Category: News

President Biden turned to an unlikely ally on Friday in his drive to build support for Ukraine’s war effort as U.S. aid falters, declaring during a White House visit by the far-right prime minister of Italy that the two leaders “have each other’s backs” and “have Ukraine’s back.”

The warm tone, a striking departure from Mr. Biden’s assessment of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni when she was elected, extended to a number of foreign policy fronts, as the leaders sought to portray themselves as united on topics including confronting global migration and trying to prevent a broader war in the Middle East.

“As you said when we first met here in the Oval, Giorgia, that we have each other’s backs,” Mr. Biden said. “We do, and you’ve demonstrated that from the moment you took office.”

But Mr. Biden highlighted their unity on Kyiv’s efforts to fend off an invasion by President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, creating a contrast with conservatives in Congress. “We also have Ukraine’s back,” Mr. Biden said. “That’s why I’m urging the House of Representatives to pass legislation” that would send billions of dollars to fund the war effort.

The meeting intensified an all-out assault by Mr. Biden to push stalled military aid for Ukraine through a reluctant Congress. He convened a meeting this week at which he sought to push Speaker Mike Johnson to allow a vote on aid. He has warned that the divisions over aid are a gift to Russia. And he has used meetings with European officials this year not only to ensure a united front against Russia’s invasion but also to pressure Congress.

In Ms. Meloni, Mr. Biden has found a surprisingly kindred spirit.

The Italian prime minister said on Friday that as the chairwoman of the Group of 7 nations, she was focused on “defending freedom and building peace for Ukraine.”

After being elected in 2022, Ms. Meloni has steered away from the most Russia-friendly elements of her coalition, and Italy recently agreed to sign a security agreement with Ukraine to help Kyiv’s defense industry.

Mr. Biden’s embrace of Ms. Meloni has come as a surprise after he expressed concern for democracy when she rose to power. Her party, the Brothers of Italy, has roots in the neo-fascist factions that emerged after World War II. She drew comparisons to former President Donald J. Trump after addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in the United States in 2022.

“She hails from Europe’s far right, and her coalition contains influential voices that are much more pro-Russian and sympathetic to Putin than the European mainstream, yet she has bucked that trend and located Italy firmly in the trans-Atlantic camp that is committed to supporting Ukraine,” said Charles A. Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Europe adviser on the National Security Council in the Obama administration.

While she has advanced other far-right causes, such as anti-L.G.B.T.Q. policies, in Italy, Mr. Biden has seemed content to set those moves aside to secure an ally on critical foreign policy matters.

Ms. Meloni also could benefit from the global spotlight that comes with a visit to the Oval Office, Mr. Kupchan said, especially as she seeks to convince her own constituents of the importance of defending Ukraine.

“The domestic debate in Italy is, I would say, more skeptical of aid to Ukraine than in most other countries,” Mr. Kupchan said.

Ms. Meloni also stressed the need to discuss strategies to combat human trafficking driving global migration, particularly from North Africa. Mr. Biden too has recently made combating illegal migration a central focus of his administration. Just the day before his meeting with Ms. Meloni, he traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border to push Congress to enact sweeping changes there.

Wildfires burning out of control in the Texas Panhandle have left a path of devastation, with up to 500 structures destroyed as of Friday and ranchers facing crippling losses of cattle and grazing lands. Officials warned that warm, windy and dry weather was expected to return over the weekend and could fan the flames.

“When you look at the damages that have occurred here, it’s just completely gone, nothing left but ashes on the ground,” Gov. Greg Abbott said as he traveled to the region to survey the damage. “Those who are affected by this have gone through utter devastation.”

The National Weather Service forecast “critical fire weather conditions” on Saturday and Sunday, and urged residents to refrain from outdoor activities that might generate sparks or flames over the weekend, which includes Texas Independence Day on Saturday.

Already, one death has been confirmed, a second has been reported by family members and several firefighters have been injured, officials said.

New questions were being raised about the origins of the biggest blaze, known as the Smokehouse Creek fire, which has charred at least 1,075,000 acres of land and become the largest wildfire on record in Texas history.

Lawyers for property insurers and landowners have asked an electric company to preserve a fallen power pole that they believe could have ignited the fire, which remained only 15 percent contained on Friday.

Salem Abraham, who owns 3,500 acres of hay land that burned outside of Canadian, Texas, said he and several other landowners were finalizing a lawsuit that they expected to file later on Friday against the electric company, Xcel Energy, which operates power lines throughout the area.

He said that investigators sent by his lawyers had located a downed pole outside of the town of Stinnett, Texas, that showed signs of having been pushed over by the high winds on Monday, putting live electricity in contact with dry brush and grass.

State officials have said they are still investigating the cause of the fire and did not comment directly on the landowners’ claims. Xcel Energy have notified regulators of the lawyers’ letter.

“We will cooperate with officials while conducting our own investigations to determine the causes of the fires,” the company said in a statement on Friday.

Mr. Abbott said early assessments suggested that about 400 to 500 structures had been destroyed, and he cautioned that the number could rise as surveys continued.

W. Nim Kidd, the chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said that several firefighters and other emergency workers had been injured.

Mr. Abbott also warned of the weather conditions expected over the next couple of days.

“Everybody needs to understand that we face enormous potential fire dangers as we head into this weekend,” he said. “No one can let down their guard, everyone must remain very vigilant.”

A brief period of light precipitation slowed expansion of the fires on Thursday and Friday, but the forecast for dry, windy weather prompted warnings for Saturday afternoon through Sunday evening, covering the Panhandle region and nearby parts of Oklahoma. Wildfires in that state have already caused “heart-wrenching devastation,” according to the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture.

