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

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

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

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

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

While the Trump administration in Washington was cutting environmental programs, delegates at U.N. biodiversity talks in Rome made modest progress Thursday on a series of measures to support nature. Governments gathered to tackle global biodiversity losses that are unprecedented in human history, driven by the ways people have transformed the world. The seismic geopolitical changes of recent weeks loomed over the talks as countries negotiated in a large conference room, fighting for small steps toward consensus. Delegates painstakingly negotiated the language of diplomatic texts even as Britain announced reductions to its overseas development aid and as the United States continued cutting its international aid programs. “We have sent a light of hope,” said Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s departing environment minister, who presided over the meeting. “The common good — the environment, the protection of life and the capacity to come together for something bigger than each national interest — is possible.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Many developing countries are rich in biodiversity but poor economically, and three days of tense negotiations centered on whether a new fund would be part of a plan to mobilize $200 billion a year for nature funding by 2030. African and Latin American countries have demanded a new fund, arguing that the way they currently gain access to multilateral money is unfair and inefficient. But many donor countries have fought their proposed fund, saying it would be expensive to set up and manage, diverting money that could otherwise be spent on conservation itself. In the end, delegates agreed on a process to decide whether a new fund would be created. Still, it was a hard-won compromise and the room erupted in applause. Delegates also approved a framework for monitoring nations’ progress on biodiversity commitments made in Montreal in 2022, which included an agreement to conserve 30 percent of the world’s land and water. “We now have a road map to secure the finances required to avert the biodiversity crisis, and the means to monitor and review progress,” said Martin Harper, chief executive of BirdLife International, a science and advocacy group. “These crucial steps must now be backed up with real money from developed nations.” Countries have recognized a biodiversity financing gap of $700 billion a year. In a landmark agreement in 2022, they agreed to mobilize at least $200 billion a year by 2030 from public and private sources and to find an additional $500 billion a year by 2030 by phasing out or reforming subsidies that harm nature. It’s a huge amount of money to find in five years, even in the most favorable political climate. The talks unfolded with one country conspicuously absent: the United States. “I can’t remember the last time the U.S. didn’t show up, but it’s been a very, very long time,” said David Ainsworth, a spokesman for the secretariat that manages the United Nations biodiversity treaty that underlies the talks, the Convention on Biological Diversity. The United States has long held an awkward but nonetheless influential role in global biodiversity negotiations. It is the only country in the world, with the exception of the Vatican, that has not ratified the treaty. Still, the United States has long wielded considerable influence from the sidelines of the talks. Now, all that has been thrown into question. In recent years, at least $385 million of U.S. biodiversity funding was funneled through the Agency for International Development, which is being dismantled by the Trump administration. Other streams of U.S. biodiversity funding are also at risk. The White House did not answer questions on its plans for biodiversity funding or why it did not send delegates to the talks. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Monica Medina, who served as biodiversity envoy in the Biden administration, called the American absence in Rome “a deafening silence” and said cuts to biodiversity funding could result in devastating extinctions. “U.S. funding has been a very important part of how we have kept some of the biodiversity we all love — elephants, whales, rhinos and polar bears — from going extinct,” Ms. Medina said. “We might not be able to keep some of these amazing animals around for our kids and grandkids without some of this funding.” The meeting in Rome was a resumption of talks held last fall in Cali, Colombia, officially called the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP16. After reaching a groundbreaking agreement in overtime on a new way for companies to compensate countries for their use of genetic material, the talks lost quorum and were suspended. One promising outcome of the Rome talks, according to stakeholders, was a move to begin an international dialogue of environment and finance ministers from developed and developing countries. Over the course of the negotiations, some delegates made impassioned pleas for nature. “Biodiversity cannot wait for a bureaucratic process that lasts forever while the environmental crisis continues to get worse,” a government delegate from Bolivia told the gathered nations on Wednesday. “Forests are burning, rivers are in agony and animals are disappearing.”

