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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.

The Supreme Court that former President Donald J. Trump helped to shape tossed him a legal lifeline on Wednesday night, making a choice that substantially aided his efforts to delay his federal trial on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

By deciding to take up Mr. Trump’s claim that presidents enjoy almost total immunity from prosecution for any official action while in office — a legal theory rejected by two lower courts and one that few experts think has any basis in the Constitution — the justices bought the former president at least several months before a trial on the election interference charges can start.

It is not out of the question that Mr. Trump could still face a jury in the case, in Federal District Court in Washington, before Election Day. At this point, the legal calendar suggests that if the justices issue a ruling by the end of the Supreme Court’s term in June and find that Mr. Trump is not immune from prosecution, the trial could still start by late September or October.

But with each delay, the odds increase that voters will not get a chance to hear the evidence that Mr. Trump sought to subvert the last election before they decide whether to back him in the current one.

If Mr. Trump is successful in delaying the trial until after Election Day and he wins, he could use the powers of his office to seek to dismiss the election interference indictment altogether. Moreover, Justice Department policy precludes prosecuting a sitting president, meaning that, once sworn in, he could likely have any federal trial he is facing postponed until after he left office.

On its surface, the Supreme Court’s ruling on Wednesday night was a purely logistical decision. The justices decided to keep preparations for the trial on hold while they review a lower court’s rejection of the immunity defense. They set a hearing on the issue for the end of April.

As a practical matter, however, the court’s decision slow-walked the process of resolving the immunity debate, validating what had seemed like a last-ditch move by Mr. Trump’s legal team to find a way to keep pushing back a trial date until the campaign was over.

A spokesman for Jack Smith, the special counsel who is handling the election case in Washington, declined to comment on the court’s decision. Within Mr. Trump’s camp, the court’s ruling was seen as a major victory, but not a decisive one.

A year ago, when Mr. Trump was charged criminally for the first time, in Manhattan, and then, over the course of the next five months, was indicted three more times — in Florida, Washington and Georgia — it seemed as if he would spend much of 2024 in front of a jury. Now, however, if events break his way, he could go to trial only once before the election in November.

In that case, a state judge in Manhattan set a start date of March 25 for the former president’s trial on charges of arranging hush-money payments to a porn star in an effort to avert a scandal on the eve of the 2016 election.

And on Friday, a federal judge in Florida is set to hold a hearing to reset the clock on Mr. Trump’s other federal trial — the one in which he stands accused of mishandling dozens of classified documents after he left office. That trial was scheduled to start in May, but now may or may not take place before Election Day.

The Georgia case is also mired in pretrial clashes that have cast doubt on when, or even whether, it will proceed.

The election interference case in Washington was supposed to have been the first of Mr. Trump’s four criminal proceedings to go in front of a jury. Months ago, the judge overseeing it, Tanya S. Chutkan, picked a trial date of March 4.

But then Mr. Trump filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that he enjoyed complete immunity from the charges because they arose from acts he took as president. While the claim had no precedent and went against basic legal and constitutional principles, it had a powerful attraction to Mr. Trump’s lawyers: Once it was lodged, Judge Chutkan was required to put the underlying case on hold until the question of immunity was resolved.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court in Washington weighed in on the question, rejecting the immunity defense in a unanimous and scathing ruling that found that Mr. Trump was subject to federal criminal law like any other American.

He then asked the Supreme Court to keep the trial proceedings on hold while the justices decided whether they wanted to weigh in on the issue, perhaps hoping less that the justices would agree with him on the merits of his claims than that they might take up the question and take their time in reaching a decision.

And that is precisely what the court did on Wednesday.

The question of when the trial will ultimately happen has been complicated by Judge Chutkan’s insistence that Mr. Trump not lose any time to prepare for the proceeding while the pause in the case remains in effect. She has suggested in court papers that, in the spirit of fairness, the former president should have an extra day to prepare for every one lost to the stay.

Judge Chutkan froze the election case on Dec. 13. That means, if she sticks to her decision, she owes Mr. Trump an additional 82 days of preparation time — equivalent to the period between Dec. 13 and the originally scheduled trial date of March 4. If the Supreme Court renders a ruling on the immunity decision in June and preparations for the trial start up again immediately, the extra 82 days could push a trial date into September.