Five fires were still active in the area as of Friday afternoon, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service. Three of them were more than 50 percent contained, the authorities said.

The Panhandle is cattle country, and ranchers have been able to do little but watch as the grasslands that their livestock rely on for food have been burned. Thousands of cattle may have died in the blazes or been so badly injured that they would have to be killed, the authorities said.

As of Friday afternoon, just over 500 customers in Hemphill County, one of the hardest hit by the wildfires this week, were without power, according to PowerOutage.us. On Wednesday, North Plains Electric Cooperative said in a statement that it had around 115 miles of power lines to rebuild.

“Our goal is to have ALL that are without power restored by Monday, March 4,” the company said.

Mr. Abbott granted temporary waivers on Thursday to three state agencies, freeing them to use all available resources to support communities affected by the fires.

In a speech on Thursday at the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, President Biden said that he had deployed federal resources to help fight the flames, in response to requests from state officials. He urged residents of the area near the fires to listen to their local officials.

“When disasters strike, there’s no red state or blue state where I come from,” Mr. Biden said, adding, “We’re standing with everyone, everyone affected by these wildfires, and we’re going to continue to help you respond and recover.”

Other areas were also affected by wildfires this week.

In Nebraska, a wildfire burned over 70,000 acres, but as of Thursday the fire was 98 percent contained, according to the state’s Emergency Management Agency.

An initial damage assessment showed that the fire had destroyed four homes and “countless outbuilding and agricultural infrastructure,” the agency said. No fatalities or injuries had been reported.

In Kansas, the forest service responded to a large fire in Saline County on Thursday. Local officials issued an evacuation notice for residents in the afternoon, but it was lifted about an hour later. Firefighters were still in the area to prevent further problems, county officials said on Thursday.

Ivan Penn contributed reporting.

A federal judge in Florida held a hearing on Friday to consider a new date for former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of mishandling classified documents, but made no immediate decision about a choice that could have major consequences for his legal and political future.

The judge, Aileen M. Cannon, previously said she was inclined to make some “reasonable adjustments” to the timing of the trial, which was originally scheduled to start on May 20 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla. Several decisions Judge Cannon has reached in recent months about the pacing of the case have made it all but impossible for the trial to start in May.

What remained to be seen at the completion of Friday’s hearing was just how long of a delay Judge Cannon would end up imposing. She did not give an indication of her thinking or provide a sense of when she would announce a date.

On Thursday evening, Mr. Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, sent Judge Cannon their proposals about when the trial should begin.

Mr. Smith’s legal team, hewing to its long-held position of trying to conduct the trial before Election Day, requested a date of July 8. But after months of seeking to delay the trial until next year, Mr. Trump’s lawyers suddenly suggested that they would be willing to go along with a date of Aug. 12.

The hearing in front of Judge Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Mr. Trump in his waning days in office, is being held just days after a decision by the Supreme Court that increased the possibility that the former president might not face trial before Election Day in his other federal case — the one in which he stands accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

The justices agreed to decide whether Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution on the election interference charges, scheduling arguments for the end of April and keeping the proceedings in the trial court frozen until they resolve the issue. As a practical matter, the Supreme Court’s decision to take up the case meant that the election trial was unlikely to begin before September, in the heat of the general election campaign.

Judge Cannon’s decision about whether to go with a July date, an August date or something later in the documents case could have an effect on the timing of the election case, as well. Mr. Trump attended the hearing on Friday.

It was not clear why Mr. Trump’s legal team said it would be open to August after long seeking to postpone the trial until next year. But one possibility was that the lawyers, by proposing to spend much of late summer and early fall in court on the classified documents case, were seeking to reduce the chances of there being time for the election case to go to trial before Election Day.

Only months ago, it seemed that Mr. Trump would spend much of 2024 in front of a jury, fending off four separate criminal indictments in four different cities.

At this point, however, only one of his criminal trials has a solid start date. Last month, a state judge in Manhattan picked March 25 for commencing his trial on charges of arranging hush money to a porn star in an effort to avert a scandal on the eve of the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump’s fourth criminal case, in which he stands accused of tampering with the election results in Georgia, has not yet been set for trial. It is currently in turmoil as a judge in Fulton County considers whether to disqualify Fani T. Willis, the district attorney who filed the indictment, from the case over allegations of financial misconduct surrounding a romantic relationship she had with one of her deputies.

The hearing in Florida touched on more than scheduling issues.

Judge Cannon has asked the defense and prosecution to be ready to discuss Mr. Trump’s unusually broad and highly politicized motion for additional discovery, which was filed in January. In the motion, the former president’s lawyers suggested that, as part of their defense at trial, they intended to argue that federal officials — chief among them those from the intelligence community — were “politically motivated and biased” against Mr. Trump.

The parties are also set to debate an effort by Mr. Smith to keep under seal the names of about two dozen potential witnesses who could testify at trial.

Judge Cannon briefly agreed to a request by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to include the witnesses’ names in a public court filing. But she put that decision on hold after Mr. Smith accused her of having made a “clear error” and said the witnesses could face threats or harassment if their identities were revealed.

Even amid discussion of these other issues, the question of the trial’s timing was arguably paramount.

If Judge Cannon were to postpone the proceeding into next year, she would probably face a tidal wave of criticism. It is possible she could also provoke Mr. Smith’s first appeal since the indictment was returned in June, even though rulings related to scheduling matters are generally not subject to a challenge in higher courts.

When Judge Cannon was randomly assigned to the case last spring, she was already under fire for having issued a ruling in an early part of the inquiry that was favorable to Mr. Trump, but so legally questionable that an appeals court sternly rebuked her in reversing it.