Formaldehyde, the chemical of choice for undertakers and embalmers, is also used in products like furniture and clothes. But it can also cause cancer and severe respiratory problems. So, in 2021, the Environmental Protection Agency began a new effort to regulate it. The chemicals industry fought back with an intensity that astonished even seasoned agency officials. Its campaign was led by Lynn Dekleva, then a lobbyist at the American Chemistry Council, an industry group that spends millions of dollars on government lobbying. Dr. Dekleva is now at the E.P.A. in a crucial job: She runs an office that has the authority to approve new chemicals for use. Earlier she spent 32 years at Dupont, the chemical maker, before joining the E.P.A. in the first Trump administration. Her most recent employer, the chemicals lobbying group, has made reversing the Environmental Protection Agency’s course on formaldehyde a priority and is pushing to abolish a program under which the agency assess the risks of chemicals to human health. In recent weeks it has urged the agency to discard its work on formaldehyde entirely and start from scratch in assessing the risks. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The American Chemistry Council is also seeking to change the agency’s approval process for new chemicals and speed up E.P.A.’s safety reviews. That review process is a key part of Dr. Dekelva’s purview at the agency. Another former chemistry council lobbyist, Nancy Beck, is back alongside Dr. Dekleva at the E.P.A. in a role regulating existing chemicals. The council’s president, Chris Jahn, told a Senate hearing shortly after the Trump inauguration that his group intended to tackle the “unnecessary regulation” of chemicals in the United States. “A healthy nation, a secure nation, an economically vibrant nation relies on chemistry,” he said. It is not unusual or unlawful for industry groups to seek to influence public policy in the interest of their member companies. The A.C.C. estimates that products using formaldehyde support more than 1.5 million jobs in the United States. What has been extraordinary, health and legal experts said, is the extent of the industry’s effort to block the E.P.A.’s scientific work on a chemical long acknowledged as a carcinogen, and how the architect of the effort was back at the agency as a regulator of chemicals. At the same time, the Trump administration has moved to sharply reduce the federal scientific work force. “They already have a track record of ignoring the science,” said Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco. “Now, they’re in charge of government agencies that decide the rules.” While leading the chemistry council’s fight to limit formaldehyde regulation, Dr. Dekleva called for investigations of federal officials for potential bias. The industry group used freedom of information laws to obtain emails of federal employees and criticized them in public statements for what they had written. It submitted dozens of industry-funded research papers to agencies that minimized the risks of formaldehyde. The A.C.C. also sued both the E.P.A. and the National Academies, which advises the nation on scientific questions, accusing researchers of a lack of scientific integrity. Allison Edwards, a chemistry council spokeswoman, said officials from the group had regularly met with E.P.A. staff members “to share critical science and to try and ensure an assessment of any chemistry is objective, employs rigorous scientific standards, and is reflective of real-world human exposure.” She said, “We’re asking to be one of many stakeholders at the table.” Molly Vaseliou, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., said the agency would continue to make sure it “ensures chemicals do not pose an unreasonable risk to human health or the environment.” At the same time, the agency would also work to approve “chemicals that are needed to power American innovation and competitiveness,” she said. Formaldehyde’s cancer risk Formaldehyde’s fumes can cause wheezing and a burning sensation in the eyes, especially when they accumulate indoors. That danger was apparent when formaldehyde in plywood used to build temporary trailer homes for victims of Hurricane Katrina sickened dozens of people. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT And there are longer-term dangers, namely several types of cancers. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded in 2004 that the chemical is a human carcinogen, and the U.S. Department of Health listed it as a human carcinogen in 2011. The chemical is restricted in the workplace, in certain composite wood products, and in pesticides. Yet efforts to strengthen overall regulations in the United States have stalled in the face of industry opposition. President Biden, whose “cancer moonshot” program had made reducing cancer deaths a priority, revived in 2021 an E.P.A. assessment of the health effects of the chemical, and published a draft the following year. That effort, under the agency’s Integrated Risk Information System, was the first step toward regulating formaldehyde. The chemistry council led a coalition of industry groups, including the Composite Panel Association and Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers, arguing that formaldehyde had already been rigorously studied and that strict industry controls were in place. In a half-dozen letters to the E.P.A., Dr. Dekleva, on behalf of a formaldehyde panel at the industry group, raised a list of complaints about the way the agency was carrying out its assessment. She questioned research linking formaldehyde to leukemia, or cancer of the blood, and accused the agency of not relying on the best available science. There was a dose, she said, at which formaldehyde did not cause risk. There was also research, she said, that showed inhaled formaldehyde did not easily travel beyond the nose to cause harm to the body. In light of these issues, Dr. Dekleva wrote, agency’s draft assessment was “flawed and unreliable without significant revision.” To bolster its case, the industry