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The Securities and Exchange Commission began an inquiry into OpenAI soon after the company’s board of directors unexpectedly removed Sam Altman, its chief executive, at the end of last year, three people familiar with the inquiry said.

The regulator has sent official requests to OpenAI, the developer of the ChatGPT online chatbot, seeking information about the situation. It is unclear whether the S.E.C. is investigating Mr. Altman’s behavior, the board’s decision to oust him or both.

Even as OpenAI has tried to turn the page on the dismissal of Mr. Altman, who was soon reinstated, the controversy continues to hound the company. In addition to the S.E.C. inquiry, the San Francisco artificial intelligence company has hired a law firm to conduct its own investigation into Mr. Altman’s behavior and the board’s decision to remove him.

The board dismissed Mr. Altman on Nov. 17, saying it no longer had confidence in his ability to run OpenAI. It said he had not been “consistently candid in his communications,” though it did not provide specifics. It agreed to reinstate him five days later.

Privately, the board worried that Mr. Altman was not sharing all of his plans to raise money from investors in the Middle East for an A.I. chip project, people with knowledge of the situation have said.

Spokespeople for the S.E.C. and OpenAI and a lawyer for Mr. Altman all declined to comment.

The S.E.C.’s inquiry was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

OpenAI kicked off an industrywide A.I. boom at the end of 2022 when it released ChatGPT. The company is considered a leader in what is called generative A.I., technologies that can generate text, sounds and images from short prompts. A recent funding deal values the start-up at more than $80 billion.

Many believe that generative A.I., which represents a fundamental shift in the way computers behave, could remake the industry as thoroughly as the iPhone or the web browser. Others argue that the technology could cause serious harm, helping to spread online disinformation, replacing jobs with unusual speed and maybe even threatening the future of humanity.

After the release of ChatGPT, Mr. Altman became the face of the industry’s push toward generative A.I. as he endlessly promoted the technology — while acknowledging the dangers.

In an effort to resolve the turmoil surrounding Mr. Altman’s ouster, he and the board agreed to remove two members and add two others: Bret Taylor, who is a former Salesforce executive, and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers.

Mr. Altman and the board also agreed that OpenAI would start its own investigation into the matter. That investigation, by the WilmerHale law firm, is expected to close soon.

A Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of posting dozens of secret intelligence reports and other sensitive documents on a social media server is expected to plead guilty in federal court on Monday.

Federal prosecutors told a judge on Thursday that the defendant, Jack Teixeira, intended to change his plea after initially pleading not guilty. A person familiar with the proceedings also said that the airman had agreed to a plea deal.

Airman Teixeira is charged with mishandling national defense information and classified documents. Prosecutors say he took the material off computers at an intelligence unit at an air base in Cape Cod, sharing them with online friends in an effort to impress them.

Among the secrets disclosed was information on the provision and delivery of military equipment to Ukraine and a highly sensitive report on Russian and Ukrainian troop movements. Officials said the disclosures about the troop movements might have compromised how American intelligence gathered the information and from whom.

Airman Teixeira posted the information online over a period of months.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.

Facing intense opposition from major industries and some Democrats, the Biden administration on Thursday said it would delay the most contentious element of its plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

The Environmental Protection Agency will exempt existing gas-fired plants, at least for now, from a new regulation that would require power plants in the United States to capture their carbon dioxide emissions before 2040.

The delay comes as the administration, in a concession to automakers and labor unions, is also expected to relax elements of another major rule to limit carbon pollution from automobiles. Those two groups are an important part of President Biden’s Democratic constituency as he seeks re-election in November.

The weakening of the Biden administration’s two most ambitious climate rules would call into question the ability of the United States to meet the president’s goal of cutting United States emissions roughly in half by the end of this decade. The target was aimed at limiting global warming to about 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientist say it will be increasingly difficult for humans to adapt to a hotter planet.

“Slower progress on these marquee rules means they’re going to have to find new places to get emissions reductions soon,” said John Larsen, a partner at Rhodium Group, a nonpartisan energy research firm.

The power plant rule initially called for steep emissions cuts from plants that burn coal or gas, which together produce the bulk of electricity in the United States. To comply, plants would have to capture their greenhouse gas emissions using technologies that are currently very expensive and not widely in use.

Now the E.P.A. says the regulation, which is expected to be finalized this spring, will apply only to existing coal-burning plants and gas-fired plants that are built in the future.

The agency plans to write a separate regulation to address climate pollution and other emissions from gas-fired plants currently in operation, a delay certain to stretch past the November election.

“This stronger, more durable approach will achieve greater emissions reductions than the current proposal,” Michael Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, said in a statement.

The changes comes as Mr. Biden faces intense headwinds as he runs for re-election while trying to confront climate change. He is aiming to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and gasoline powered vehicles, which are two of the largest sources of greenhouse gasses, while retaining crucial electoral support in major manufacturing states.

Power plants generate about a quarter of the planet-warming pollution produced by the United States. Regulating electric utilities is a major part of Mr. Biden’s climate agenda, which includes a goal of eliminating emissions from the power sector by 2035.

Several environmental activists and Democratic lawmakers criticized the move. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, called the E.P.A. decision “inexplicable.”

“Making a rule that applies only to coal, which is dying out on its own, and to new gas power plants that are not yet built is not how we are going to reach climate safety,” Mr. Whitehouse said.