After the F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, for classified documents in August 2022, Judge Cannon appointed an independent arbiter to figure out whether any of the materials collected by the agents were privileged and should be kept out of the hands of investigators.

But she accompanied that relatively typical decision with another that was all but unheard of, effectively freezing the government’s investigation of Mr. Trump in place until after the arbiter, known as a special master, completed his work.

Prosecutors were outraged by the move, accusing Judge Cannon not only of lacking the power to insert herself into the case so extremely, but also of treating Mr. Trump differently than a normal criminal defendant.

A federal appeals court in Atlanta ultimately agreed, unanimously reversing her decision and pointing out that she appeared to have granted “a special exception” for Mr. Trump in defiance of “our nation’s foundational principle that our law applies to all.”

Still, in some of her more recent rulings, Judge Cannon has shown herself willing to buck Mr. Trump.

On Wednesday, for example, she denied a highly unusual request from his lawyers to gain access to a secret government filing detailing a trove of classified discovery evidence that prosecutors said was neither helpful nor relevant to his defense.

If Judge Cannon had permitted the request, legal experts said, it would have fallen far outside the normal procedures laid out in the Classified Information Procedures Act, the federal law governing the use of classified materials at public trials.

But even while ruling against Mr. Trump, Judge Cannon seemed to suggest that he was different from most criminal defendants. She did not quite agree with Mr. Smith’s position that the facts in this case did not “remotely justify a deviation from the normal process.”

“The court,” she wrote, “cannot speak with such confidence in this first-ever criminal prosecution of a former United States president — once the country’s chief classification authority over many of the documents the special counsel now seeks to withhold from him.”

Russians traveled from far and wide to bear witness as Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in an Arctic prison at 47, was buried in Moscow on Friday amid a heavy police presence.

Some mourners chanted his name. Others said, “Thank you for your son!” to Mr. Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, who had fought for days to reclaim his body. Eventually, the authorities relented, but Mr. Navalny’s team described having to overcome a gantlet to persuade a church, a cemetery and a hearse to take part in the burial.

Thousands turned out for the service, Mr. Navalny’s supporters estimated. Foreign diplomats were among the crowd. Some Russians shouted, “No to war,” risking arrest. In the end, Mr. Navalny’s coffin was lowered into the cemetery grounds to the strains of the Sinatra song “My Way” and one from the movie “Terminator 2,” video showed.

Mourners, above, walking to the Borisovskoye cemetery on Friday in Moscow during the funeral for Mr. Navalny. Law enforcement officers detained a man near the cemetery, below.

Carrying Mr. Navalny’s coffin from the Moscow church where his funeral was held on Friday.

Laying flowers at the grave in Moscow.

A journalist estimated in a Facebook post that “tens of thousands” of people had assembled for the funeral, though that figure could not be verified.

Diplomats, including the French ambassador to Russia, Pierre Levy, second from left, and the U.S. ambassador, Lynne M. Tracy, second from right, waiting near the church for the service.

Police officers on the roof of an apartment building during the burial.

The police presence outside the cemetery where the burial was taking place.

Some people chanted Mr. Navalny’s name and thanked his mother for her son.

Law enforcement officers outside the church after Mr. Navalny’s funeral.

Videos showed the crowd tossing flowers onto the road as the funeral cortège left the church for the cemetery.

Valerie Hopkins contributed reporting.

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Google removed the ability to generate images of people from its Gemini chatbot. We talk about why, and about the brewing culture war over artificial intelligence. Then, did Kara Swisher start “Hard Fork”? We clear up some podcast drama and ask about her new book, “Burn Book.” And finally, the legal expert Daphne Keller tells us how the U.S. Supreme Court might rule on the most important First Amendment cases of the internet era, and what Star Trek and soy boys have to do with it.

Today’s guests:

• Kara Swisher, tech journalist and Casey Newton’s former landlord

• Daphne Keller, director of the program on platform regulation at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center

Additional Reading:

Credits

“Hard Fork” is hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton and produced by Davis Land and Rachel Cohn. The show is edited by Jen Poyant. Engineering by Alyssa Moxley and original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Diane Wong and Rowan Niemisto. Fact-checking by Caitlin Love.

Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Pui-Wing Tam, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti and Jeffrey Miranda.

A judge in the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump is hearing final arguments on Friday afternoon on a motion to disqualify the prosecutor who brought the case, Fani T. Willis, on the ground that a romantic relationship she had with a subordinate created a conflict of interest.

In their first line of attack on Friday, defense attorneys tried to set the bar low for disqualification, arguing that even the appearance of a conflict of interest could lead to the dismissal of Ms. Willis and her entire office from the case. The question could be pivotal to the outcome of whether the disqualification effort succeeds.

“We can demonstrate an appearance of a conflict of interest and that is sufficient,” John B. Merchant III, a lawyer for one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants, Michael Roman, told the judge, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court.

Judge McAfee is not likely to rule on the matter on Friday. Rather, the hearing, which started at 1 p.m., is allowing lawyers from the two sides to sum up their arguments over a salacious subplot to the election case — one that has already caused significant embarrassment and turmoil for Ms. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Details of her personal life have been spilled out in the Atlanta courthouse where she had hoped to put Mr. Trump and 14 co-defendants on trial as soon as this summer.

The stakes are high: If Ms. Willis is disqualified from the case, her entire office would be, too, and the case would probably be turned over to a district attorney from another jurisdiction. The new prosecutor could choose to continue the case as planned, modify the charges or drop them.