At that point, the general election campaign would be in full swing — and there would be no guarantee that the trial could be completed by Election Day.

Last August, a team of paleontologists announced that they had discovered the fossilized bones of a gigantic ancient whale. Perucetus, as they named it, might have weighed over 200 tons, which would make it the heaviest animal that has ever lived.

But in a study published Thursday, a pair of scientists have challenged that bold claim. “The numbers don’t make any sense,” said Nicholas Pyenson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and one of the authors of the new study.

In their new analysis, Dr. Pyenson and Ryosuke Motani, a paleontologist at the University of California, Davis, concluded that Perucetus probably weighed 60 to 70 tons, which would have made it about the size of a sperm whale.

They also analyzed fossils of blue whales and provided a new estimate of the weight of that species. They concluded that blue whales weigh up to 270 tons — much more than previous estimates, of up to 150 tons — which would make them far and away the heaviest known species in the history of the animal kingdom.

Perucetus first came to light in 2010, when Mario Urbina, a paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History at the National University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru, spotted a bone in a desert in southern Peru. He and his colleagues excavated 13 vertebrae, four ribs, and part of a pelvis.

The bones had many hallmarks of whales’ bones. But they were also astonishingly large and heavy. Dr. Urbina and his colleagues reconstructed the full skeleton of Perucetus by studying the much smaller whales that lived at the same time. They also drew inspiration from living manatees, which have dense skeletons that let them stay underwater to graze on sea grass.

Dr. Urbina and his colleagues ended up with a reconstruction of a bizarre animal. It had an enormous éclair-shaped trunk, a tiny head, flippers and vestigial hind legs.

But Dr. Motani, an expert on reconstructing the bodies of extinct marine animals, was puzzled by their conclusions. “I thought, how could it be? How can you pack that mass into that volume?” he said.

Dr. Motani contacted Dr. Pyenson, an expert on whale fossils. They both felt that modeling Perucetus after manatees was a mistake, since only whales have evolved to truly gigantic sizes.

“It’s really important to compare apples to apples,” Dr. Pyenson said.

For their own study, Dr. Pyenson and Dr. Motani took a fresh look at living whales. Since no one can haul a live blue whale onto a scale, no one has ever made a precise measurement of its weight. Dr. Pyenson and Dr. Motani dredged up data collected by Japanese whaling ships in the 1940s, and used that as the basis for a new estimate.

They also created a three-dimensional model of the blue whale, and used it to make a model of Perucetus. With this approach, they estimated that Perucetus weighed 60 to 70 tons, much less than the other research team had concluded.

Eli Amson, an expert on bone tissue at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany and an author on the original study, disagreed with the new approach. “This extinct whale had a very different biology than that of recent whales,” he said.

Dr. Amson said that he and his colleagues are now making their own three-dimensional model of the ancient species. They are finding that Perucetus was even more manatee-like than they originally believed, strengthening their conclusion that it rivaled or surpassed the blue whale in weight, he said.

Dr. Pyenson said Perucetus remains a major discovery, despite the smaller size he and Dr. Motani are suggesting. Paleontologists have long believed that whales evolved to huge sizes only in the past few million years. Even at 60 tons, Perucetus would have been a giant among early whales.

“Whales were clearly exploring big sizes,” Dr. Pyenson said.

As a fall rematch between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump becomes increasingly likely, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania is announcing an Election Threats Task Force, a federal-state partnership, in the critical battleground state.

The task force, announced Thursday morning by Gov. Josh Shapiro, will seek to thwart attempts to disrupt elections as well as protect voters from intimidation. The organization will include the Homeland Security Department, the Justice Department, the Pennsylvania Department of State and multiple state agencies.

In a country already awash in disinformation and lies about the safety, security and integrity of elections, the task force points to how seriously elected officials are taking threats to the coming campaign.

Pennsylvania is one of the first battleground states, if not the first, to announce such a collaboration this far from November.

“We take our responsibility as stewards of our democracy seriously and the Election Threats Task Force will ensure all levels of government are working together to combat misinformation, safeguard the rights of every citizen and ensure this election is safe, secure, free and fair,” Mr. Shapiro said in a statement.