“Time is not on our side,” he said, adding that a warming planet won’t wait for what he called the agency’s “lethargic rule-making pace.”

The Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utilities, would not say whether it supported a more limited rule. But Emily Sanford Fisher, the group’s executive vice president of clean energy, said in a statement that the E.P.A. had “acknowledged our concerns” about gas plants.

“We understand that the role of natural gas continues to evolve, and it is important that regulations for existing natural gas protect customer reliability and affordability and support our industry’s ongoing clean energy transition,” she said.

Imposing rules on how American homes and businesses are powered has never been easy.

President Barack Obama tried to cut carbon pollution from power plants by engineering a transition to renewable power, but his 2015 Clean Power Plan was put on hold by the Supreme Court and later rolled back by President Donald J. Trump.

In 2022 the Supreme Court restrained the way E.P.A. could regulate emissions from power plants, ruling the government could not force a wholesale transition away from coal-fired electricity.

When the Biden administration first proposed new limits on pollution from power plants, the E.P.A. hewed closely to the restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court. Still, the resistance was immediate.

Electric utility groups argued that the rules for existing gas plants would be particularly hard to meet; the country’s biggest manufacturing lobby warned it could have “devastating consequences”; and a small but significant number of swing state Democrats said they also feared the requirements would result in electric rate increases.

“Depending on implementation, municipal electric utilities serving small, rural communities in my district may have no choice but to pass along the costs of compliance to their ratepayers,” said Representative Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Ohio.

Ms. Kaptur was among a group of House and Senate Democrats who wrote to the E.P.A. in January to express concern about the proposed regulation. “We share the administration’s goal of responsibly reducing carbon emissions,” they wrote. But, they added “we cannot ask our constituents to bear the cost of that risk in the form of significantly higher utility bills and unreliable electricity.”

Senator Jon Tester, one of the most vulnerable Democrats facing re-election in November who also opposed the power plant rule, said he wanted a methodical transition to cleaner energy. “I’m all about climate change, and we have to figure out ways to that,” Mr. Tester said on Wednesday. “In the meantime, we can’t shut off the spigot.”

The Democratic critics represent a small slice of the party. But some fear that the segment will grow as more than a half-dozen regulations cracking down on everything from carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles and power plants to handling of coal ash, chemicals, endangered species and environmental permits are finalized this spring.

“I do worry about this,” said Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat who frequently promotes fossil fuels, said in a recent interview.

“In my area, you’ve got generations of people who have worked for energy companies and you’ve got families that depend on and work in this industry,” Mr. Cuellar said. He said he supported cutting greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change but added, “I think there should be incentives instead of mandating.”

Under the new plan disclosed on Thursday, the E.P.A. said it intended to finalize its regulation to require existing coal plants to install technology that will capture 90 percent of their carbon emissions by 2035. Alternatively, coal plants could convert their operations so that they are burning mostly hydrogen by 2038. Plants that cannot meet the new standards would be forced to retire.

The E.P.A. did not say when it intended to issue a separate rule for gas plants. Mr. Regan said the agency was writing a regulation that will also address other harmful pollutants emitted from gas plants like formaldehyde and nitrous oxide.

Delaying the final regulation past this spring runs the risk of it being overturned by the next Congress. The 1996 Congressional Review Act permits lawmakers to undo regulations with a simple majority within the first 60 days of the finalization of a new rule. Republicans have already pledged to repeal rules written by the Biden administration rules if they win control of the White House and Congress in November.

Some climate activists said they supported the E.P.A.’s decision. A group of environmental justice leaders led by Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University, issued a letter in support of the delay because they were glad to learn it meant the agency would also consider blocking nitrous oxide and other pollutants.

“Many of our communities experience the immediate impacts of living near the existing infrastructure of coal plants, gas plants, pipelines, and extraction and refining facilities,” Dr. Bullard and others wrote.

Others noted that an analysis conducted by Evergreen, another environmental advocacy group, said that only 5.2 percent of gas-fired turbines, representing 22 percent of the nation’s gas power capacity, would be covered by the rule.

“There’s no good way to regulate fossil gas plants without regulating all of them, ,” said Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, an environmental group.

Coral Davenport contributed reporting.

Many Americans prefer to believe the Covid pandemic is a thing of the past. But for the nation’s nursing homes, the effects have yet to fully fade, with staffing shortages and employee burnout still at crisis levels and many facilities struggling to stay afloat, according to a new report published Thursday by federal investigators.

The report, by the inspector general’s office at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, found that the flawed infection-control procedures that contributed to the 170,000 deaths at nursing homes during the pandemic were still inadequate at many facilities. And while the uptake of Covid vaccines was initially robust when they first became available, investigators found that vaccination booster rates among staff workers and residents have been badly lagging.

The findings were directed at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the agency under the department’s jurisdiction that oversees 1.2 million nursing home residents whose care is provided mainly by the federal government. The inspector general’s report described the staffing problems as “monumental,” noting high levels of burnout, frequent employee turnover and the burdens of constantly training new employees, some of whom fail to show up for their first day of work. For nursing homes, the inability to attract and retain certified nurse aides, dietary services staff and housekeeping workers is tied to federal and state reimbursements that do not cover the full cost of care.

Rachel Bryan, a social science analyst with the inspector general’s office, said the report sought to ensure that key lessons from the pandemic were not lost, especially now that the acute sense of urgency has faded.