Disqualification would reduce the chances that a trial would begin before the November presidential election, in which Mr. Trump is expected to be the Republican nominee.

The relationship between Ms. Willis and Nathan Wade, an Atlanta-area lawyer she hired in November 2021 to manage the prosecution team, first came to light in January, in a motion filed by a lawyer for one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants.

The defense lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, asserted that the romance began before Ms. Willis hired Mr. Wade, and argued that Mr. Wade was unqualified for the high-profile job, for which he has been paid at least $650,000 so far.

Ms. Merchant also claimed that Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis had engaged in “self-dealing,” because the couple went on vacations together that she said Mr. Wade had paid for.

In her filing on Jan. 8, Ms. Merchant cited Georgia case law in arguing that the situation as she laid it out met the standard for a disqualifying conflict of interest.

“Such a conflict of interest has been held to arise where the prosecutor has acquired a personal interest or stake in the defendant’s conviction,” she wrote.

Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade have acknowledged that they had a romantic relationship. But they have said that it began after Mr. Wade was hired, and that it ended before Mr. Trump and 18 of his allies were charged in August in a sweeping indictment that accuses them of conspiring to overturn Mr. Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. Ms. Willis said the couple roughly split the costs of the trips they took together, with Ms. Willis often using cash to pay back Mr. Wade for her share.

In a speech at a Black church in Atlanta, Ms. Willis, an African-American Democrat, suggested that racism was motivating those who were criticizing her decision to hire Mr. Wade, who is also Black.

In a later legal filing, Ms. Willis brushed aside the motion to disqualify her as a legally dubious stunt, arguing that there was no conflict of interest. She wrote that “the existence of a relationship between members of a prosecution team, in and of itself, is simply not a status that entitles a criminal defendant any remedy.”

The judge held a series of hearings on the issue in February that felt at times like a mini-trial. Mr. Wade took the stand, as did Ms. Willis, who pushed back angrily against Ms. Merchant’s questions. Ms. Willis described feeling loneliness after becoming the district attorney, the violent threats and racist messages she had received, and her frustration that the focus on her love life had distracted the nation’s attention from Mr. Trump and the 14 co-defendants who remain after four of those originally charged pleaded guilty.

At a hearing on Tuesday, the conflicting accounts of when the prosecutors’ romance began took center stage. Ms. Merchant called Terrence Bradley, a former law partner of Mr. Wade, to the stand, hoping to help prove that the relationship began before Mr. Wade was hired.

But Mr. Bradley delivered contradictory information. Entered into evidence was a text exchange he had with Ms. Merchant months earlier, in which he said that the relationship “absolutely” predated Mr. Wade’s hiring. But on the witness stand, he repeatedly said he had no knowledge of when the romance began.

The judge will have to decide which of Mr. Bradley’s accounts to believe as he weighs whether to disqualify the prosecutors. Another witness, a former friend and employee of Ms. Willis named Robin Yeartie, also testified that the relationship predated Mr. Wade’s hiring. But under cross-examination, she said that she had left the D.A.’s office on bad terms and was no longer Ms. Willis’s friend.

There is already some precedent within the Trump case for disqualification. In July 2022, a judge blocked Ms. Willis from developing a case against Burt Jones, a fake Trump elector in Georgia in 2020, because Ms. Willis had hosted a fund-raiser for one of Mr. Jones’s political rivals. A year and a half after the disqualification, no replacement prosecutor has yet been named to continue investigating Mr. Jones, who is now Georgia’s lieutenant governor.

Pete Skandalakis, the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, said in a recent interview that the current situation was different from the one involving Mr. Jones and suggested that it could move more quickly because an indictment has already been handed up.

Mr. Skandalakis, who would be the person responsible for reassigning the case, said last month that only a few other district attorney’s offices in Georgia were large enough to handle the case, and that one factor he would consider if he had to reassign the case would be a district attorney’s proximity to Fulton County. That probably means that the case would fall to a district attorney’s office in the Atlanta region.

Such an outcome would inevitably delay the case for some time.

Two good friends, Rebecca Grekin and Yannai Kashtan, met up one crisp December morning at Stanford University, where they both study and teach. The campus was deserted for the holidays, an emptiness at odds with the school’s image as a place where giants roam, engaged in groundbreaking research on heart transplants, jet aerodynamics, high-performance computing. Work that has changed the world.

Ms. Grekin and Mr. Kashtan are young climate researchers. I had asked them there to explain how they hoped to change the world themselves.

They have very different ideas about how to do that. A big question: What role should money from oil and gas — the very industry that’s the main contributor to global warming— have in funding work like theirs?

“I’m just not convinced we need fossil fuel companies’ help,” said Mr. Kashtan, 25, as we toured the lab where he works, surrounded by sensitive electronic gear used to detect methane. “The forces and the incentives are aligned in the wrong direction. It makes me very cynical.”

For Ms. Grekin, 26, that’s a delicate issue. Her entire academic career, including her Ph.D. work at Stanford, has been funded by Exxon Mobil.

“I know people who are trying to change things from the inside,” she said. “I’ve seen change.”

We spent hours that day — first at her lab, then in his, and then off campus at a hole-in-the-wall Burmese joint — as the two disagreed and agreed in amiable and insistent ways about some of the biggest questions facing the next generation of climate scientists like themselves.

Should universities accept climate funding from the very companies whose products are heating up the planet? Is it better to work for change from within a system, or from outside? How much should the world count on cutting-edge technologies that seem far-fetched today?

And the big one. What is gained or lost when oil producers fund climate solutions?

Some of Ms. Grekin’s research has focused on calculating the true climate impact of food and other things that people consume. In the hallway outside her lab hangs a large poster describing her work. The poster prominently features the ExxonMobil logo.