After the 2020 election, Pennsylvania election officials had to navigate a sustained effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn his re-election loss in a state that Mr. Biden had won by 80,000 votes.

Mr. Shapiro, then the attorney general, fought multiple lawsuits, including efforts to get millions of ballots thrown out. Other election officials, including Al Schmidt, a Republican who is now the secretary of the commonwealth and then a Philadelphia election official, faced death threats.

“In recent years, we’ve seen bad-faith actors attempt to exploit these changes by spreading lies and baseless conspiracy theories, and attempting to delegitimize our safe, secure and accurate elections,” Mr. Schmidt said in a statement. “This task force has been working together to develop and coordinate plans to combat this dangerous misinformation and continue providing all eligible voters with accurate, trusted election information.”

In addition to the task force, Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Schmidt created a fact-check page on the administration website, debunking numerous false claims about the 2020 election and voting in the state.

The Biden administration announced on Thursday that it was proposing new regulations for how airlines must treat passengers in wheelchairs, an effort aimed at improving air travel for people with disabilities.

Under the proposed rule, damaging or delaying the return of a wheelchair would be an automatic violation of an existing federal law that bars airlines from discriminating against people with disabilities. The Transportation Department said that change would make it easier for the agency to penalize airlines for mishandling wheelchairs.

The proposed regulations would also require more robust training for workers who physically assist disabled passengers or handle their wheelchairs.

“There are millions of Americans with disabilities who do not travel by plane because of inadequate airline practices and inadequate government regulation, but now we are setting out to change that,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “This new rule would change the way airlines operate to ensure that travelers using wheelchairs can travel safely and with dignity.”

For people in wheelchairs, flying can be difficult and uncomfortable, and mistakes by airlines can make for an even more agonizing experience. More than 11,000 wheelchairs and scooters were mishandled by airlines last year, according to the Transportation Department.

The proposed regulations add to earlier moves by the Biden administration intended to improve the flying experience for disabled travelers. In 2022, the Transportation Department published a bill of rights for airline passengers with disabilities. Last year, the agency finalized new regulations to require more commercial aircraft to have accessible bathrooms.

What is the meaning of a cat’s meow that grows louder and louder? Or your pet’s sudden flip from softly purring as you stroke its back to biting your hand?

It turns out these misunderstood moments with your cat may be more common than not. A new study by French researchers, published last month in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, found that people were significantly worse at reading the cues of an unhappy cat (nearly one third got it wrong) than those of a contented cat (closer to 10 percent).

The study also suggested that a cat’s meows and other vocalizations are greatly misinterpreted and that people should consider both vocal and visual cues to try to determine what’s going on with their pets.

The researchers drew these findings from the answers of 630 online participants; respondents were volunteers recruited through advertisements on social media. Each watched 24 videos of differing cat behaviors. One third depicted only vocal communication, another third just visual cues, and the remainder involved both.

“Some studies have focused on how humans understand cat vocalizations,” said Charlotte de Mouzon, lead author of the study and a cat behavior expert at the Université Paris Nanterre. “Other studies studied how people understand cats’ visual cues. But studying both has never before been studied in human-cat communication.”

Cats display a wide range of visual signals: tails swishing side to side, or raised high in the air; rubbing and curling around our legs; crouching; flattening ears or widening eyes.

Their vocals can range from seductive to threatening: meowing, purring, growling, hissing and caterwauling. At last count, kittens were known to use nine different forms of vocalization, while adult cats uttered 16.

That we could better understand what a cat wants by using visual and vocal cues may seem obvious. But we know far less than we think we do.

“We often take for granted our ability to understand the people and the animals that we’re close to, and that we live with,” said Monique Udell, director of the Human-Animal Interaction Laboratory at Oregon State University, who was not involved in this study. “It’s worth doing these investigations because it’s showing us that we’re not always accurate, and it helps us understand where our blind spots are, that we really do benefit from having multiple sources of information.”

And the fact that we’re not very good at picking up on signs of animal discontentment should not come as a surprise, Dr. Udell suggested. “We’re more likely to perceive our animals as experiencing positive emotions because we want them to,” she said. “When we see the animals, it makes us feel good, and our positive emotional state in response to the animals gives us these rose-colored glasses.”

