New legal action aims to head off a Trump administration plan to open up to 24m acres of federal lands to cattle grazing, which opponents characterized as a gift to big agriculture and said could cause a spike in deaths among already imperiled wolves, grizzlies, steelhead salmon and other wildlife.

The plan also calls for opening up parts of Grand Canyon national park, and other sensitive landscapes. Cattle destroy critical habitats for wildlife because they strip land bare of essential vegetation and pollute streams with feces, urine, sediment and carcasses. Meanwhile, park rangers and ranchers often kill grizzly bears and other predators who prey on cattle, despite that ranchers and the government pushed the cattle into the predators’ home range.

The degree to which livestock grazing degrades ecosystems makes it a top threat to animals and plants at risk of extinction, environmental advocates say. These issues exceed the combined impacts of logging and mining on protected species.

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) alleges in a notice of intent to sue that the Trump administration fast-tracked the plan without consulting the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which, under the Endangered Species Act, must review the plan’s impact on protected species.

“The federal grazing program is already a disaster for endangered species and the places they live,” said Andrea Zaccardi, carnivore conservation legal director at CBD. “Expanding grazing across 24m more acres will make that devastation even worse and likely drive more animals and plants to extinction.”

Trump implemented the new plan through a memorandum of understanding signed in March by the US Bureau of Land Management, and would use emergency authority to fast-track grazing where it is not currently allowed.

Zaccardi said it is unclear why the administration is aggressively opening up the land. While there have been isolated instances of individual ranchers asking for some “allotments” to be opened to grazing, there is no industry-wide effort that environmental groups are aware of, she added.

The Bureau of Land Management declined to comment, but the new policy states that it plans to implement “a goal of a no net loss of Animal Unit Months within allotments” and maximizing “authorization of livestock use” across vast western rangelands.

The move comes as meat prices remain high, but while the harm to wildlife would probably be significant, advocates say the benefit to the livestock industry would be small – grazing on public lands accounts for just 2% of the nation’s beef cattle.

About half of 2,400 stream miles of endangered species habitat surveyed by CBD since 2017 show significant damage from livestock. Meanwhile, surveys of more than 200 forest service and Bureau of Land Management grazing allotments in Arizona and New Mexico show damage to critical habitat from authorized, unauthorized, trespassing and feral livestock. The cattle are also a threat to fish because they eat the riparian vegetation along streams’ edges that keeps the water cool.

Among the most alarming potential fallout is how the plan would foster conflict among cattle, ranchers and predators, advocates say. Congress in the 1930s authorized the wildlife services to kill wildlife at the request of private landowners, including if they threaten livestock. Predators, like grizzlies, covered by the Endangered Species Act, are not exempted, and Zaccardi said the law is a major threat to the bears, gray wolves and Mexican wolves that are particularly prone to preying on cattle.

State and federal agents “lethally remove” hundreds of thousands of animals annually in what some advocates have previously characterized as a “bloodbath”. Some of the lands listed in the memorandum have not been used for grazing for decades and many predators likely live there, Zaccardi said.

“The likelihood of this increasing conflict with predators is extremely high,” she added.

The plan also contains “unusual provisions to benefit” big agriculture, said Chandra Rosenthal, western lands and rocky mountain advocate with the Public Employees For Environmental Responsibility (Peer) non-profit.

Among those is the establishment of “immersion and training programs for new and existing federal employees to the daily life, decisions, and dilemmas of ranchers”, Peer noted. The memorandum makes little mention of rangeland environmental conditions and instead the plan will “deregulate”, “streamline” and “incorporate beneficial flexibility”.

“The Trump administration does not appear to care that commercial livestock grazing exacts an enormous toll on native ecosystems and wildlife throughout the American West,” Rosenthal said in a statement.

The plan would also open lands in popular national parks and monuments, including Grand Staircase-Escalante national monument, Canyons of the Ancients national monument in Colorado, and Arizona’s Sonoran desert national monument.

The Trump administration has 60 days to respond to the notice of intent to sue. If it fails to, then CBD would ask a federal judge to order the Trump administration to review how the plan would impact protected wildlife, as is required under the Endangered Species Act.

Levels of some of the most dangerous Pfas compounds have dramatically fallen in Canadian seabird eggs, which the authors of a new peer-reviewed study say illustrates how regulations are effective.

Researchers looked at Pfas levels in the eggs of northern gannets in the St Lawrence Seaway basin over a 55-year period. Pfas levels shot up from the 1960s through the peak of the chemicals’ use in the late 1990s and early aughts, then fell.

The fall coincides with several developments – facing regulatory scrutiny, the chemical giant 3M, which is one of the largest producers of Pfas, began moving away from Pfos, among its most common and toxic compounds. By 2015, major chemical makers reached an agreement with the US Environment Protection Agency to phase out Pfos and Pfoa, the latter a similarly problematic compound.

Raphael Lavoie, a co-author and ecotoxicologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, called the findings “good news”.

“We see this incredible rise to a peak where concentrations seem to be higher than toxicological threshold for those birds, then it really decreases in a nice way,” Lavoie said. “The regulations are having a good effect.”

