. Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, who is named in the Justice Department lawsuit, said Thursday that the climate superfund law “ensures that those who contributed to the climate crisis help pay for the damage they caused.” Meghan Greenfield, an environmental lawyer who previously worked at the Justice Department and Environmental Protection Agency and is now a partner at the firm Jenner & Block, said legal challenges to such a novel law were inevitable. Some of the arguments being used against the measures are also new and untested in this context, like one about “equal sovereignty” between states, which is the idea that they should be treated uniformly by the federal government, she said. “It’s kind of hard to predict how it all will go, because we’re looking at different layers here, a new kind of law, and new kinds of challenges against that law,” she said. She said she expected further challenges to more traditional state climate laws as well, such as New York and California measures that specify how much of a state’s power supply should come from clean energy.

An English court on Wednesday approved the extradition of an Israeli man charged by New York prosecutors with running a “hacking-for-hire” operation that targeted environmental groups. Prosecutors say that companies run by the man, Amit Forlit, 57, earned at least $16 million by hacking more than 100 victims and stealing confidential information on behalf of a lobbying firm working for a major oil company. Lawyers for Mr. Forlit identified the company as ExxonMobil in a January court filing. Exxon has been sued by Democratic attorneys general and other local officials over its role in climate change. The lawsuits claim the company covered up what it knew about climate change for decades to continue selling oil. The lobbying firm was identified in the filing as DCI Group. An Exxon statement said the company had not been involved in and was not aware of any hacking. “If there was any hacking involved, we condemn it in the strongest possible terms,” the statement said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT A spokesman for DCI, Craig Stevens, said the firm instructs employees and consultants to comply with the law and that no one at DCI had directed or was involved “in any hacking alleged to have occurred a decade ago.” DCI also said that “radical anti-oil activists and their billionaire donors, many of whom still sleep on beds paid for by their family’s fossil-energy legacy trust funds, peddle conspiracy theories” about the firm. That was an apparent reference to the role of the Rockefeller family in supporting organizations advocating for climate-change litigation. Heirs of John D. Rockefeller, who made his fortune in oil more than a century ago, today lead a foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, that plays a key role in the movement to sue oil companies over climate change. Lee Wasserman, its director, has said he was targeted by the hacking campaign. Mr. Forlit was arrested in London last year following a grand jury indictment in New York on charges of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit computer hacking, which could carry a lengthy sentence. His lawyers had argued that he should not be extradited because he would not receive a fair trial in the United States because of the political firestorm over climate change litigation. They argued that “one of the reasons underpinning the prosecution is to advance the politically motivated cause of pursuing ExxonMobil, with Mr. Forlit a form of collateral damage.” His lawyers also argued that Mr. Forlit would be in danger at the Metropolitan Detention Center, the only federal jail in New York, which has been plagued by violence and dysfunction. High-profile defendants recently held there have included Luigi Mangione, Sam Bankman-Fried and Sean Combs, also known as Puff Daddy and Diddy. The Westminster Magistrates’ Court rejected those concerns. Mr. Forlit can appeal the decision. His lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment. One of the groups targeted was the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has long researched the fossil fuel industry’s role in what it calls climate science disinformation. The group also does source-attribution science, the practice of using data to estimate the contributions made by specific corporations to the effects of global warming, like sea level rise or wildfires. Its work has been cited in lawsuits against the oil industry. The organization learned of the hacking from a 2020 report by Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog group at the University of Toronto, according to Kathy Mulvey of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The report found that hackers had targeted American nonprofit groups working on a campaign called #ExxonKnew, which argued that the company had hidden information about climate change. Numerous Union of Concerned Scientists employees received suspicious emails in which hackers tried to trick them into giving up passwords or installing malicious software. Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York began an investigation. One associate of Mr. Forlit, Aviram Azari, pleaded guilty in New York in 2023 to crimes including computer intrusion, wire fraud and identity theft and was sentenced to six years in prison. Mr. Forlit ran three security and intelligence-gathering firms, two registered in Israel and one in the United States, that hired people to hack into email accounts and devices, the filing said. His clients included a Washington lobbying firm working on behalf of “one of the world’s largest oil and gas corporations, centered in Irving, Texas, in relation to ongoing climate change litigation being brought against it.” Exxon was previously headquartered in Irving. The lobbying firm identified targets to Mr. Forlit, then he or another person gave a list to Mr. Azari, who owned another Israel-based firm and hired people in India to illegally access the accounts, the filing said. Those details were used to obtain documents that were given to the oil company and the media “to undermine the integrity of the civil investigations,” the filing said.