“Just as airplanes cannot be repaired while in flight, nursing home challenges could not be fully repaired during the pandemic,” she said. “We feel very strongly that as we come out of emergency mode, we take the time to reflect, learn and take real steps toward meaningful change.”

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services declined to discuss the recommendations, and instead directed a reporter to comments the agency provided for the report. Those comments were largely noncommittal, neither agreeing or disagreeing with the recommendations, but agency officials asked that some of the proposed recommendations be removed from the report, saying improvements were already in the works.

The agency, for example, cited a new federal program that will provide $75 million in scholarships and tuition reimbursement for those pursuing careers in nursing.

The report, based on interviews with two dozen nursing home administrators from across the country, paints a picture of an industry in deep turmoil. Many nursing homes are still reeling from the traumas wrought by the pandemic, when shortages of personal protective equipment and widespread fear of infection drove away seasoned employees and forced nursing home operators to bar outside visitors, compounding the fear and isolation of their residents.

At the pandemic’s peak in 2020, two in five Medicare beneficiaries in nursing homes were infected with Covid and more than 1,300 nursing homes had infection rates of 75 percent or higher during surge periods, according to a previous report by the inspector general. In April 2020, for example, there were 1,000 additional deaths per day among Medicare nursing home beneficiaries than in April 2019. Death rates were higher at for-profit nursing homes, investigators found.

At Bethany Home, a nonprofit nursing facility in Lindsborg, Kan., a third of employees quit during the pandemic, many of them driven by their opposition to vaccine mandates or by the nationwide shortage of P.P.E. that forced caregivers to use trash bags as gowns and cotton underwear for masks, said Kris Erickson, Bethany’s chief executive.

“There were days during the pandemic when I measured success by how long I’d gone without crying in my office,” said Mr. Erickson, whose father is a Bethany resident. “It was that tough.”

Bethany has yet to recover. Mr. Erickson said the facility has had to eliminate about 20 of its 85 beds because it’s been unable to hire new staff. For the first time in its 100-year history, Bethany has a waiting list, he said.

The biggest challenge in recruiting workers is the $13.50 hourly pay that Bethany offers to entry-level nurse’s aides — a rate dictated by the reimbursements provided by the federal and state government, he said. “We’re going to need base rate in the $16 to $20 range if we want to compete against McDonald’s in the town next to us,” he said.

The recruitment problems have been exacerbated by private staffing agencies that charge nursing homes as much as 50 percent more for workers, some of whom were described by administrators as less reliable than their permanent employees. “Agency staff comes in and talks about how much money they’re making and our own staff gets upset because agency staff aren’t working as hard,” the report quoted one operator as saying.

Katie Smith Sloan, president of LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit nursing homes, said that higher federal reimbursement rates would help but that the staffing challenges were best addressed by mobilizing a number of government agencies. For example, she said, the Department of Homeland Security could include nursing aides in the temporary worker visa programs that bring in farm workers from abroad, and the Department of Education, with support from Congress, could make Pell grants available to nursing assistant students and culinary worker trainees.

Ms. Sloan and other nursing home advocates have criticized a Biden administration proposal that would require the most thinly staffed nursing homes to hire more workers or face fines. The proposal does not include increased funding that would help facilities meet the new mandates.

“This is bigger than C.M.S.,” Ms. Sloan said, referring to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. “We have to figure out how to creatively apply the things that work to this intractable work force issue.”

There were some bright spots in the inspector general’s findings. Many nursing home administrators said the dire shortages of P.P.E. had eased since 2021. And the report highlighted creative solutions that some nursing homes successfully used to retain staff, among them hiring bonuses, free staff meals and the decision of many institutions to take advantage of licensing waivers that allowed them to provide nursing assistant students with on-the-job training.

And despite the early stumbles, many experts say the initial vaccine rollout was a success, though the spread of vaccine misinformation has significantly reduced the uptake of Covid boosters for nursing home staff workers and residents. Only 41 percent of residents and 7 percent of employees are up to date with vaccines, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But many experts say the nation’s system of caring for its aging population is fundamentally broken. It is a problem that is only becoming more urgent as the demographic bulge of boomers grows older.

Elizabeth White, a professor at Brown University School of Public Health and an expert in long-term care, said the problem reflected a lack of political will to spend what it takes to support Americans in their golden years.

“The pandemic helped highlight the challenges facing nursing homes but it’s still the elephant in the room,” she said. “The financing system is broken, and the problem is just so enormous that it’s very hard to get the political motivation to do anything about it.”

President Vladimir V. Putin has threatened to reach into Russia’s arsenal of nuclear weapons at three points in time in the past two years: once at the outset of the war against Ukraine two years ago, once when he was losing ground and again on Thursday, as he senses that he is grinding down Ukrainian defenses and American resolve.

In each instance, the saber rattling has served the same basic purpose. Mr. Putin knows that his opponents — led by President Biden — fear escalation of the conflict most of all. Even bluster about going nuclear serves as a reminder to Mr. Putin’s many adversaries of the risks of pushing him too far.

But Mr. Putin’s equivalent of a State of the Union speech on Thursday also contained some distinct new elements. He not only signaled that he was doubling down on his “special military operation” in Ukraine. He also made clear that he had no intention of renegotiating the last major arms-control treaty in force with the United States — one that runs out in less than two years — unless the new deal decides Ukraine’s fate, presumably with much of it in Russia’s hands.