group enlisted experts at consulting firms to submit opinions and studies to the E.P.A. minimizing formaldehyde’s risks. The firms included those previously commissioned by tobacco companies to help defend cigarettes. The A.C.C. also submitted 41 peer-reviewed studies that it said refuted a link between formaldehyde and leukemia. A New York Times review found that the majority of the studies were funded by industry groups, including at least 11 from the Research Foundation for Health and Environmental Effects, an organization established by the American Chemistry Council. David Michaels, an epidemiologist and professor at George Washington University School of Public Health and assistant secretary of labor under President Barack Obama, said the industry strategy was to create the appearance of disagreement among scientists. While it’s true, he said, that inconsistencies can always exist in studies on humans, “there’s little disagreement among independent scientists that formaldehyde causes cancer.” Scientists targeted For more than 150 years, the National Academies has advised the U.S. government on science. In 2021, it was asked to weigh in on the E.P.A.’s work on formaldehyde. It became a target of the American Chemistry Council. The industry group used freedom of information laws to obtain internal emails of members and support staff of a panel assessing the E.P.A.’s formaldehyde review, and it accused one staff of showing “bias in favor of disputed research claiming formaldehyde causes leukemia.” The staff member, a former Environmental Protection Agency scientist, had for example described as “wonderful” the news that Congress might try to replicate an influential Chinese study that had shown formaldehyde could cause leukemia. Wendy E. Wagner, professor at the University of Texas School of Law and an expert on the use of science by environmental policymakers, said she did not see how the comment reflected bias. “After all, they don’t know what the results will be, do they?” she said. “I would expect all scientists to be enthusiastic about potential future research.” Dr. Dekleva called for investigations at both the E.P.A. and the National Academies, and for the removal of potentially biased panel members and staff. That included scientists who had previously accepted federal research grants. In July 2023, the industry group sued the E.P.A., as well as the National Academies, accusing researchers of a lack of scientific integrity. The chemistry council said that lack of integrity made the use of the National Academies research in regulating formaldehyde “arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful.” “It was relentless, and beyond the pale,” said Maria Doa, a scientist at the E.P.A. for 30 years who is now senior director of chemicals policy at the Environmental Defense Fund. “They really ratcheted up their attacks on federal employees.” The National Academies stood its ground, issuing a report the following month affirming the E.P.A.’s Integrated Risk Information System findings that formaldehyde is carcinogenic and increases leukemia risk. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Those conclusions are shared by other global health authorities. Mary Schubauer-Berigan, the evidence-synthesis head at the World Health Organization’s Agency for Research on Cancer, said there was “sufficient evidence in humans” that formaldehyde causes leukemia as and nasopharynx cancer. Mikko Vaananen, a spokesman for the European Chemicals Agency, said that while some questions around specific links to leukemia remained unanswered, evidence was sufficient to classify formaldehyde as a carcinogen. Formaldehyde “cannot in principle be placed on the E.U. market,” he said. In March 2024, a federal judge dismissed the chemistry council’s lawsuit. And early this year, near the end of the Biden administration, the E.P.A. issued a final risk determination, under the Toxic Substances Control Act: Formaldehyde “presents an unreasonable risk of injury to human health.” Mary A. Fox, an expert in chemical risk assessment at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and a member of a committee that reviewed the E.P.A.’s research on formaldehyde, said agency scientists had accurately reflected the uncertainties around the links between formaldehyde and leukemia. But they had documented many other streams of evidence that indicated that link, Dr. Fox said. “It’s an inevitable progress of science, that as we learn more over time, we generally learn that health effects appear at lower concentrations than we had thought,” she said. Following Mr. Trump’s re-election, the American Chemistry Council signed onto a letter from a range of industry groups calling for broad changes to policy, specifically citing formaldehyde. “We urge your administration to pause and reconsider” the E.P.A. findings on formaldehyde, the Dec. 5 letter said. The E.P.A. “should go back to the scientific drawing board,” chemistry council said in January. The group was particularly concerned about the workplace limits the agency was suggesting, which it said ignored steps companies were already taking to protect workers, like the use of personal protective equipment. The A.C.C. is also supporting a bill from Republican members of Congress that would end the Integrated Risk Information System. Soon after, Trump transition officials said Dr. Dekleva would be returning to the E.P.A. to run a program assessing chemicals for approval. The chemistry council, which has long complained of a backlog, is pushing the agency to speed up approvals. During the first Trump administration, agency whistle-blowers described in an inspector general’s investigation how they had faced “intense” pressure to eliminate the backlog, sometimes at the expense of safety. Shortly after the inauguration, the Trump administration fired the inspector-general who carried out the investigation. On Jan. 20, the A.C.C. welcomed President Trump. “Americans want a stronger, more affordable country,” said Mr. Jahn, the group’s president. “America’s chemical manufacturers can help.”