“They brag about their relationship with Stanford, their association with bright, young, environmentally minded scientists,” Mr. Kashtan said, standing in the hallway. “But the majority of their money is going to things that are pretty explicitly about getting more oil out of the ground.”

Ms. Grekin pushed back on any suggestion that Exxon had influenced her research. The poster was simply being transparent about her funding, she said, which is always appropriate. “You’re supposed to share your funding sources,” she said. “They don’t have anything to do with the research. They just happen to fund graduate school.”

In any case, her work is already being used at 40 universities to cut the climate impact of their sprawling food services, she pointed out. Would that have happened otherwise?

Despite differences like these, Mr. Kashtan and Ms. Grekin are friends. They fill in to teach each other’s classes. They both talk passionately about solutions to climate change, and both co-signed an open letter last year calling on Stanford to establish guidelines for engaging with fossil fuel companies.

Mr. Kashtan says his skepticism about oil-industry motivations was born of his own experience. A physics and chemistry double-major working on his Ph.D., he previously researched a technology called electrofuels that big corporations, including fossil fuel companies, are promoting as a way to fight global warming.

The technology behind electrofuels, also known as e-fuels, sounds equal parts science fiction and magic.

It essentially involves capturing carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that is rapidly warming the planet, by sucking it out of the air, then combining it with hydrogen that has been split from water (using renewable energy) to make liquid fuels that can be used in trucks and planes. Start-ups working on e-fuels, including a Stanford spinoff, have raised millions of dollars, typically from the venture capital arms of large oil and gas companies, as well as from airlines.

But Mr. Kashtan has come to believe that deploying e-fuels at scale isn’t just many years away, it also doesn’t make sense from an economic or even energy perspective. For one, he said, capturing carbon dioxide by pulling it out of the atmosphere is itself energy intensive. The rest of the process to produce the fuel, even more so.

Instead, these technologies have become industry-funded red herrings that distract from the critical task of burning less fossil fuels, he said. After all, it is the burning of coal, oil and gas that’s putting the planet-warming gases in the air in the first place.

He’s come to be particularly wary of how well-meaning colleagues, like his friend Ms. Grekin, could play a role in bringing about that delay, for example by amplifying research that emphasizes far-out technological solutions instead of, say, taking steps like curbing emissions.

Technologies like electrofuels aren’t simply “complete wastes of time, talent, and money,” Mr. Kashtan said in his characteristically direct way, “they’re exactly what fossil fuel companies want.”

We were in Mr. Kashtan’s lab, filled with tubes, tanks and ozone scrubbers. The team he’s part of was working on a project to measure air pollution from gas-burning stoves in homes across the world. It wasn’t what he expected to be researching. Since he was a child growing up in Oakland, he’s been interested in the possibilities of technology, not the harms of it.

As a boy he produced a series of YouTube videos earnestly explaining every element of the periodic table. “That’s pure Beryllium metal right there: super toxic, super hard, pretty expensive, and one of my favorite elements,” 12-year-old Yannai says in one clip, decked out in goggles and lab coat.

Ms. Grekin disputed Mr. Kashtan’s notion of new technologies as delay tactics. That approach raised the risk that the world would write off promising innovations prematurely, she said. “Sometimes you don’t know until you do the research,” she said.

“Do we need people focusing on these problems so that we can find either better solutions or and cheaper solutions? Yes. Do we know exactly what those will be? No,” Ms. Grekin said.

“But I see an exception when it comes to climate, because of the timeline,” Mr. Kashtan said. “We’re racing against the clock here.”

“Maybe I’m more optimistic about the future and Yannai, maybe, is less,” Ms. Grekin said.

We were starving and decided to look for lunch. The only option on the all-but-empty campus was a sad Starbucks. So instead we drove to a Burmese restaurant, a local favorite, snagging a table outside so that we could hear each other better.

On the way, Ms. Grekin was apologetic about driving us in her car, a bright yellow Fiat 500 that she’s had for more than a decade, instead of walking or taking a bus. Usually she doesn’t drive, she said. It was just that she’d brought several weeks’ worth of recycling to drop off that day, one of the few permissible excuses for a climate researcher to drive to campus in a car, in her view.

“I came with my entire car full of recycling,” she said.

Ms. Grekin said she also tries to buy very little. “This is from high school. Like, a lot of my clothes are from high school,” she said.

In response, Mr. Kashtan pointed to his own shirt. “This is a hand-me-down,” he said.

Fossil fuel funding for research has become a thorny issue for many universities, and particularly at Stanford’s Doerr School. Founded in 2022 with a $1.1 billion gift by John Doerr, a venture capitalist and billionaire, the school quickly attracted criticism for saying it would work with and accept donations from fossil fuel companies.

A recently issued list of funders of the Doerr School is a who’s who of the fossil fuel industry

In October, a nonprofit group founded by Adam McKay, the writer and director of “Don’t Look Up,” the climate-themed film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio, criticized the Doerr School in a satirical ad that has since been viewed more than 200,000 times on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The school seeks to come up with ways to combat climate change, so we’re calling on the help of all our friends at Big Oil,” the parody says.

Stanford has been a friend to oil and gas in the past. A researcher at the Stanford Exploration Project, which began in the 1970s, later developed an algorithm for BP that contributed to a 200-million-barrel oil and gas discovery in the Gulf of Mexico.

Today, many of these older programs are atrophying and some are shutting down. A project that worked with oil and gas companies to study the geology of undersea drill sites off the coast of West Africa ended in 2022.