Some would call it nuclear chess, others nuclear blackmail. Implicit in Mr. Putin’s insistence that nuclear controls and the continued existence of the Ukrainian state must be decided together is the threat that the Russian leader would be happy to see all the current limits on deployed strategic weapons expire. That would free him to deploy as many nuclear weapons as he wants.

And while Mr. Putin said he had no interest in pursuing another arms race, which helped bankrupt the Soviet Union, the implication was that the United States and Russia, already in a constant state of confrontation, would return to the worst competition of the Cold War.

“We are dealing with a state,” he said, referring to the United States, “whose ruling circles are taking openly hostile actions against us. So what?”

“Are they seriously going to discuss issues of strategic stability with us,” he added, using the term for agreements on nuclear controls, “while at the same time trying to inflict, as they themselves say, a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia on the battlefield?”

With those comments, Mr. Putin underscored one of the distinctive and most unsettling aspects of the war in Ukraine. Time and again, his senior military officials and strategists have discussed the employment of nuclear weapons as the logical next step if their conventional forces prove insufficient on the battlefield, or if they need to scare off a Western intervention.

That strategy is consistent with Russian military doctrine. And in the early days of the war in Ukraine, it clearly spooked the Biden administration and NATO allies in Europe, who hesitated to provide long-range missiles, tanks and fighter jets to Ukraine for fear that it would provoke a nuclear response or lead Russia to strike beyond Ukraine’s borders into NATO territory.

A second scare about Russia’s possible use of nuclear weapons, in October 2022, arose not only from Mr. Putin’s statements, but from American intelligence reports suggesting that battlefield nuclear weapons might be used against Ukrainian military bases. After a tense few weeks, that crisis abated.

In the year and a half since, Mr. Biden and his allies have gradually grown more confident that for all of Mr. Putin’s bluster, he did not want to take on NATO and its forces. But whenever the Russian leader invokes his nuclear powers, it always touches off a wave of fear that, if pushed too far, he might actually seek to demonstrate his willingness to set off a weapon, perhaps in a remote location, to get his adversaries to back off.

“In this environment, Putin might engage again in nuclear saber rattling, and it would be foolish to dismiss escalatory risks entirely,” William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director and a former U.S. ambassador to Russia when Mr. Putin first took office, wrote recently in Foreign Affairs. “But it would be equally foolish to be unnecessarily intimidated by them.”

In his speech, Mr. Putin portrayed Russia as the aggrieved state rather than the aggressor. “They themselves choose targets for striking our territory,” he said. “They started talking about the possibility of sending NATO military contingents to Ukraine.”

That possibility was raised by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, this week. While most of the NATO allies talk about helping Ukraine defend itself, he said, “the defeat of Russia is indispensable to the security and stability of Europe.” But the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine was immediately dismissed by the United States, Germany and other nations. (Mr. Macron played right into Mr. Putin’s hands, some analysts say, by exposing divisions among the allies.)

Mr. Putin may have sensed, however, that this was a particularly ripe time to test the depth of the West’s anxieties. Former President Donald J. Trump’s recent declaration that Russia could do “whatever the hell they want” to a NATO nation that didn’t sufficiently contribute to the alliance’s collective defense, and that he would not respond, resonated deeply across Europe. So has Congress’s refusal, so far, to provide more arms to Ukraine.

The Russian leader may have also been responding to speculation that the United States, concerned that Ukraine is on a path toward losing, may provide longer-range missiles to Kyiv or seize the long-frozen $300 billion in Russian assets now sitting in Western banks and hand it over to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to purchase more weapons.

Whatever triggered him, Mr. Putin’s message was clear: He regards victory in Ukraine as an existential struggle, central to his grander plan to restore the glory of the days when Peter the Great ruled at the height of the Russian Empire. And once a fight is seen as a war of survival rather than a war of choice, the leap to discussing the use of nuclear weapons is a small one.

His bet is that the United States is heading in the other direction, becoming more isolationist, more unwilling to stand up to Russia’s threats and certainly not interested in facing down Russian nuclear threats the way Presidents John F. Kennedy Jr. did in 1962 or Ronald Reagan did in the dying days of the Soviet Union.

The fact that the current Republican leadership, which had enthusiastically supplied weapons to Ukraine during the first year and a half of the war, has now heeded Mr. Trump’s calls to cut off that flow may be the best news Mr. Putin has gotten in two years.

“Whenever the Russians revert to nuclear saber rattling, that is a sign of their recognition that they still do not have the conventional military capability that they thought they had,” Ernest J. Moniz, the former energy secretary in the Obama administration and now the chief executive of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which works on reducing nuclear and biological threats, said in an interview on Thursday.

“But that means their nuclear posture is something they are relying on more and more heavily,” he said. And “that amplifies the risk.”

Two news stories this week — one that made headlines, and one that got less attention — point to the fiendish difficulty of reinventing agriculture to reduce its heavy toll on the climate.

The first development: The New York attorney general Letitia James, fresh off a $450 million civil verdict against Donald Trump, announced a lawsuit against JBS, the world’s biggest meatpacking company, for making misleading statements about its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

James’s lawsuit said that JBS has “used greenwashing and misleading statements to capitalize on consumers’ increasing desire to make environmentally friendly choices,” with statements such as: “Agriculture can be part of the climate solution. Bacon, chicken wings, and steak with net zero emissions. It’s possible.”