Another rift has opened between the U.S. oil and gas industry and President Trump, this time over new rules designed to encourage domestic shipbuilding and undermine China’s maritime power. This month, the Trump administration issued rules that require at least 1 percent of the natural gas shipped overseas to be carried on U.S.-built tankers in 2029. The United States is the top global exporter of liquefied natural gas — gas that has been chilled until it becomes a liquid so that it can be transported in large quantities. But it does not build any of the specialized ships that are used to send that fuel abroad. In a letter to the administration last week, the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. oil and gas industry’s main trade association, said the industry could not comply with that rule and urged officials to reconsider it. The requirement “risks counteracting the significant progress the Trump administration has made toward reducing uncertainty and unleashing U.S. L.N.G.,” the trade group said in the letter, which was addressed to Chris Wright, the energy secretary, and Doug Burgum, the interior secretary. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The maritime rules are the latest source of tension between oil and gas executives — many of whom contributed to Mr. Trump’s campaign — and the administration. The industry is aligned with Mr. Trump on an array of key priorities, including exporting more L.N.G. But when it comes to trade, oil and gas companies generally favor more open arrangements, in contrast to Mr. Trump’s protectionist agenda. His policies have also weakened economic confidence, causing oil prices to fall. Many companies that produce natural gas are also in the oil business. Oil now sells for about $62 a barrel in the United States, compared with $78 just before Mr. Trump took office. Natural gas prices have also fallen, but remain well above what they were a year ago. Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, suggested on Monday that there was room to further negotiate the shipping rules. “We should hear what oil and gas has as their concerns, listen to them, but find a pathway forward where we can build ships in America to send great American energy around the world,” Mr. Duffy said during a visit to the Hanwha Philly Shipyard in Philadelphia when asked about the industry’s concerns. Hanwha Systems, a South Korean defense technology company, and Hanwha Ocean, a South Korean shipbuilder, bought the Philadelphia shipyard last year and plan to modernize it. Hanwha Ocean has delivered 200 L.N.G. carriers from its shipyards in South Korea. Such vessels are primarily built in that country, Japan and China. J. Elizabeth Peace, an Interior Department spokeswoman, declined to comment on the trade group’s letter, which was reported earlier by The Financial Times. The American Petroleum Institute praised other actions by the Trump administration, including those aimed at enabling more L.N.G. to be exported. “On balance, we have made significant progress toward ensuring that we have long-term American energy dominance going forward,” Amanda Eversole, the group’s chief advocacy officer, said on Monday. In addition to requiring the use of U.S.-built L.N.G. ships, the new rules impose fees on Chinese-owned and Chinese-built vessels. The rules originated from a petition requesting a federal investigation into Chinese shipbuilding filed during the Biden administration by labor unions. Shortly before Mr. Trump took office, the Biden administration said its investigation had found that China had used unfair trade practices like subsidies to become dominant in shipbuilding. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The Office of the United States Trade Representative, the agency behind the new rules, softened an earlier proposal after pushback from many industries and trade groups, including the American Petroleum Institute. But the energy group said the latest version of the rules — which require that 1 percent of L.N.G. exports be carried on U.S.-built vessels in 2029, rising to 15 percent in 2047 — was still too demanding. The industry association estimated that five U.S.-built L.N.G. tankers would be needed in 2029 and said building them was “not feasible,” citing a lack of shipyard capacity and skilled workers, among other concerns. But the rules appear to include a way for companies to delay the use of U.S.-built L.N.G. transporters for three years if they have ordered and taken delivery of a U.S.-built vessel in that time.

The Trump administration announced a flurry of measures to target PFAS contamination, but it stayed mum on whether it intends to uphold a Biden-era rule requiring utilities to remove the “forever chemicals” from the tap water of hundreds of millions of Americans. “I have long been concerned about PFAS and the efforts to help states and communities dealing with legacy contamination in their backyards,” said Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, in a statement. “This is just a start of the work we will do on PFAS to ensure Americans have the cleanest air, land, and water.” PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of chemicals linked to cancer and other diseases and are used widely in everyday products such as waterproof clothing and paper straws. The chemicals, which don’t break down easily in the environment, are also present in drinking water nationwide. According to the latest data from the E.P.A., as many as 158 million Americans have PFAS in their water. Last year, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. set the first limits on PFAS in drinking water. The rules effectively require municipal water systems to remove certain kinds of PFAS. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT But water utilities and chemical-industry groups filed suit saying the drinking water standards would be too costly. The Trump administration faces a May 12 deadline to decide whether to continue to defend the standards in court. On Monday, the E.P.A. announced measures to tackle PFAS contamination, including designating an official to lead the agency’s efforts on the chemicals, creating guidelines for how much PFAS factories could release in their wastewater, and engaging with Congress to come up with ways to hold polluters responsible. The E.P.A. also said it would determine a path forward to address PFAS contamination of fertilizer made from sewage sludge. Concerns have been growing over widespread contamination of American farmland from sludge fertilizer, also known as biosolids, containing dangerous levels of PFAS. Environmental groups said the E.P.A.’s plans lacked specifics, including whether the agency intended to defend the Biden-era drinking water standards in court. Among the only hints on what the Trump administration might do was a mention of the need to address “compliance challenges.” The Trump administration also faces a court deadline next month on whether it will continue to defend the designation of two types of PFAS as hazardous chemicals that must be cleaned up by polluters under the nation’s Superfund law, a measure also enacted by President Biden. “The key things that we actually want a direct answer on, they completely punt,” said Erik D. Olson, a senior strategist on drinking water and health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. The E.P.A. also said that it will rely on science, Mr. Olson said, but does not mention that the agency plans to eliminate its scientific research arm and cut the overall agency budget by 65 percent. “On one hand, the E.P.A. says it’s going to do all this new work. But it’s also going to slash the budget and eliminate the scientists that would be responsible for doing the work,” he said. “I don’t see how this adds up.” The E.P.A. has also been cutting research grants to scientists studying how to prevent PFAS from accumulating in crops and the food chain. In a statement, an E.P.A. official said the agency was in the process of reviewing the Biden administration’s drinking water standards. The agency official did not comment on how the E.P.A. would proceed with the Superfund policy. Industry groups suing the agency over PFAS, including the American Water Works Association and National Association of Manufacturers, did not provide immediate comment. James L. Ferraro, an environmental attorney who represents several water utilities, said E.P.A.’s announcement “signals that the agency is mindful of the cost burdens PFAS regulations may impose, not just on industry, but also on public water systems.” Still the new measures felt “very preliminary,” he said. “We’ll see how this unfolds.” The E.P.A.’s announcement of steps to tackle PFAS comes as the administration is pursuing a broad effort to roll back the nation’s climate and environmental regulations. Still, polls have consistently shown that, compared to policies to tackle climate change, protecting clean water is popular regardless of politics. Even the White House has raised the alarm on PFAS, albeit in action against paper straws, saying that “scientists and regulators have had substantial concerns about PFAS chemicals for decades.”

The 36-page official national strategy document bears the presidential seal and involves 10 agencies from across the federal government. It isn’t the government’s policy on tariffs or border security. It’s President Trump’s master plan to eradicate paper straws and bring back plastic. “My Administration is committed,” the document declares, to “ridding us of the pulpy, soggy mess that torments too many of our citizens whenever they drink through a paper straw.” It’s a shot in the culture wars, critics say, and another example of the haphazard policies of an administration guided by Mr. Trump’s whims and dislikes, whether for paper straws, wind turbines or low-flow shower heads. But there’s a twist: It complicates another, bigger public health question in the administration’s drive to roll back regulations. In its attack on paper straws, the document devotes a robust eight pages to highlighting their health and environmental dangers. It points out, in particular, the dangers of PFAS, a class of thousands of synthetic chemicals that are used to make paper straws and other everyday products water-resistant but are also linked to serious health problems and are turning up in tap water around the country. The Biden administration set strict new federal standards last year that tightened restrictions on PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down easily in the environment. But industry and utility groups sued, calling the standards “unattainable” and “onerous,” and have urged the Trump administration to roll them back. It’s unclear whether Lee Zeldin, who leads the Environmental Protection Agency, will oblige. The administration faces a May 12 deadline to decide whether to continue to defend the standards in court.“Is Zeldin going to roll back PFAS drinking water standards when there’s this anti-PFAS screed out of the White House?” said Matthew Tejada, who leads environmental health policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If the White House is concerned about PFAS in straws, then can Zeldin pretend there’s no problem with PFAS in drinking water?” Under Mr. Zeldin, the agency has embarked on a deregulatory push, targeting for repeal dozens of environmental regulations that limit toxic pollution. And he has filled the agency’s leadership ranks with lobbyists and lawyers from industries that have opposed environmental regulations. At a news briefing with reporters on Monday, Mr. Zeldin said that the science on PFAS “was not declared as settled.” “We’ve figured out some of the questions related to PFAS, but the research is important to continue,” Mr. Zeldin said. And regulations needed to be based on “less