Even some of the most common cues may be misunderstood.

Purring, for example, is not always a sign of comfort. “Purring can be exhibited in uncomfortable or stressful conditions,” Dr. de Mouzon said. “When a cat is stressed, or even hurt, they will sometimes purr.”

Such instances are a form of “self-soothing,” said Kristyn Vitale, an assistant professor of animal health and behavior at Unity Environmental University in Maine, who was not involved in the new study.

The same lack of understanding applies to visual cues in dogs.

“People tend to perceive the wag of the tail as this really positive thing,” Dr. Udell said. “Actually, there are so many different, subtle cues that can be given off with the tail. Is the tail wagging more to the left or the right? How fast is the tail wagging? Is it above the midline or below? All of those wags mean entirely different things. Some of them are happy. Some are pre-aggression warning signs. You can see the whole gamut in just the tail wag.”

These studies may help to improve not only owners’ personal relationships with their pets, but also animal welfare, the researchers say.

As an example, Dr. de Mouzon pointed to a cat’s habit of suddenly biting. “Over time, with cats communicating and humans not understanding, the cat will just bite,” she said, “because they have learned over time that this is the only way to make something stop.”

Animal rescue shelters use such findings to educate prospective owners. Dr. Udell and Dr. Vitale are assessing whether cats can be suitable as therapy animals, or in aiding children with developmental differences.

Dr. Udell said such interventions were “increasingly important when we’re looking at mental health, when we’re looking at children who have difficulty bonding with people, if we look at what is now considered the loneliness epidemic.”

She continued, “These are all places where animal companionship can make really big differences.”

And the benefits for improving relationships between pets and their owners can be profound, Dr. Udell said.

“You can’t rely on animals to be these effective companions if you’re not mindful of their welfare,” she said. “And animal welfare, human welfare and interactions between the two are intricately linked. If you’re improving the lives of animals, you’re likely providing better outcomes for people, too.”

Clocks and calendars are handy, even if they are out of step with the astronomical world.

Earth’s actual orbit around the sun takes six hours and nine minutes more than the strict 365 days that our regular scheduling mechanisms prefer. To sync the natural world to our calendars, we add a leap day every four years, on Feb. 29 — today.

This all seems like mere chronological housekeeping, but there are other concerns at play, according to Judah Levine. He’s is the head of the Network Synchronization Project in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, in Boulder, Colo. He is one of dozens of time experts around the world who work on coordinating the world’s clocks so they are in sync not only with one another but with the natural world. He sat down with The New York Times to discuss what more is at stake on Leap Day.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

So this all starts with Julius Caesar?

He was the guy who started the initial leap day business, in something like 46 B.C.

Did he just declare a leap day?

I think he just said, “Every four years.” He was Caesar — he didn’t have to take a vote. Although he proclaimed it, it didn’t happen until about 30 or 40 years later.

The goal was to make the spring equinox happen in the spring, and the problem was that the equinox was bumping into winter; that was not cool.

The spring equinox in many societies was associated with a harvest festival; in order to have a harvest festival, you have to have a harvest. Passover, roughly in the time of Jesus, was a harvest festival, so Passover had to occur in the spring; it had to be loosely hooked into the equinox. The same thing is true of the of the Christian Easter.

But Caesar came before that.

Julius Caesar must have used a similar argument — that when we don’t do the leap day, those harvest holidays get pushed closer to winter. He may have been responding to a Roman requirement.

Then, in the Christian environment, the leap day produced a problem relative to Christmas, because Easter was moving back toward Christmas.

By definition, Easter falls on the Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox.

Right. The larger problem is that Christmas is a defined date, but Easter is a movable feast. And Passover, loosely speaking, is similar — it’s got to be a springtime thing.

The Jewish calendar doesn’t have a leap day, but it does have a leap month. It happens seven times in 19 years. It affects the Jewish calendar — it affects all the holidays. There’s a great discussion in the Talmud about how you decide when to do the leap month, and the root of the discussion is that Passover has got to be a harvest festival.

Then came the Gregorian fix. What was that?