The lawsuit cited David Gelles’s interview with Gilberto Tomazoni, the chief executive of JBS, at our Climate Forward event in September in which he said: “We pledge to be net zero in 2040.”

James argues the company can’t possibly achieve net zero “because there are no proven agricultural practices to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions” at the company’s vast scale, at least without costly efforts to offset its emissions.

JBS is a gigantic company, but the issues raised in the lawsuit against its U.S. arm are even fundamental: Is there even a path to net zero agriculture, especially if people are determined to keep large quantities of meat in their diets?

Climate-smart agriculture

The second development this week speaks to that problem: A new report found that the United States is spending billions of dollars to try to slash greenhouse gas emissions from farms. Sounds great, but there’s a hitch: much of the money may go to projects that won’t necessarily serve that goal.

The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit group that conducted the research, said that the United States Department of Agriculture is poised to fund a number of unproven practices. Those include installing new irrigation systems, despite the harm they can cause to groundwater supplies, and building infrastructure to contain animal waste, which could in fact lead to more emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases.

Allan Rodriguez, a U.S.D.A. spokesman, said in a statement that the EWG report is “fundamentally flawed” because it “did not take into account the rigorous, science-based methodology used by USDA to determine eligible practices” or the level of specificity that is required for some practices to receive climate funding.

Anne Schechinger, the author of the EWG report, told me that she is still waiting for the U.S.D.A. to share its sources and data that would justify the climate-smart designation.

Even setting aside that particular dispute, one thing is clear: There is a huge knowledge gap in our efforts to transform agriculture. Measuring agricultural emissions is a lot more complex than monitoring power plants and tailpipes. That makes it hard for any government to measure how well such techniques are working — or if in some cases they’re actually doing more harm than good.

“The pace at which these strategies are being implemented is greatly outpacing the speed at which the science, knowledge necessary to understand their effectiveness is being generated,” said Kim Novick, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who studies carbon in agricultural systems. “Until we close that gap, it’s really a lot of putting the cart before the horse.”

Closing the knowledge gap

Farming accounts for about a third of the world’s carbon emissions, and a 10th of America’s. But we still know shockingly little about how to reduce its toll on the climate and vulnerable ecosystems.

I spoke to a number of experts for this newsletter. Though some of them were generally supportive of investing in some climate-smart practices, they told me that even practices that are generally recognized as good for the climate still have unclear benefits.

Take cover crops, one of the most accepted climate-smart farming practices. These are legumes and other species that are planted after the harvest of cash crops, such as corn, to help nourish the soil and improve water quality.

Most people agree that implementing cover crops on a large scale could help reduce emissions. But those conclusions rely on a relatively small amount of data, Novick told me.

The Inflation Reduction Act and other funding streams are directing hundreds of millions of dollars to improve data and models. That, the U.S.D.A. spokesman said, will “ensure that future resources are directed to the most effective practices.”

Doria Gordon, a senior director at the Environmental Defense Fund, told me she is excited about “the unprecedented level of funding” the agriculture sector is getting to become more sustainable and that many practices the U.S.D.A. is supporting should have climate benefits if implemented at scale.

Still, she would like the agency to take its efforts to collect data further. There is also “an equally unprecedented opportunity” to close the knowledge gap, she said. “This really is a once in-a-lifetime chance to advance our understanding of these emerging solutions.”

A U.S. investigation into Chinese cars

The Biden administration on Thursday said it was opening an investigation into whether internet-connected Chinese cars might pose a national security threat. It could be the first step toward blocking the sale of Chinese cars and trucks — including a coming wave of low-cost electric vehicles.

Concerns about security threats from China are running high. Relations between the two countries remain testy, and American lawmakers are already taking steps to block other popular Chinese imports, including TikTok.

But it’s impossible to understand the opening of the investigation without also considering China’s dominance in climate-friendly technologies, including solar panels and EVs.

As Robinson Meyer wrote in the Times Opinion section earlier this week, U.S. automakers are facing an onslaught of low-priced Chinese EVs. “BYD and other Chinese automakers like Geely, which owns Volvo Cars and Polestar brands, are very good at making cars,” he wrote. “They have leveraged China’s dominance of the battery industry and automated production lines to create a juggernaut.”

China’s BYD leapfrogged Tesla to become the biggest maker of EVs in the world last year, and this month unveiled a plug-in hybrid that cost just $11,000. Ford, General Motors and Stellantis — the company behind Dodge, Chrysler and Jeep — simply can’t compete with that.

The Biden administration has shown that it is eager to boost the U.S. clean-energy manufacturing industry. It has been trying to crack down on cheap Chinese solar panels that it says are evading tariffs. And it has been pouring trillions of dollars into domestic factories and infrastructure.

Opening an investigation, which could lead to tariffs or import bans, may be framed as a matter of national security. But even Scott Paul, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a pro-labor group, was quick to acknowledge that the move was about economic competition, too.

“We agree that the data security of connected vehicles is an issue critical to national security, especially when manufactured by companies based in China,” he said in a statement. “We also believe more will need to be done to stem the threat of Chinese autos to our national and economic security, which is why we have called for a broad range of measures, including higher tariffs and limiting EV tax credits.” — David Gelles

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III presented himself before a congressional committee for chastisement on Thursday, continuing a round of mea culpas over his failure last month to tell his boss that he was in the hospital with complications from prostate cancer surgery.