assumptions and more facts,” he said. Yet Mr. Trump’s anti-paper-straw strategy document is more explicit about the chemicals. “Scientists and regulators have had substantial concerns about PFAS chemicals for decades,” the White House paper says. “PFAS are harmful to human health, and they have been linked to harms affecting reproductive health, developmental delays in children, cancer, hormone imbalance, obesity, and other dangerous health conditions.” This week, the White House repeated those warnings. “Paper straws contain dangerous PFAS chemicals — ‘forever chemicals’ linked to significant long-term health conditions — that infiltrate the water supply,” the administration said on Monday in an Earth Day statement.Another wild card is the secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Addressing a forum on the health and the environmental effects of plastics on Wednesday, Mr. Kennedy listed PFAS among the chemicals he hoped to eliminate from the food system. “We’re going to get rid of whole categories of chemicals in our food that we have good reason to believe are harmful to human health,” he said. Both the White House and the E.P.A. said there was no gap between their approaches to PFAS. “President Trump and Administrator Zeldin are working lock-step to remove harmful toxins from the environment,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said. “The Trump administration, including Administrator Zeldin, has made it clear that PFAS are harmful to human health and further research on the danger of PFAS is critical to ensure we are making America healthy again.” Molly Vaseliou, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., declined to comment specifically on whether the agency would seek to roll back PFAS drinking water standards, but she pointed to Mr. Zeldin’s long experience with PFAS issues. Before joining the Trump administration, Mr. Zeldin served four terms as a congressman from Long Island, which has struggled with PFAS contamination. In 2020, he was one of 23 House Republicans who voted to pass the PFAS Action Act, a sweeping bill championed by Democrats that required the Environmental Protection Agency to limit the chemicals in drinking water and hold polluters responsible for cleanups. “He was, and remains, a staunch advocate for protecting Long Islanders and all Americans from contaminated drinking water,” Ms. Vaseliou said. Mr. Zeldin is correct that more research is needed to pin down the health effects of exposure to PFAS. Still, the evidence of the chemicals’ harm is mounting, especially for the most-studied kinds of PFAS. The White House strategy on straws lists that evidence, backed up by a seven-page bibliography. “The E.P.A. conducted an analysis of current peer-reviewed scientific studies and found that PFAS exposure is linked to concerning health risks,” the document says. They also include, according to the White House: decreased fertility, high blood pressure in pregnant women, low birth weight, accelerated puberty, behavioral changes in children, diminished immune systems and increased cholesterol. Plastic also contains harmful chemicals. Microplastics are everywhere, polluting ecosystems and potentially harming human health. And critics point to how promoting plastic helps the fossil fuel industry, which produces the building blocks of plastic. Still, Linda Birnbaum, a toxicologist and a former director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences who has been sounding the alarm on PFAS for decades, agreed with aspects of the White House document. “Their statements of all these adverse effects are well founded,” she said. But if the Trump administration was concerned about the health effects of PFAS, they should be concerned about the chemicals’ presence all around us, she said, in food and food packaging, for example, and in drinking water. “Instead they’re spending all this effort trying to rally people around straws,” she said. The debate over plastic straws reaches back to the mid-2010s, when they suddenly became a pariah for their role in an exploding plastic waste crisis. Some cities and retailers banned plastic straws, and a few states imposed restrictions. (Disability rights groups have expressed concerns about the bans, noting that some people need straws to drink safely.) Alternatives to plastic proliferated: stainless steel or glass straws, as well as lids with spouts. But paper straws quickly became the main replacement. And, just as quickly, they were derided for their tendency to disintegrate into a mushy mess. Around the same time, scientists started detecting PFAS in a variety of paper and plant-based straws, raising concerns that they were exposing people to harmful chemicals and that they were becoming yet another source of water pollution. The president has portrayed the Biden-era measures as “a paper straws mandate,” though those plans didn’t specifically require a switch to paper straws. His disdain for paper straws goes back years. His campaign for the 2020 election sold packs of 10 branded plastic straws for $15 with the tagline, “Liberal Paper Straws Don’t Work.” In his grand strategy, Mr. Trump orders federal agencies to “be creative and use every available policy lever to end the use of paper straws nationwide.” Moreover, “taxpayer dollars should never be wasted, so no federal contracts or grants should fund paper straws or support any entities that ban plastic straws.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Christine Figgener, a marine conservation biologist (who, a decade ago, posted a viral video of a sea turtle with a plastic straw stuck in one of its nostrils), said pitting paper against plastic ignored the easiest solution of all: Avoid straws. Straws have become “the symbol of everything that’s unnecessary that we use in a society so dictated by convenience,” she said. “Why is America so obsessed with straws? Most people don’t need them.”