President Trump said on Wednesday that he would revoke a Biden-era policy that allowed more oil to be produced in Venezuela and exported, dealing a blow to the country’s government and Chevron, which produces oil there. Mr. Trump did not mention Chevron in his post on Truth Social, saying only that he would reverse concessions granted on Nov. 26, 2022. That’s when the Treasury Department gave Chevron permission to expand operations in Venezuela. The license is up for renewal on March 1. “The regime has not been transporting the violent criminals that they sent into our Country (the Good Ole’ U.S.A.) back to Venezuela at the rapid pace that they had agreed to,” Mr. Trump said. A spokesman for Chevron said the company was reviewing the implications of Mr. Trump’s statement. Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company, has long operated in Venezuela. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Asked about Venezuela last month, Chevron’s chief executive, Mike Wirth, said the company was focused on keeping staff safe and following the law. “We don’t set policy,” he said on the company’s year-end earnings call. “We engage with the government to help inform them of the potential impacts of policy choices, and we’ll continue to do so.” Oil is the backbone of Venezuela’s deeply troubled economy. The country is believed to have the world’s largest oil reserves, but the government of President Nicolás Maduro has struggled to take advantage of those resources because of mismanagement and underinvestment in its state-owned oil company. Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, called Mr. Trump’s move “a harmful and inexplicable decision” in a post on social media. She added that by “seeking to harm the Venezuelan people, in reality it is inflicting harm to the United States, its population, and its companies.” She added that the decision was likely to drive up the migration of Venezuelans, with “widely known consequences.” The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment. U.S. oil prices were little changed Wednesday afternoon, hovering around $69 a barrel. The United States stopped importing oil from Venezuela for several years after Mr. Trump placed sanctions on the country’s state-owned oil company in 2019, during his first term. Imports resumed after the Biden administration gave Chevron permission in late 2022 to export oil it produced in Venezuela. But the United States is far less reliant on Venezuelan oil than it once was. It imports roughly 226,000 barrels a day from the country, equivalent to about 1 percent of U.S. demand, according to the Energy Information Administration. Venezuela produces a denser, more viscous type of oil that is not common in the United States. Refineries in the United States are designed to run on a mix of that heavier oil and lighter varieties produced domestically.