Republican lawmakers had been preparing to lay into Mr. Austin before the hearing, calling former Defense Department officials for advice. Even the formal title of the hearing, listed on the House Armed Services Committee’s website, struck an ominous tone: “A Review of Defense Secretary Austin’s Unannounced Absence.”

Mr. Austin sought to get ahead of the expected scolding by apologizing — again — for keeping his hospitalization at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center a secret.

“We did have a breakdown in notifications during my January stay at Walter Reed — that is, sharing my location and why I was there,” he told the packed hearing room. “And back in December, I should have promptly informed the president, my team, and Congress and the American people of my cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment.”

He added: “I take full responsibility.”

On Monday, the Pentagon released an unclassified version of a review of how Defense Department officials, including Mr. Austin, handled his hospitalization. The document offered little if any criticism and faulted no one for the failure to disclose his illness.

Even before the hearing began, lawmakers had been steaming. Representative Mike D. Rogers, Republican of Alabama and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, resorted to capital letters to make his point on social media that “the review of Sec Austin’s actions, conducted by his own subordinates & subject to his approval, HELD NO ONE ACCOUNTABLE.”

In his opening statement on Thursday, Mr. Rogers said the chain of command “doesn’t work” when the president does not know whom to call.

“It’s totally unacceptable that it took three days to inform the president of the United States that the secretary of defense was in the hospital, and not in control of the Pentagon,” Mr. Rogers said as he opened the hearing. “Wars were raging in Ukraine and Israel, our ships were under fire in the Red Sea, and our bases were bracing for attack in Syria and Iraq. But the commander in chief did not know that his secretary of defense was out of action.”

Mr. Rogers added: “Someone needs to be held accountable.”

On the other side of the Capitol, senators from both parties voiced frustration after receiving a classified briefing on the Pentagon’s review on Tuesday.

“I have very strong, severe questions remaining for the Pentagon as to how this seeming concealment was handled, and I think there ought to be some public accountability,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, told reporters.

Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement, “I remain concerned that the department has yet to account for its failure to comply with federal law and notify Congress or the White House that the secretary was incapacitated.”

Mr. Wicker added, “It is clear that many members of the committee left the briefing frustrated by questions that went unanswered.”

Mr. Austin underwent an elective medical procedure at Walter Reed on Dec. 22. He did not tell the White House or senior administration officials that he was having surgery for a diagnosis he would later describe as a “gut punch.”

He was released before Christmas but returned on New Year’s Day with complications that kept him in the intensive care unit for two weeks.

Mr. Austin’s chief of staff, Kelly Magsamen, did not inform the White House that her boss was in the hospital until three days later. The extraordinary breach of protocol — Mr. Austin is in charge of the country’s 1.4 million active-duty service members at a time when wars in Gaza and Ukraine dominate the American national security landscape — baffled officials across the government, including at the Pentagon.

Mr. Austin tried to explain himself in early February when he told reporters at the Pentagon that “I did not handle this right.”

“I should have told the president about my cancer diagnosis,” he said. “I should have also told my team and the American public, and I take full responsibility.”

Mr. Austin also said he never told his staff not to inform the White House about his hospitalization.

The defense secretary has long been known as extremely private and media shy.

Vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus may have caused a few cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological condition, federal health officials said on Thursday.

The numbers were small, on the order of two cases per 100,000 vaccinated people or fewer, and much more data is needed to pin down the risk, the officials said. In May 2023, the Food and Drug Administration approved two vaccines against R.S.V.: Abrysvo, by Pfizer, and Arexvy, by GSK.

In June, rather than recommend the shots to all older adults, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that adults aged 60 or older might opt to receive a single dose of an R.S.V. vaccine in consultation with their health care providers. Fewer than 10 million doses had been administered by Feb. 16.

The new safety data, disclosed at a meeting of scientific advisers to the agency, came from multiple databases maintained by federal health agencies. Still, because of the preliminary nature of the analysis, officials urged caution in interpreting the results.

“At this point, due to the uncertainties and limitations, these early data cannot establish if there is an increased risk for G.B.S. after vaccination in this age group,” Dr. Thomas Shimabukuro, director of the C.D.C.’s Immunization Safety Office, said at a meeting on Thursday.

Ongoing surveillance “will be better able to determine if an increased risk for G.B.S. after R.S.V. vaccination is present, and if so the magnitude of the risk,” he said.

In Guillain-Barré syndrome, the immune system attacks nerves. Most patients recover, but in severe cases the syndrome can lead to paralysis and death.

Experts noted that even if confirmed, the absolute risk remains low. The highest estimate from any of the databases pegs the risk at about one case of G.B.S. per 40,000 doses administered.

That rate is “very rare and needs to be considered in the context of the benefits of vaccination,” said Dr. Daniel Salmon, director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

R.S.V. vaccines may prevent an estimated 120 to 140 in-hospital deaths and about 25,000 hospitalizations per million doses administered, federal officials said.

Most of the other side effects observed after inoculations with the R.S.V. vaccines were minor. But on Jan. 19, federal health officials picked up signs of an increase in Guillain-Barré syndrome after inoculation with Abrysvo.