President Trump has ordered the U.S. government to take a major step toward mining vast tracts of the ocean floor, a move that is opposed by nearly all other nations, which consider international waters off limits to this kind of industrial activity. The executive order, signed Thursday, would circumvent a decades-old treaty that every major coastal nation except the United States has ratified. It is the latest example of the Trump administration’s willingness to disregard international institutions and is likely to provoke an outcry from America’s rivals and allies alike. The order “establishes the U.S. as a global leader in seabed mineral exploration and development both within and beyond national jurisdiction,” according to a text released by the White House. Mr. Trump’s order instructs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to expedite permits for companies to mine in both international and U.S. territorial waters. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT 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, but whose supply chains are increasingly controlled by China. No commercial-scale seabed mining has ever taken place. The technological hurdles are high, and there have been serious concerns about the environmental consequences. As a result, in the 1990s most nations agreed to join an independent International Seabed Authority that would govern mining of the ocean floor in international waters. Because the United States isn’t a signatory, the Trump administration is relying on an obscure 1980 law that empowers the federal government to issue seabed mining permits in international waters. Many nations are eager to see seabed mining become a reality. But until now the prevailing consensus has been that economic imperatives shouldn’t take precedence over the risk that mining could damage the fishing industry and oceanic food chains or could affect the ocean’s essential role in absorbing planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Mr. Trump’s order comes after years of delays at the I.S.A. in setting up a regulatory framework for seabed mining. The authority still has not agreed to a set of rules. The executive order could pave the way for the Metals Company, a prominent seabed mining company, to receive an expedited permit from NOAA to actively mine for the first time. The publicly traded company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, disclosed in March that it would ask the Trump administration through a U.S. subsidiary for approval to mine in international waters. The company has already spent more than $500 million doing exploratory work. “We have a boat that’s production-ready,” said Gerard Barron, the company’s chief executive, in an interview on Thursday. “We have a means of processing the materials in an allied friendly partner nation. We’re just missing the permit to allow us to begin.” Anticipating that mining would eventually be allowed, companies like his have invested heavily in developing technologies to mine the ocean floors. 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. Some analysts questioned the need for a rush toward seabed mining, given that there is currently a glut of nickel and cobalt from traditional mining. In addition, manufacturers of electric-vehicle batteries, one of the main markets for the metals, are moving toward battery designs that rely on other elements. Nevertheless, projections of future demand for the metals generally remain high. And Mr. Trump’s escalating trade war with China threatens to limit American access to some of these critical minerals, which include rare-earth elements that are also found in trace quantities in the seabed nodules. The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that nodules in a single swath of the Eastern Pacific, known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, contain more nickel, cobalt and manganese than all terrestrial reserves combined. That area, in the open ocean between Mexico and Hawaii, is about half the size of the continental United States. The Metals Company’s contract sites are in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, where the ocean is on average about 2.5 miles deep. The company would be the first to apply for an exploitation permit under the 1980 law. Mr. Barron blamed an “environmental activist takeover” of the I.S.A. for its delays in establishing a rule book that his company could have played by, leading it to apply directly to the U.S. government instead. In a statement provided to The New York Times last month, a NOAA spokeswoman, Maureen O’Leary, said that the existing process under U.S. law provided for “a thorough environmental impact review, interagency consultations and opportunity for public comment.” Under the 1994 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, nations have exclusive economic rights over waters 200 nautical miles from their coasts, but international waters are under I.S.A. jurisdiction. Since the Law of the Sea went into effect, the State Department has sent representatives to meetings at the Seabed Authority’s headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica, creating the impression that the United States intended to honor the terms of the treaty, even though the Senate never formally ratified it. More than 30 countries have called for a delay or moratorium on the start of seabed mining. An array of automakers and tech companies including BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo, Apple, Google and Samsung have pledged not to use seabed minerals. Representative Ed Case of Hawaii in January introduced the American Seabed Protection Act, which would prohibit NOAA from issuing licenses or permits for seafloor mining activities. I.S.A. negotiators have spent more than a decade drafting the mining rule book, which would cover everything from environmental rules to royalty payments. Despite a pledge to finalize it by this year, negotiators seemed unlikely to meet that deadline. Nevertheless, other major world powers including China, Russia, India and several European countries — which have generally supported moving quickly to mine in international waters — objected to the Metals Company’s intention to obtain a permit from the U.S. government. Much of the hesitation to mine the seabed comes from how little it has been studied by scientists. Polymetallic nodules in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, for instance, lie in a cold, still, pitch-black world inhabited by organisms that marine biologists have encountered only on infrequent missions. “We think about half the species that live in that area are dependent on the nodules for some part of their development,” said Matthew Gianni, a co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. The ways companies are proposing to mine would essentially destroy those ecosystems, Mr. Gianni said, and the plumes of sediment caused by the mining could spread out over wider areas, smothering others. The Metals Company, which has conducted its own environmental research for a decade, has said those concerns are overblown. “We believe we have sufficient knowledge to get started and prove we can manage environmental risks,” Mr. Barron said in the news release last month. Reaching the deep ocean is expensive and technologically complex, not entirely unlike traveling to another planet. “Mankind has only scratched the surface,” said Beth Orcutt, a microbiologist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. The deep sea covers roughly 70 percent of the Earth. Disturbing deep-sea ecosystems, remote as they may seem, could have ripple effects far and wide. “The ecosystems themselves are really important in the major global cycles that allow the ocean to be productive and to create fish and shellfish and feed people,” said Lisa Levin, an oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “And all of those ecosystems are interconnected, so if you destroy one, we still probably don’t even understand what happens to the others in many ways.” The biggest consequence might be losing entire ecosystems before scientists have a chance to understand them. That would be a loss of the kind of science that can fuel unexpected discoveries, like new drugs or new insights into how life formed on Earth or could form on other planets. “If we want to mine the deep sea, we have to be willing to give up those ecosystems,” Dr. Levin said.