Stanford’s newer fossil fuel funded programs instead tend to focus on climate solutions, like blue hydrogen or carbon storage. Mr. Kashtan questions the climate bona fides of many of those programs.

The Natural Gas Initiative, for example, works with an industry consortium to research ways that natural gas can be part of the climate solution. It is led by a former Chevron strategist, and industry funders get a spot on its board of advisers for a quarter-million dollars a year.

“They’re ultimately about how to drill more efficiently,” he said.

“Exxon did offer me internships that were basically like, ‘Let’s get more oil out of the ground more efficiently,’” Ms. Grekin said. “But I didn’t want to do that,” she said. “So I fought really hard and got an internship that was sustainability-related.”

She feels that her current research, into ways to make heating and air-conditioning systems in commercial buildings more efficient, wouldn’t have been possible without Exxon, which made an entire office building in Houston available to her for experimentation. Her Exxon funding also paid for a recent stint in the Amazon rainforest back in Brazil, where she helped teach a course about sustainable polymers and locally sourced materials.

“The way I see it is, if this money wasn’t coming to me, it could be going toward a new drill, a new rig,” she said.

Can these two friends reach a compromise? They say they did find common ground hammering out proposed guidelines on how Stanford should engage with fossil fuel companies.

The guidelines include a call for eliminating financial sponsorships from any company, trade group or organization that doesn’t have a credible plan for transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable power, doesn’t provide transparent data, or is otherwise at odds with goals set forth under the Paris accord, the landmark 2015 agreement among the nations of the world to fight climate change.

“In my opinion, all of the fossil fuel companies currently funding Stanford research would be pretty much disqualified,” Mr. Kashtan said. “The only thing that’s going to prompt these companies to shift is either being sued into bankruptcy, or some kind of economic or regulatory pressure, not partnerships with universities.”

Ms. Grekin looked taken aback. “I’d like to think that we don’t have to go to those extremes,” she said.

An Exxon spokeswoman said the company was “investing billions of dollars into real solutions.” She added, “Research and healthy debate by students like Rebecca and Yannai are critical to developing solutions that will help us all.”

A spokesman for the Doerr School said, “We are proud of our students for engaging in civil discourse on this topic, and we are listening.”

The conversation stretched on. We ordered more tea. We ended up overstaying our welcome at the Burmese restaurant.

“Maybe I’m naïve,” Ms. Grekin said as we wrapped up the day. She recalled a moment from one of her early Exxon internships, near its sprawling refinery in Baytown, Texas, when she “looked up and there was this huge ball of flame coming out of a flare,” she said, referring to the towering, flaming stacks that are a dramatic feature of refineries. In that moment, she said, she felt her work on sustainability insignificant, her effect on reducing emissions even smaller than what that flare was emitting that very second.

She now thinks differently. “If I can change Exxon by even 1 percent,” she said, “the impact I have might make up for more than that flare.”

When developers set out to build 60 subsidized apartments in an affluent corner of Florence, S.C., the chairman of the County Council waxed enthusiastic. Affordable housing “would serve a great need,” he wrote, and its proximity to services and jobs fit county planning goals. He pledged a small grant.

Then the neighbors found out. Lawyers, executives and civic leaders, they gathered at the Florence Country Club, a half-mile from the proposed development, and vowed to block it. Nine days later, the plan suffered a fatal blow when the Council, in a meeting that took three minutes and 14 seconds, began rezoning the site, led by the chairman who had praised it.

The Council’s sudden reversal is the subject of a fair housing suit — most of the prospective tenants were Black in a neighborhood of mostly white residents — and a study of forces that keep low-income families from opportunity-rich neighborhoods.

In many if not most affluent communities, existing land-use rules would have barred low-income housing, with the regulations often operating so quietly that they hide how fully exclusion is a product of design. But a quirk in the Florence County zoning code, permitting the subsidized apartments, brought the opposition into public view.

“What’s unusual here is that we see an exercise of political power that is typically invisible,” said Jessica Trounstine, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University who studies housing regulation. “It makes the opposition to affordable housing clearer than it often is.”

The shortage of affordable housing is wreaking havoc nationwide with families of modest means. Nearly two-thirds of low-income renters — a record share — face “severe cost burdens,” meaning they spend more than half their income on rent and utilities. The federal government deems shelter affordable if it consumes 30 percent of income or less.

At the same time, mounting evidence has emphasized the harm children suffer by growing up in disadvantaged places. As gateways to schools, safety and connections, neighborhoods go far in determining who gets ahead. By moving to better neighborhoods, a pioneering study found, children from low-income families increased their average lifetime earnings by an average of nearly $200,000.

Speaking before the County Council, opponents said the Florence project would increase danger from traffic and flooding in an area troubled by both. Adding apartments near one of the city’s busiest intersections would leave more drivers cutting through streets where their children play, critics said, and paving the six-acre wooded site would worsen runoff.

No one mentioned the prospective tenants’ race or class.

“This is a wonderful time for us to move this good project to a better location,” Jean Leatherman, a neighborhood resident, told the Council. “We are not opposed to the development — we are opposed to the location of this development.”

Like many of the project’s opponents, Ms. Leatherman has a history of civic engagement, including as a fund-raiser for the public schools, whose students largely come from low-income and minority backgrounds.

“It’s not about race,” she said in an interview, referring to the opposition to the project. “I wouldn’t care if it was $500,000 luxury apartments. If you put 60 of them, I would be opposed.”

A different conversation involving other opponents of the project unfolded on Facebook, where one warned that subsidized housing serves “sorry lazy people” and another wrote that “the only thing that protects us from high crime is distance.” Low-income housing, a third person wrote, is “woke crap.”