Of 37 preliminary reports in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, officials verified 23 by medical record review, 15 with Abrysvo and eight after Arexvy, Dr. Shimabukuro said. There were nearly three additional cases of G.B.S. per million doses of Abrysvo than would be expected in the population of older Americans.

A separate database identified four cases of G.B.S. linked to Arexvy, translating to an estimated 14 cases per million doses administered. That system did not pick up any cases after shots of Abrysvo. But the vaccine accounted for only about 10 percent of the total doses recorded in the database.

“I will say that these rates are higher than rates that we’ve observed for high-dose influenza and for Shingrix,” Dr. Shimabukuro said. (Shingrix is a shingles vaccine.)

Additional data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services indicated that the incidence of Guillain-Barré syndrome after vaccination with Abrysvo was roughly five times higher than would be expected. The incidence after vaccination with Arexvy was not statistically significant.

“These data are preliminary and there are several limitations to take into consideration,” said Dr. Patricia Lloyd, a health statistician at the F.D.A.

G.S.K. is planning to study a possible link, said Alison Hunt, a spokeswoman for the company. “There are limitations to all of these data, and further analysis by F.D.A., C.D.C. and the vaccine manufacturers are needed to confirm and quantify any potential risk,” she said.

Pfizer did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A representative at the meeting on Thursday said the company was conducting four safety studies that monitor G.B.S.

Rare cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome have been linked to other vaccines, including those against influenza and shingles. A few cases were observed in the clinical trials of the two R.S.V. vaccines, but the numbers were too small to be certain of an association.

R.S.V. is particularly dangerous for those with other chronic conditions.

During the 2017-18 respiratory season, hospitalizations related to R.S.V. were about 6.5 times higher for adults with chronic kidney disease, according to data presented on Thursday. Those with other respiratory conditions, severe obesity or heart disease were also at increased risk.

By the end of December, about one in four Americans ages 60 and older with a chronic condition had received a dose of R.S.V. vaccine, federal health officials said.

Climate change is increasing the risk of wildfires in Texas, a danger made real this week as the Smokehouse Creek fire, the largest in state history, burns out of control across the Panhandle region.

And that growing fire risk is beginning to affect the insurance market in Texas, raising premiums for homeowners and causing some insurers to withdraw from parts of the state.

For the Smokehouse Creek fire to grow so big so quickly, three weather conditions had to align: high temperatures, low relative humidity and strong winds, said John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University.

On Monday, as the Smokehouse Creek fire began to spread, it was 82 degrees Fahrenheit in Amarillo. The city’s average daytime high temperature in February is 54 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.

As of Thursday, a New York Times tracker based on federal data shows more than one million acres burning, making the fire one of the most destructive in U.S. history.

Temperatures in Texas have risen by 0.61 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1975, according to a 2021 report by the state climatologist’s office. The relative humidity in this region has been decreasing as well, Dr. Nielsen-Gammon said. It’s less clear whether the winds have changed significantly.

Climate change is likely making fire season start earlier and last longer, he said, by increasing the number of days in a year with hot and dry weather conditions that enable wildfires.

Texas is currently the state with the second highest number of properties that are vulnerable to wildfires, behind Florida, according to analysis by the nonprofit research group First Street Foundation.

In most of Texas, wildfires happen in the summer. But across the Southern Plains, including the Texas Panhandle, fire risk is highest around March when temperatures warm, strong winds blow over the flat landscape and dry grass left from the previous growing season can easily catch fire.

Only about 1 percent of wildfires in Texas happen in the Panhandle, but the region accounts for half of the state’s acres burned, said Sean Dugan, a spokesman for the Texas A&M Forest Service. “They’re not very numerous. But when they do happen, they get really big,” he said.

Normally, if there is no drought, in April the landscape starts to become green and the Panhandle’s fire risk goes down. But this year, there are “enhanced chances” of a dry spring and summer and a hot summer, Dr. Nielsen-Gammon said. As a result, he expects the fire risk to remain high in the Panhandle and it may be higher during the summer in the rest of the state as well.

As the climate changes, the very concept of a fire season is becoming blurry.

“There were clear fire seasons for Texas in the past, but fires have become a year-round threat,” said Yongqiang Liu, a meteorologist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Southern Research Station, in an email.

Texans are noticing the uptick in extreme weather events, said Jeremy Mazur, a senior policy adviser at Texas 2036, a nonpartisan research organization that helps fund an extreme weather report written by the state climatologist.

A top concern of residents is the rising cost of homeowners insurance, according to a recent survey conducted by Texas 2036. About 88 percent of 1,000 likely voters polled expressed some level of concern about extreme weather events increasing what they pay for property insurance.

“The real impact that we’re starting to see from this growing wildfire risk is in the form of growing property insurance premiums,” Mr. Mazur said.

Texas homeowners saw their insurance rates increase 53.6 percent between 2019 and 2023, according to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence. That was the highest rate of any state save for Arizona.

Allstate, the second-largest insurer in Texas, included wildfires as one of its “greatest areas of potential catastrophe losses” in a regulatory filing this month.

Some insurance companies have begun to withdraw from parts of the Texas market. People in Llano and Burnet counties, southwest of Dallas, report being dropped by their insurers because of wildfire risk, the news outlet KXAN reported last week.

State legislators are starting to take note, but more action is needed, Mr. Mazur said. During the last legislative session, a Republican representative from East Texas introduced a bill to require the state forest service to recommend ways to mitigate the state’s wildfire risks. The bill was removed from the calendar before the end of session.