The Trump administration is set to cancel tens of millions of dollars in grants to scientists studying environmental hazards faced by children in rural America, among other health issues, according to internal emails written by senior officials at the Environmental Protection Agency. The planned cancellation of the research grants, which were awarded to scientists outside the agency, comes as President Trump continues to dismantle some of the E.P.A.’s core functions. The grants are designed to address a range of issues, including improving the health of children in rural America who have been exposed to pesticides from agriculture and other pollution; reducing exposure to wildfire smoke; and preventing “forever chemicals” from contaminating the food supply. An email sent by Dan Coogan, a deputy assistant administrator at the E.P.A., on April 15, and seen by The New York Times, said the agency leadership was directing staff to cancel all pending and active grants across a number of key programs, including Science to Achieve Results, known as STAR. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT According to the email, the cuts also targeted the People, Prosperity and the Planet program, or P3, which awards small grants to college students to work on environmental solutions. In the latest funding year, students were developing antiviral face masks from plastic waste as well as 100 percent-compostable packaging film. “We have received direction from Leadership to cancel all pending awards and terminate grants for the following programs,” the email from Mr. Coogan began, followed by a list of programs. In response to inquiries on Monday, the E.P.A. said the grants had not been canceled. “As with any change in Administration, the agency is reviewing its awarded grants to ensure each is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars and to understand how those programs align with Administration priorities,” said the emailed statement from the E.P.A.’s press office. “The agency’s review is ongoing.” Still, project officers have started to receive cancellation notices. One such notice seen by The New York Times was sent on Friday stating that the grant “has been canceled” and instructing officers to “begin the process of deobligating funds.” Many grants involve issues that affect regions of the country where voters supported Mr. Trump. One grant funds Oklahoma University scientists researching how to help children in rural America who face increased health risks from pesticide and other pollution, issues that can be compounded by limited access to health care and higher poverty rates. Combined, those factors can cause rural children to miss school days, perpetuating a cycle of sickness and disadvantage, research has shown. The targeted grants, which total about $40 million a year, play an outsize role in advancing research on environmental health, experts said. “This is just terrible,” said Tracey Woodruff, a former senior scientist and policy adviser at the E.P.A. who now teaches at the University of California, San Francisco. “E.P.A.’s research program is already woefully underfunded, particularly when considering the enormity of the health problems faced by environmental exposure to the American public.” The agency’s research is unique “because it focuses on answering questions that will help E.P.A. do a better job of identifying and protecting people from toxic chemicals,” Dr. Woodruff said. “Defunding this research will do the opposite of the administration’s goal of making America healthy.” Many of the grants have their roots in research that emerged in the 1990s that showed children are much more vulnerable to toxic chemical exposure than adults. Congress soon passed the nation’s first law with provisions explicitly designed to protect children’s health, which led to a series of grants, awarded to universities and medical centers, to explore how environmental hazards were affecting infants. “For the past 25 years these grants have generated enormous amounts of new information about children’s vulnerability to toxic chemicals in the environment,” said Philip J. Landrigan, a pediatrician and director of the Program for Global Public Health at Boston College, who led the initial research into children’s health. One exception to the cuts were expected to be grants awarded after Oct. 1, the date when Biden-era changes kicked in making it harder for grants to be clawed back, according to a separate email sent by another senior official. The planned cancellations come on the heels of controversy surrounding $20 billion in grants for climate and clean energy programs that had been funded by Congress but were frozen at the Trump administration’s request. The move has been labeled illegal by nonprofit groups that were supposed to receive the funds. The E.P.A. has also shut down its offices responsible for addressing the disproportionately high levels of pollution that poor communities face. And internal documents have outlined plans to eliminate the agency’s scientific research arm, a move that experts have said will hinder clean water improvements, air quality monitoring, toxic site cleanups and other parts of the agency’s mission. That’s even as the current administration has pursued a platform to “Make America Healthy Again,” led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, who has in the past been vocal about dangers posed by pesticides and other pollution linked to agriculture. And Mr. Trump, in appointing former congressman Lee Zeldin to helm the Environmental Protection Agency, promised America would maintain “the cleanest air and water on the planet.” Grant-funded projects have often focused on babies in utero as well as after birth. Scientists now have abundant evidence that a mother’s chemical exposure during pregnancy can result in children who suffer from brain injury, autism, birth defects, cancer, as well as increased risk for heart disease and diabetes in later life. By cutting these grants, “an administration that claims to be anti-abortion is allowing infants in the womb, and young children, to be damaged by increased levels of toxic chemicals in the environment,” Dr. Landrigan said. The retrenchment also targets about $8 million in grants that had been awarded to researchers studying how to prevent harmful per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, from accumulating in crops and the food chain. Concerns have been growing over widespread contamination of American farmland from fertilizer contaminated with PFAS, which are also known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment. PFAS has been linked to cancer and other diseases.