It was made by Pope Gregory to correct the Julius Caesar rule, which was OK but not exactly right. From the time of Julius Caesar to the time of Pope Gregory was, like, 15 centuries. At that point, the equinox was at least 10 days off target — a little less than a day per century. Easter was now moving into the summer. Pope Gregory dropped those 10 days from the calendar, and he removed three leap days every 400 years from the system. That made a small adjustment so that the problem wouldn’t recur.

The idea was to keep the equinox at March 21, plus or minus a day.

Was it enough to keep Passover and Easter and harvest celebrations in the desired spot?

At least for several thousand years.

Because small time differences still accumulate?

I’m sure there’s a round-off now, and there will be a problem in 10 centuries, but loosely speaking, the holidays occur at the right time and will for the foreseeable future.

What’s important to understand nowadays about Leap Day?

That the fundamental reason for it is to keep the seasons and the calendar linked together. That’s why leap days are there.

Why does this happen with the spring equinox but not the winter or summer solstice?

It could. But once you fix the length of the year, it doesn’t matter how you fix it. Once you’ve synchronized the astronomical year with the calendar, you could do it any way and it would be equally good.

We could have leaped in winter, summer or autumn?

Yes. But the spring is always exciting because it’s a time of harvest and rebirth. It’s always had a special place in people’s hearts. It’s a special time.

The New York attorney general, Letitia James, on Wednesday sued JBS USA, the American arm of the world’s largest meatpacker, accusing the company of making misleading statements about its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The lawsuit is a major setback for JBS, which is based in Brazil, as it pursues a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

The lawsuit alleges that JBS has made a series of deceptive statements about its record on climate change, including claims that it will achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040.

Ms. James cited several instances in recent years when the company claimed it was on the path to being net zero, or not adding any carbon emissions to the atmosphere. One she cited occurred during an onstage interview with Gilberto Tomazoni, the company’s global chief executive, at a New York Times event in September.

Other examples of misleading claims, Ms. James said, include a 2015 industry presentation, a full-page ad that JBS placed in The Times in 2021, and statements that currently appear on the company’s website.

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

“When companies falsely advertise their commitment to sustainability, they are misleading consumers and endangering our planet,” Ms. James said in a statement. “JBS USA’s greenwashing exploits the pocketbooks of everyday Americans and the promise of a healthy planet for future generations.”

In a statement to The Times, JBS said it disagreed with the attorney general’s allegations. It said that it would continue to work with farmers and others “to help feed a growing population while using fewer resources and reducing agriculture’s environmental impact.”

JBS was already under scrutiny for its environmental record, labor practices and past activities. In 2017, its holding company, J&F Investimentos, agreed to pay $3.2 billion in reparations and fines as part of a Brazilian federal investigation after the company acknowledged bribing public officials to sign off on investments so it could expand its business internationally. In a 2020 plea agreement, J&F pleaded guilty to related charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Since then, the holding company says, it has developed a robust anti-corruption program for JBS, a requirement of the plea deal, though it recently announced it would challenge the fine it had previously agreed to in the 2017 settlement agreement. A Brazilian Supreme Court Justice temporarily suspended payment.

In the live interview with the Times, Mr. Tomazoni said JBS was working to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. “We are so confident that we are doing a great job on that,” he said. “And look, we pledge to be net zero in 2040.”

But JBS’s claim that it would be able to achieve zero emissions was deemed misleading by the National Advertising Review Board last year.

JBS said at the time that it disagreed the advertising board’s “interpretation of how consumers perceive the challenged claims,” but agreed to comply with the recommendation to stop using the net-zero claims in “published statements and advertising claims going forward.”

JBS produces huge quantities of beef, pork and chicken. It has annual revenues of more than $50 billion and an extensive supply chain that includes tens of thousands of farms in the Amazon. A Times investigation found that ranches supplying JBS significantly overlapped Indigenous land, conservation zones or areas that were deforested after 2008, when laws regulating deforestation were put in place in Brazil.

JBS said at the time that the ranches had been in compliance with rules to prevent deforestation when it bought from them, though it acknowledged it couldn’t trace indirect suppliers. It also said it had excluded thousands of suppliers because of irregularities.

Its proposed listing on the New York Stock Exchange has faced strong opposition, drawing together an unusual alliance of environmentalists, other meatpackers and both Republican and Democratic politicians. Last week, JBS said it was delaying plans for the listing until at least the second half of the year.