The proposed apartments, to be known as the Jessamine, won financing from the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, the federal government’s largest affordable housing program. It spends about $13 billion a year giving developers tax credits, which they sell, generally to banks or other corporations, to raise construction funds in exchange for keeping rents low.

Unlike public housing or Section 8, the program is not intended for the poorest tenants. The Jessamine’s developers called it work force housing, for people like nursing aides or security guards. But some indigent families rent tax-credit apartments with vouchers or other aid. In South Carolina, tax-credit tenants have median annual incomes of about $17,000.

In a statewide competition for the credits, the Jessamine won points for location — its census tract had the county’s best score on an index of opportunity — and political support. The county planning director, Shawn Brashear, praised its “ideal location,” and the council chairman, Willard Dorriety Jr., pledged up to $10,000 for a fire hydrant.

Most of the neighborhood, called the Country Club, was zoned for single-family housing. But the Jessamine was in an unzoned “doughnut hole” — county property surrounded by city land — which allowed apartments.

When neighbors saw workers preparing the site, alarm spread. “I was getting calls every day,” Frank J. Brand II, who was the district’s councilman at the time, said in a deposition. “No one called me saying they were happy.”

Some residents approached the developers about buying them out. Hostile articles appeared in a political blog. Hours before critics met at the Country Club to plan their opposition, Mr. Dorriety rescinded his support.

Nine days later, in a meeting that lasted less than four minutes, the Council voted 8-0 to halt construction in doughnut holes and reconsider their zoning. More meetings were needed to make the moratorium final, but the outcome was clear.

The Jessamine’s opponents included a former mayor of Florence, Joe W. Pearce Jr.,; a lawyer from one of the city’s most prominent families, Walker H. Willcox; and Ms. Leatherman, whose late husband, Hugh K. Leatherman, a state senator for 40 years, was often described as South Carolina’s most powerful man.

Another critic, C. Pierce Campbell, runs one of the state’s largest law firms, Turner Padget; his home sits yards from the proposed site. Heavy traffic had left cars flipped over in his yard, he told the Council, and the proposed drainage pond beside the road could turn such crashes lethal.

“That’s the most dangerous thing I’ve ever heard of,” he said.

Unlike the out-of-town developers, “I live there,” he said, and “this matters to me personally.”

While influential critics spoke forcefully, few people outside the neighborhood knew the proposal existed, and no potential tenants addressed the Council. “I doubt they were aware,” said the Rev. Calvin Robinson Jr., the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church, a prominent Black congregation. “I didn’t know about it.”

One of the developers, Drew Schaumber, wrote council members that they should “be ashamed of” ignoring renters’ needs. “You represent ALL Florence citizens, not just those that live in the 29501 ZIP code,” he wrote.

The contours of the dispute would sound familiar to students of fair housing. In one of the first cases under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, a federal court found that Lackawanna, N.Y., had illegally rezoned a white neighborhood to block subsidized housing. While officials said they acted to protect strained sewers, the court saw “invidious discrimination” and warned, “The pattern is an old one.”

In 1983, a federal court found that Greenville County, S.C., broke the law by rezoning a site planned for subsidized housing. Neighborhood opposition, it ruled, was driven by “racial concerns — and not the objections to congestion or waste disposal capacity.”

Georgetown County, S.C., is being sued for rejecting a tax-credit project opposed by residents of a golf-course community 1.6 miles away. While the project won unanimous support from the planning commission, critics warned online that it would serve “lazy welfare lifers” and create a “breeding ground for crime.” As in Florence, most of the tenants would have been Black, and most of the critics were white.

Opposition to affordable housing is also common in left-leaning communities, with recent fights unfolding in Milton, Mass., and the Chevy Chase section of Washington, D.C. Fears about property values, crime and schools often animate debate.

“A lot has changed in American life over the past 50 years, but the hostility to affordable housing has remained surprisingly durable,” said Justin Steil, a professor of urban planning and law at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is an expert witness for the Jessamine developers.

Since the passage of the Fair Housing Act, Mr. Steil said, residential segregation by race has fallen only modestly, and economic segregation has grown as the affluent increasingly live in wealthy enclaves.

To win the Florence suit, the developers do not have to show that officials had discriminatory motives — only that their actions had a racially disparate impact (without serving a valid goal that could not be met in less discriminatory ways).

Analyzing other Florence tax-credit housing, Mr. Steil estimated that 78 percent of the Jessamine’s tenants would have been Black in a neighborhood that is at least 80 percent white. Hence its demise “perpetuated residential segregation,” he wrote.

Council members said they had long intended to re-examine zoning in the county’s so-called doughnut holes and did not single out the Jessamine.

Many economists argue that exclusionary zoning raises rents by limiting the housing supply. Growing evidence suggests that it also constrains mobility by keeping low-income children from places where they might flourish.

Opportunity Insights, a research project based at Harvard, collected more than 20 million de-intentified tax records to track neighborhood effects on people born in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By moving from a neighborhood that is below average in opportunity to one above average, it found, low-income children raised their average lifetime earnings by $198,000.

“Where you grow up matters a great deal for shaping your life outcomes,” said Nathaniel Hendren, a founder of the project, who is now an economist at M.I.T.

Mr. Schaumber, the developer, has built four tax-credit buildings in Florence without resistance, but all of them were in low-income neighborhoods. Qwendolyn Bines, 40, lives in one called the Belmont, which is comfortable and clean but on a commercial thoroughfare, separated from a car repair shop by a fence with razor wire.

Ms. Bines has done clerical work for school systems in the area for 15 years and earns about $38,000. But she has never been able to afford market-rate housing, which would consume about 45 percent of her income.