In 1886, a French chemist dissolved holmium oxide in acid. Then, he added ammonia. Toiling over the marble slab of his fireplace, he repeated the procedure dozens of times. Finally, voilà: He’d extracted a new element. More than a century later, Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran’s painstaking discovery — which he named dysprosium, from the Greek for “hard to get” — is a crucial ingredient in the powerful magnets used in wind turbines and electric vehicle motors. If the world is to succeed in its efforts to slow global warming, it will need dysprosium. It will also need a suite of other rare earth elements and minerals that many of us first heard about this week when China announced export controls that would effectively cut off the global supply of seven rare earths. China’s export ban, part of the country’s retaliation for President Trump’s steep new tariffs, has exposed the extent to which the global energy transition depends on raw materials produced by China. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT It’s not just rare earths, as my colleague Max Bearak and I reported this week. China supplies more than half of the 50 minerals the U.S. government has deemed critical to national security and the economy. Among those critical minerals are lithium, cobalt and nickel, components of the rechargeable batteries that power electric vehicles and store energy on the grid when the weather is unfavorable for wind and solar generation. China refines or mines significant portions of the world’s supply of all three, and Chinese companies have acquired major stakes in mineral-rich countries: nickel in Indonesia, cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, lithium in Zimbabwe. “China’s influence over critical mineral supply chains is far greater than trade data alone suggests,” said Krista Rasmussen, director of natural resource security at C4ADS, a research organization based in Washington that has traced Chinese companies’ hidden ownership of Indonesian nickel refineries. “Chinese firms exert substantial control across nearly every stage of the supply chain.” Some critical minerals are far more abundant than rare earths, and American mining companies have been engaged for years in extracting them domestically and around the world, though at a fraction of the scale of Chinese companies. Mr. Trump has sought to increase American access to certain critical minerals through deals with Ukraine and Congo, and there are deposits in Canada and Greenland, two places he has mused about annexing. Rare earths, on the other hand, have narrower supply chains and are often more difficult to extract, requiring more cumbersome processes to separate them from other minerals (as Lecoq de Boisbaudran learned). The United States has just one operational rare earth mine, in Mountain Pass, Calif., which produces around 15 percent of global rare earths. China’s rare earths export ban applies to all countries, not just the United States, meaning the U.S. will be unable to acquire the banned commodities through intermediaries. U.S. companies have stockpiled rare earth inventories that can tide them over, but they will not last forever, said Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James who specializes in the mineral trade. “If we are still having this conversation six-plus months from now, that’s when we would begin to get worried about physical shortages,” Molchanov said, “but not right now.”

Two court rulings on Tuesday unfroze hundreds of millions of dollars in federal climate funds, a win for nonprofit groups that have been denied access to money they were promised under the Biden administration. Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the federal court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday ordered the immediate release of up to $625 million in climate grants that have been frozen since mid-February under the $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The fund is also known as the “green bank” program and has been a major target of Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Separately, Judge Mary S. McElroy of the federal court for the District of Rhode Island ordered five federal agencies to unfreeze environmental and infrastructure funding that had been awarded to nonprofits during the Biden administration. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In her ruling, Judge McElroy said the nonprofits had demonstrated in court that the indefinite freeze, put in place by the Trump administration, “was neither reasonable nor reasonably explained.” She added that the nonprofits were likely to be able to prove that the freezes were “fundamentally arbitrary.” The lawsuits are among many filed against the Trump administration’s moves to freeze billions of dollars in funding that had been awarded through two laws passed in 2021 and 2022, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Various judges have ordered the administration to unfreeze funds, but the administration has cited legal loopholes to avoid doing so. Administration officials have said the pauses are necessary to align with executive orders President Trump has issued since taking office. The $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act and finalized before last November’s presidential election, represents roughly twice the E.P.A.’s budget for 2025. Mr. Zeldin seized on the program early in his tenure, citing a hidden-camera video filmed in December in which an E.P.A. staffer likened the outgoing Biden administration’s efforts to spend federal money to tossing gold bars off the Titanic. The video was released by Project Veritas, a conservative group known for using covert recordings to embarrass its political opponents. Mr. Zeldin called for the funds to be returned to the federal government. Citibank, which holds the money on behalf of the grant recipients, froze the accounts. The nonprofit grant recipients then sued the E.P.A. and Citibank last month. The bank declined to comment on Wednesday. The E.P.A. has notified that court that it will appeal. “The D.C. District Court does not have jurisdiction to reinstate the $20 billion Biden-Harris ‘Gold Bar’ scheme,” an E.P.A. official said Wednesday. “These grants are terminated, and the funds belong to the U.S. taxpayer.” The E.P.A. is allowed to freeze the grants if it uncovers evidence of waste, fraud or abuse. Judge Chutkan, who was nominated by President Barack Obama, asked the agency to produce evidence of that, but it has not offered anything concrete, despite investigations by the Department of Justice, the F.B.I. and the agency’s Office of Inspector General. Judge Chutkan’s order, which was released late Tuesday, calls for the release of funds that were “properly incurred before the mid-February suspension of plaintiffs’ funds.” A court filing from the E.P.A. estimated the total withdrawal requests at up to $625 million. On Wednesday morning, grant recipients were still trying to figure out exactly which transaction requests would be honored. Beth Bafford, chief executive of Climate United, one of the nonprofits that sued, said that the decision “gives us a chance to breathe after the E.P.A. unlawfully, and without due process, terminated our awards and blocked access to funds that were appropriated by Congress and legally obligated.” The group, a national investment fund based in Maryland, said it intended to use the grants for projects in solar energy in Arkansas and hydropower in Alaska. In the Rhode Island lawsuit, filed in March, the named defendants include the departments of Agriculture, Energy and Interior, as well as the E.P.A., the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget, and the agency heads. None of the agencies immediately commented on the ruling. Six nonprofits had filed the suit. They argued that their work had been hamstrung by the uncertainty created by the funding freeze. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Examples of harm cited in the lawsuit included nonprofits having to furlough employees and pause projects, with no ability to plan for the future. “We are pleased that a federal court has seen the Trump administration’s freeze of congressionally approved funds for what it is, another abuse of executive power,” said Skye Perryman, chief executive of Democracy Forward, a legal group focused on challenging the Trump administration. It worked with co-counsel DeLuca, Weizenbaum, Barry & Revens, a firm based in Providence, R.I., on the case. Judge McElroy, who was appointed by President Trump in 2018, imposed a deadline of 5 p.m. on Wednesday in Rhode Island for the agencies to report back on their compliance with the order.