Lawyers for the pipeline company Energy Transfer and Greenpeace fired their opening salvos in a North Dakota courtroom Wednesday morning in a civil trial that could bankrupt the storied environmental group. The suit revolves around the role Greenpeace played in massive protests against construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline nearly a decade ago. The pipeline, which carries crude oil from North Dakota across several states to a transfer point in Illinois, was delayed for months in 2016 and 2017 amid lawsuits and protests. The trial commenced on Wednesday with opening arguments in a quiet county courthouse in Mandan, N.D. Greenpeace says Energy Transfer, which built the Dakota Access Pipeline, is seeking $300 million in damages. Energy Transfer, one of the largest pipeline firms in the country, accused Greenpeace of inciting unrest that cost it millions of dollars in lost financing, construction delays, and security and public-relations expenses. Trey Cox, its lead lawyer, told the nine-person jury that his team would prove that Greenpeace had “planned, organized and funded” unlawful protests. He called the trial a “day of reckoning.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Everett Jack Jr., the lead lawyer for Greenpeace, gave a detailed timeline to rebut aspects of that account, saying Greenpeace played a minor role in the demonstrations, which drew an estimated 100,000 people to the rural area.

Kelly Brunt wasn’t the only federal employee to be laid off this month while traveling for work. But she was almost certainly the only one whose work trip was in Antarctica. Dr. Brunt was a program director at the National Science Foundation, the $9 billion agency that supports scientific advancement in practically every field apart from medicine. As part of the Trump administration’s campaign to shrink the federal government, roughly 10 percent of the foundation’s 1,450 career employees lost their jobs last week. Officials told staff members that layoffs were just getting started. Yet the office where Dr. Brunt worked has an importance that goes beyond science. The Office of Polar Programs coordinates research in the Arctic and Antarctic, where the fragile, fast-changing environments are of growing strategic interest to the world’s superpowers. By treaty, Antarctica is a scientific preserve. And for decades, U.S. research — plus the three year-round stations, the aircraft and the ships that support it — has been the bedrock of the country’s presence there. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Of late, though, “countries such as Korea and China have been rapidly expanding their presence, while the U.S. has been sort of maintaining the status quo,” said Julia Wellner, a marine scientist at the University of Houston who studies Antarctic glaciers. The Office of Polar Programs has long been understaffed, said Michael Jackson, who worked as an Antarctic program director for the agency until retiring late last year. Aging planes and facilities, plus flat budgets for science, have snarled the pace of research. “Right now we are capable of doing maybe 60 percent of the science that we were capable of doing” 15 years ago, Dr. Jackson said. If the Trump administration slashes science funding, American researchers could collaborate more with other nations’ polar institutes, as many already do, Dr. Wellner said. “But those other countries have their own scientists,” she said. “I don’t think South Korea or the U.K. is just going to make room for all of us.” When asked how the layoffs of polar scientists would affect the National Science Foundation’s work, an agency representative declined to comment. When the agency fired Dr. Brunt and other employees last week, she was heading home after spending over a month at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Another program director who was laid off, David Porter, had been supporting scientists embarking from New Zealand on a 10-week expedition in the Southern Ocean. Other teams were gearing up to drill ice cores, take seismic measurements, measure ultraviolet radiation and more. Foundation program officers help decide which projects like these are most worthy of federal funding. Often they are seasoned scientists themselves: Dr. Porter is an expert in atmospheric and oceanic science who has worked at Columbia University. Dr. Brunt’s N.S.F. employment was probationary because she became a permanent worker only six months ago, she said. Before that, she spent three years at the agency on temporary assignment from NASA and the University of Maryland. In total, she has 25 years of experience as a glaciologist and 15 Antarctic field seasons under her belt. “I want to dispel this rumor that this is a bunch of people who are sitting around sucking off the government milk bottle,” Dr. Jackson said. “These are people that had well-established careers in academia, and they decided that they wanted to come to N.S.F. and give something back to the U.S. taxpayers.” Dr. Jackson also doesn’t buy the idea that eliminating federal workers will root out fraud and abuse. “By removing the program officers at the front lines, you’re actually removing the very thing that you want to have there in place to make sure that no fraud and abuse is happening,” he said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT For scientists in the field, their program officer might also be their first point of contact when issues arise, said Twila Moon, the deputy lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. “Maybe you’re having trouble with some of the logistics,” Dr. Moon said. “Maybe your instruments aren’t getting to you on time, or there’s been changes in the field flights that you need to think about.” Fewer officers mean more scientists at risk of snags or challenges, she said. The geopolitical significance of Antarctica might help shield it from the administration’s most severe cost-cutting, said Dawn Sumner, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Davis, who studies microbes in Antarctic lakes. “The only way you can have a presence in Antarctica is through science,” Dr. Sumner said. Even so, much of that science is motivated by the need to address human-caused global warming, a subject that President Trump and his allies have long denigrated as a nonissue. Dr. Wellner of the University of Houston finds it “appalling” that Antarctic scientists might someday have to avoid mentioning climate change to receive federal funding. Still, she said, researchers in Texas, Florida and other states long ago figured out how to sidestep official taboos around climate. “We talk about sea-level rise in Texas all the time,” Dr. Wellner said. “You don’t have to talk about ‘climate.’ It’s just ‘sea-level rise.’”