She said she and her daughters love their three-bedroom apartment, where Kaylee, 5, sleeps with a unicorn bedspread and Kaylyn, 12, displays certificates from the honor roll. (The $765 monthly rent is about 60 percent of the market rate.) But Ms. Bines said affordable housing “should not just be in the poor parts of town.”

Data from Opportunity Insights frames the stakes. By moving from Ms. Bines’s census tract to the one surrounding the Country Club, a low-income child would grow up to earn an additional $12,000 a year on average, it shows. That is a gain of nearly 50 percent, which Mr. Hendren called “exceedingly rare” in social policy.

Ms. Bines briefly lived in a different tax-credit building, until threats from a violent boyfriend forced her to move. She called the Jessamine’s location ideal for raising children and suggested a reason beyond traffic for neighborhood opposition.

“Us,” she said. “I feel like they don’t want African Americans over there.”

In depositions, council members, who did not respond to interview requests, repeated their warnings about traffic and flooding. Mr. Brand, who lost his next election to represent the Country Club neighborhood, partly blamed the Jessamine dispute and said he wished he had acted sooner to shrink or stop the project.

Mr. Dorriety said he withdrew his support in deference to Mr. Brand’s opposition and the voters he represented.

“The consensus of Florence County Council,” he said, “is you don’t mess in another man’s district.”

President Biden and his economic team, concerned that elevated mortgage rates and housing costs are hurting Americans and hindering his re-election bid, are searching for new ways to make housing more available and affordable.

Mr. Biden’s forthcoming budget request will call on Congress to pass a raft of initiatives to build more affordable housing and help certain Americans afford to purchase a home. The president is also expected to address housing affordability for both homeowners and renters in his State of the Union address next week, according to people familiar with the speech planning.

On Thursday, administration officials announced a handful of relatively modest executive actions, including steps to increase the supply of manufactured homes. White House officials said this week that they would announce “additional actions we are taking to lower housing costs.”

The increased focus on housing affordability comes as congressional Republicans assail Mr. Biden over high mortgage rates and housing costs, and as allies of the president warn that those costs are hurting working-class voters he needs to win in November.

There is little Mr. Biden can do immediately and directly to affect mortgage rates. Those are heavily influenced by the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policies, and the White House is careful not to appear to be pressuring the central bank to cut rates. Fed officials have signaled that they expect to begin cutting rates this year.

New research from economists at Harvard University and the International Monetary Fund — including Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary — suggests high mortgage rates and other borrowing costs are contributing to Americans’ relatively gloomy mood about the economy, despite low unemployment and healthy growth. By weighing on consumer confidence, those costs could be depressing Mr. Biden’s re-election hopes.

“If you’re Biden, you’re cheering for inflation to continue its way down and for the Fed to lower interest rates,” Judd N.L. Cramer, a Harvard economist and one of the paper’s authors, said in an interview. The president should particularly care about that, he added, “because consumers are more aware than we’ve given them credit for of those borrowing costs.”

Mr. Biden has made a habit of asking aides about the current state of mortgage rates, which have more than doubled since he took office and as the Fed raised rates to combat the worst bout of inflation in four decades.

The average 30-year mortgage rate jumped to nearly 8 percent last fall from below 3 percent in 2021. It has declined slightly this year but recently ticked up again and now sits just under 7 percent.

Monthly payments for prospective homeowners have soared because of the increase. The monthly payment for a typical mortgage for a $400,000 home — which is just under the median sales price nationwide — is about $2,900 at a 7 percent interest rate, assuming a 20 percent down payment. That is about $800 more per month than the payment would be at a 3 percent rate.

The increased burden of high borrowing costs can make home buying seem prohibitive, which is one reason polls show that younger adults in particular are concerned about housing prices. Mr. Cramer said his research suggested that high mortgage rates also frustrate existing homeowners, who may want to sell their home but have seen the ranks of potential buyers thinned because fewer people can afford to pay their asking price.

The research, published on Monday as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, seeks to shed light on a puzzle of the Biden economy: why consumer sentiment remains lower than historical evidence suggests it should be, given the job market is strong and wages are rising.

Drawing partly on alternate ways of calculating inflation rates in the past, the researchers — Mr. Cramer, Mr. Summers and Karl Oskar Schulz of Harvard, along with Marijn A. Bolhuis of the I.M.F. — conclude that rising borrowing costs for homes, cars and more under Mr. Biden account for much of the depression in sentiment.

“Consumers, unlike modern economists, consider the cost of money part of their cost of living,” they write.

White House economists have run their own calculations on consumer sentiment. They find it is largely dragged down by persistently high grocery prices and residual frustration with the coronavirus pandemic. In recent months, as mortgage rates fell slightly, they calculated that housing issues were helping to brighten consumers’ moods.

Still, Mr. Biden’s aides say they know how difficult housing costs are for Americans. They are scrounging for ways to alleviate them, even on the margins, before the election.

The president has already tried and failed to persuade Congress to pass expansive plans to build more affordable housing units, along with aid for certain Americans trying to buy homes, like down payment assistance for people whose parents do not own homes. Republicans who control the House have not been receptive to those proposals this year.

“The president considers the long-term shortage of affordable housing to be one of the most important pieces of unfinished business we have,” Jared Bernstein, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview.

The research suggest a drop in mortgage rates could swiftly lift Mr. Biden with consumers and in his campaign. They suggest the slight fall in rates in recent months was a reason sentiment surged at the end of last year and the start of this one.

White House officials agree. But, they are quick to add, Mr. Biden will not push the Fed to cut rates.