Amid the turmoil over global trade, countries around the world reached a remarkable, though modest, agreement Friday to reduce the climate pollution that comes from shipping those goods worldwide — with what is essentially a tax, no less. An accord reached in London under the auspices of the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency, would require every ship that ferries goods across the oceans to lower their greenhouse gas emissions or pay a fee. The targets fall short of what many had hoped. Still, it’s the first time a global industry would face a price on its climate pollution no matter where in the world it operates. The proceeds would be used mainly to help the industry move to cleaner fuels. Some of it could also go to developing countries most vulnerable to climate hazards. The accord would come into effect in 2028, pending approval by country representatives at the agency’s next meeting in October. Given the widespread support for Friday’s terms, the head of the organization expressed hope it would be adopted in October with few or no changes. The agreement marks a rare bit of international cooperation that’s all the more remarkable because it was reached even after the United States pulled out of the talks earlier in the week. No other countries followed suit. “The U.S. is just one country and that one country cannot derail this entire process,” said Faig Abbasov, shipping director for Transport and Environment, a European advocacy group that has pushed to clean up the maritime industry. The agreement is the “first binding decision that will force shipping companies to decarbonize and switch to alternative fuels.” The agreement applies to all ships, no matter whose flag they fly, including ships registered in the United States, although the vast majority of ships are flagged in other countries. It remained unclear whether or how Washington might respond to the fee agreement. A State Department official said only that the U.S. didn’t participate in the negotiations. Ships mostly run on heavy fuel oil, sometimes called bunker fuel and more than 80 percent of global goods move by ships. The industry accounts for around 3 percent of global greenhouse emissions, comparable to the emissions from aviation. The agreement reached Friday is far less ambitious than one initially proposed by a group of island nations that had suggested a universal assessment on emissions. After two years of negotiations, the proposal sets out a complicated two-tiered system of fees. It sets carbon intensity targets, which are like clean-fuel standards for cars and trucks. Ships using conventional shipping oil would have to pay a higher fee ($380 per metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent produced) while ships that use a less carbon-intensive fuel mix would have to pay a lower fee ($100 for every metric ton that exceeds the fuel standard threshold). It is expected to raise $11 billion to $13 billion a year, according to the Organization’s estimates. “It is a positive outcome,” said Arsenio Dominguez, the organization’s secretary-general. “This is a long journey. This is not going to happen overnight. There are many concerns, particularly from developing countries.” The threshold would get stricter over time. It could allow the industry to switch to biofuels to meet the standards. That is a contentious approach, since biofuels are made from crops, and growing more crops to make fuel could contribute to deforestation. The new shipping-fuel standards are meant to spur the development of alternative fuels, including hydrogen. There were objections from many quarters. Developing countries with maritime fleets said they would be unfairly punished because they have older fleets. Countries like Saudi Arabia, which ship huge quantities of oil, and China, which exports everything from plastic toys to electric cars worldwide, balked at proposals to set a higher price, according to people familiar with the negotiations. “They turned away a proposal for a reliable source of revenue for those of us in dire need of finance to help with climate impacts,” said Ralph Regenvanu, the climate minister for Vanuatu, in a statement after the vote. In the end, countries that voted in favor of the compromise agreement included China and the European Union. Saudi Arabia and Russia voted against it. The United States pulled out of the talks entirely. The global shipping industry agreed in 2023 to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by around 2050. Last year, it followed up on that commitment with a more concrete plan, taking the first steps toward establishing an industrywide carbon price. Projections by the International Chamber of Shipping, an industry body, found that it would have a negligible effect on prices. “We recognize that this may not be the agreement which all sections of the industry would have preferred, and we are concerned that this may not yet go far enough in providing the necessary certainty,” said Guy Platten, the council’s secretary general. “But it is a framework which we can build upon.”