Pfas are a class of at least 16,000 chemicals commonly used to make products resist water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down, and they are linked to a range of health issues such as cancer, thyroid disease, kidney problems and decreased immunity.

The eggs were collected from the remote Bonaventure Island, which holds North America’s largest northern gannet colony. Data shows the levels of Pfos fell from a peak level in the eggs of 100 parts per billion (ppb) to a level of 26ppb by 2024, a 74% drop. Levels of Pfoa are down about 40% over this time, though they ticked back up in recent years.

Meanwhile, PFHxS, another common, toxic Pfas compound fell from 0.69 to 0.19ppb, or about 72%.

The paper details how Pfas production increased sharply between 1969 and the mid-1990s, driven by widespread applications from firefighting foams to stain guards, as well as various manufacturing processes. With virtually no regulatory oversight, the chemicals rapidly accumulated in the environment, exposing wildlife like the northern gannet. The birds faced high risk as the St Lawrence received water pollution from the upper midwest manufacturing centers around the Great Lakes. The chemicals reached levels in the eggs that suggested ecotoxicological risks, Lavoie said.

As the dangers of the most commonly used Pfas came into focus around this time, the US, Europe and Canada each ratcheted up regulatory pressure with proposed regulations or risk actions. The United Nations similarly targeted Pfos, and the compound was also listed in the 2009 Stockholm convention, which requires signatory countries to restrict its production and use. In recent decades, militaries and other users of firefighting foam switched to Pfas-free products, or stopped using the chemicals during training exercises, which has significantly reduced water pollution.

However, it is not all good news. The chemical makers moved to a newer generation of smaller Pfas, and those also present risks to the environment and wildlife. The levels of those compounds have probably grown, and the study found one example of a shift, but the new Pfas are more difficult to measure in bird eggs because they do not accumulate in wildlife as much, Lavoie said.

Moreover, compounds such as Pfos stay in the environment or animals’ bodies for decades, so the birds and environment will remain contaminated for the foreseeable future, which the authors wrote “emphasizes the importance of maintaining scientific and regulatory vigilance”.

The German energy group E.ON has agreed to buy struggling UK rival Ovo in a deal that would create Britain’s biggest gas and electricity supplier.

The combined company will serve about 9.6 million customers, overtaking the market leader, Octopus, which serves almost 8m households in the UK.

The value of the deal was not disclosed, but reports have estimated it at £600m. E.ON said the takeover represented a significant investment in the UK market and would bring bills down for customers.

It said there would be no changes at its domestic energy supplying arm E.ON Next, nor at Ovo, while it awaited regulatory approval for the deal, stressing “existing tariffs will be honoured in full and service will continue unchanged”. Clearance of the acquisition is expected in the second half of the year.

E.ON did not comment on what the deal could mean for jobs. It is understood that once it has been completed, the German supplier will establish a transformation office to develop the integration plans. It believes that a larger customer base enables faster investment in technology, products and services, which will benefit customers and support the energy transition.

Ovo, the UK’s fourth-largest gas and electricity supplier, said it had also agreed to sell its home services business, which provides boiler insurance and boiler servicing, to Hometree.

E.ON has about 5.6 million customers in the UK, while Ovo, which was founded in 2009 by the green energy entrepreneur Stephen Fitzpatrick as a challenger to the big six energy companies, has 4 million.

Fitzpatrick said the energy market had changed a great deal: “Energy retail is now more regulated, more capital intensive and increasingly dependent on long-term investment and scale. In that context, bringing Ovo together with E.ON is the right next step for customers, for colleagues and for the long-term commitment that decarbonisation requires.”

In 2019, Ovo became the UK’s then second-biggest energy supplier after it agreed to buy SSE’s home energy business in a £500m deal that challenged the dominance of the big six energy suppliers.

However, it has been struggling financially and in September cast doubt on its future. It said in its financial accounts that there was uncertainty around the plan it had agreed with the regulator to improve its capital position, after failing financial stress tests. Since then, it has cut hundreds of jobs to reduce costs.

Marc Spieker, the chief operating officer commercial at E.ON, said: “The United Kingdom is an important growth market for E.ON, particularly for flexibility and customer‑focused energy solutions. The planned acquisition of Ovo strengthens our retail business.”

The company will continue Ovo’s energy intelligence platform licence agreement with the software company Kaluza, which simplifies energy billing and reduces costs, and will look into potentially using it across the wider E.ON group outside the UK.

Ovo sits within a sprawling empire controlled by Fitzpatrick, including the flying taxi firm Vertical Aerospace, Kaluza and London’s Kensington Roof Gardens.

Chris Norbury, the chief executive of E.ON’s UK business, said: “For decades the UK energy system focused too much on those upstream. Now is our opportunity to change that. Solar, batteries, EVs and a retailer built to orchestrate. That is what this deal is about: customers in control and new energy that works for everyone.”

E.ON Next offers time-of-use tariffs that reward customers for shifting energy use to cheaper, off-peak periods.

With about 7m smart meters installed, E.ON and Ovo together connect more than 60% of their customers in the UK in a “fully digital manner”.