Glenn Hurowitz, the chief executive of Mighty Earth, a nonprofit group that investigates supply chains that affect forests, said the lawsuit demonstrated how a company’s handling of climate and environmental issues can become an obstacle to business success.

The lawsuit “should be a warning signs to other companies that think environmental concerns can be easily dismissed,” he said.

People who frequently smoke marijuana have a higher risk of heart attack and stroke, according to a study published on Wednesday.

The article, published in The Journal of the American Heart Association, is an analysis of responses to the U.S. government’s annual survey on behavioral risk from 2016 to 2020.

The respondents answered health questions, including reporting their own health problems related to heart disease.

About 4 percent of the respondents reported daily marijuana use, which the researchers suggested raised the chance of a heart attack by 25 percent and of a stroke by 42 percent. Among those who never smoked tobacco, daily use was tied to a 49 percent higher risk of heart attack and a more than doubled risk of stroke, the study indicated.

About three-quarters of the respondents said that smoking was their main method of using weed. The other quarter consumed it by vaping, through edibles or drinking it.

“Cannabis smoke releases the same toxins and particulate matter that tobacco does,” said the study’s first author, Abra M. Jeffers, a data analyst at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She conducted the analysis during her post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco.

The study is merely observational in its review of survey responses; it does not provide conclusive evidence that regular marijuana use causes heart disease.

Even so, researchers and experts said they were concerned about its implications, especially as cannabis use has increased in recent years. Thirty-eight states have legalized medical use of marijuana, and 24 have begun allowing recreational use.

Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, said in an email that as cannabis consumption has risen, “there has also been an increase in the emergence of adverse health effects including addiction, respiratory problems, accidents, psychosis and cardiovascular events.”

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is weighing whether to follow the recommendations of a team of federal scientists at the Food and Drug Administration, which concluded last year that marijuana should be reclassified to a less restrictive category of controlled substances. They cited a lesser potential for abuse than other drugs have as well as marijuana’s possible medical benefits.

But the new paper’s authors warned that frequent marijuana use “could be an important, unappreciated risk factor leading to many preventable deaths.”

“This study demonstrates that smoking cannabis may be as harmful as smoking tobacco,” said Dr. Salomeh Keyhani, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and the study’s senior author.

“Cannabis is being marketed to the public as a substance that is harmless and might be good for you,” Dr. Keyhani added. “I worry that we’re sleepwalking into a public health crisis. The progress on tobacco smoking might be undone.”

Heart disease is already the nation’s leading cause of death. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 695,000 Americans died in 2021 of cardiovascular-related causes, such as coronary artery disease.

Other surveys have documented the surge in consumption of marijuana. The percentage of Americans reporting marijuana use increased to 17 percent last year from 7 percent in 2013, according to a Gallup poll.

A study published in August and financed by the National Institute of Drug Abuse offered more details on consumption by age. From 2012 to 2022, reported use among adults up to age 30 increased to 44 percent from 28 percent, while daily use rose to 11 percent from 6 percent. Among those 35 to 50 years old, the proportion for overall use rose to 28 percent from 13 percent.

A 2023 federal survey documented marijuana use in the past year among 8 percent of eighth graders, 18 percent of 10th graders and 29 percent of 12 graders.

The new study was funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. The surveys that were analyzed came from 434,104 respondents, who were 18 to 74 years old. Sixty 60 percent were white, 12 percent were Black and 19 percent were Hispanic.

Dr. David C. Goff, director of a cardiovascular division at the institute that financed the research, cautioned that comparing the theoretical harms of smoking tobacco versus marijuana was challenging because of differing consumption patterns. People tend to consume more cigarettes a day, but marijuana users tend to inhale marijuana more deeply and hold it for longer.

“What we can say is it’s a bad idea to put smoke in your lungs,” he said.

Even relatively casual weed use had an association with heart disease in the new study. Weekly use was tied to a 3 percent greater risk of heart attack and a 5 percent greater chance of stroke.

Robert Page, a pharmacist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora who was not involved with the new study, said that patients and their health care providers should have open conversations about cannabis use. But he added that even doctors were often unaware of the risks.

“People don’t know the data,” he said. “They think because it’s natural, it’s safe.”