West Texas, from the oil rigs of the Permian Basin to the wind turbines twirling above the High Plains, has long been a magnet for companies seeking fortunes in energy.

Now, those arid ranch lands are offering a new moneymaking opportunity: data centers.

Lancium, an energy and data center management firm setting up shop in Fort Stockton and Abilene, is one of many companies around the country betting that building data centers close to generating sites will allow them to tap into underused clean power.

“It’s a land grab,” said Lancium’s president, Ali Fenn.

In the past, companies built data centers close to internet users, to better meet consumer requests, like streaming a show on Netflix or playing a video game hosted in the cloud. But the growth of artificial intelligence requires huge data centers to train the evolving large-language models, making proximity to users less necessary.

But as more of these sites start to pop up across the United States, there are new questions on whether they can meet the demand while still operating sustainably. The carbon footprint from the construction of the centers and the racks of expensive computer equipment is substantial in itself, and their power needs have grown considerably.

Just a decade ago, data centers drew 10 megawatts of power, but 100 megawatts is common today. The Uptime Institute, an industry advisory group, has identified 10 supersize cloud computing campuses across North America with an average size of 621 megawatts.

This growth in electricity demand comes as manufacturing in the United States is the highest in the past half-century, and the power grid is becoming increasingly strained.

The Uptime Institute predicted in a recent report that the sector’s myriad net-zero goals, which are self-imposed benchmarks, would become much harder to meet in the face of this demand and that backtracking could become common.

“This is not just about data centers,” said Mark Dyson, a managing director at RMI, a nonprofit organization focused on sustainability. “Data centers are a practice round for a much bigger wave of load growth that we are already seeing and are going to continue seeing in this country coming from electrification of industry, vehicles and buildings.”

The data center industry has embraced more sustainable solutions in recent years, becoming a significant investor in renewable power at the corporate level. Sites that leased wind and solar capacity jumped 50 percent year over year as of early 2023, to more than 40 gigawatts, capacity that continues to grow. Still, demand outpaces those investments. And the need for more processing power is backing up the interconnection queue and creating stopgap solutions.

Power-hungry data centers in full force further complicate the balance. Data centers in the construction pipeline would, when complete, use as much power annually as the San Francisco metro area, according to a report released on Wednesday by the real estate services company JLL. Most sites coming online this year are already leased; in popular markets, significant space will not open up for at least two years.

“You have to get as many gigawatts live as you possibly can, as fast as you can,” Ms. Fenn of Lancium said. “People are going to cobble that together in whatever way they can.”

That has quickly expanded development beyond the established first- and second-tier markets, such as Northern Virginia, Dallas and Silicon Valley.

Competition is growing in parts of the country offering cheap land and available power. Amazon, for instance, announced last month that it was planning a $10 billion project in Mississippi, the state’s largest economic development project, which includes data centers and solar generating sites.

“Anybody who has any significant source of power has now become a new data center market,” said Jim Kerrigan, managing principal of North American Data Centers, an industry consultancy.

A.I. is only a small percentage of the global data center footprint. The Uptime Institute predicts A.I. will skyrocket to 10 percent of the sector’s global power use by 2025, from 2 percent today.

“They have been building at a breakneck pace with so many other kinds of drivers for demand,” said Andy Lawrence, executive director of research at the institute. “A.I.’s kind of the froth on top.”

Last year, construction of data centers was up 25 percent, according to the real estate firm CBRE. And Nvidia, which supplies most of the high-tech chips powering this technology, last week reported record profit in data center sales, with 2023 revenue hitting $47.5 billion, a 217 percent jump from the year before.

The nation’s energy grids cannot handle that kind of demand, said Christopher Wellise, vice president of sustainability at Equinix, a global data center operator. “Technology is moving faster than our infrastructure has evolved,” he said.

Equinix, which operates 260 data centers across the globe, installed fuel cells from Bloom Energy to help provide backup power to many of its data centers. The company is also reducing emissions with offsets, such as through power purchase agreements, and has squeezed 5 percent more efficiency out of its operations in the past year, Mr. Wellise said. Design firms like Gensler have been experimenting with new designs that feature mass timber to cut down on the embodied carbon of data centers.

And A.I. itself can help: At a data center in Frankfurt, Equinix has used the technology to moderate cooling loads and adjust energy use in concert with changing weather, making a data center 9 percent more efficient.

Niklas Sundberg, a sustainable IT expert and chief digital officer at Kuehne + Nagel, a transport and logistics company in Sweden, said the industry would need to focus on investing in renewable generating capacity.

Some sites have sought to install on-site gas power plants to make up for shortfalls in the grid. It may be cleaner than existing power, but it adds to the industry’s substantial carbon footprint.

And lawmakers have proposed more transparency and action. The Senate introduced a proposal in early February to assess A.I.’s environmental impact. Lawmakers in Northern Virginia, which is known as Data Center Alley, have pushed to mandate sustainability goals for data centers.

Suhas Subramanyam, a Virginia state senator, proposed a number of rules, including one that would require data centers to get at least 90 percent of their power from renewable sources to qualify for subsidies. “I don’t want to stick my kids in a situation where, in 20 years, they have to pay some of the bills for things that we thought were a good idea and turned out not to be,” he said.