Escape Velocity
President Donald Trump ran on a promise of more fossil fuels, fewer environmental regulations, and outright climate denial — and now he's following through. His administration is gutting clean energy policy, fast-tracking oil and gas projects, and reshaping environmental policy with sweeping consequences.
At the same time, though, there's another force pulling hard in the opposite direction. A global clean tech revolution — one that powers our homes, our cars, and our lives without wrecking the climate — is already well underway.
The new generation of wind and solar power, batteries, and electric vehicles are on the verge of, or have already achieved, escape velocity, breaking free from the gravity of political capriciousness. In a lot of places, especially in power generation, the cleanest option is also the fastest, the cheapest, and the one most likely to turn a profit. That's true whether or not you care about the climate.
The world is building momentum around clean energy, unlocking ways to grow economies and raise living standards without cranking up the planet's temperature. And every fraction of a degree we avoid means more lives saved, fewer disasters, more stability, and more of the future left intact.
It's 2025 — halfway between now and 2050, the year stamped on basically every major climate target. That puts us closer to those deadlines than we are to Gladiator, Kid A, iMacs, and frosted tips. So it's a good moment to pause and ask: How did we get here? Are we moving fast enough? And what's standing in the way?
In this special project, Escape Velocity, Vox's climate team set out to answer those questions. We looked at the places where climate progress is still speeding up, the breakthroughs changing everything behind the scenes, and the moments where clean tech might overcome political resistance entirely.
The US has played a key role in getting the world to this point. But now, other countries are eyeing the lead. Right now, we're holding a strong hand, but our government is actively sabotaging it. What's at stake isn't just a cleaner future — it's whether the US stays in the race at all. —Paige Vega, climate editor
CREDITS:
Editorial lead: Paige Vega
Editors: Carla Javier, Miranda Kennedy, Naureen Khan, Paige Vega, Elbert Ventura, Bryan Walsh | Reporters: Avishay Artsy, Sam Delgado, Adam Clark Estes, Jonquilyn Hill, Melissa Hirsch, Umair Irfan, Benji Jones, Paige Vega | Copy editors and fact-checkers: Colleen Barrett, Esther Gim, Melissa Hirsch, Sarah Schweppe, Kim Slotterback | Art director: Paige Vickers | Data visualization: Gabrielle Merite | Photo illustration: Gabrielle Merite | Original photography: Annick Sjobakken | Data fact-checking: Melissa Hirsch | Podcast engineering: Matthew Billy | Audience: Bill Carey, Gabby Fernandez, Shira Tarlo | Editorial directors: Elbert Ventura and Bryan Walsh | Special thanks: Nisha Chittal and Lauren Katz
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Vox
38 minutes ago
- Vox
Trump's big, beautiful bill, explained in 5 charts
covers politics Vox. She first joined Vox in 2019, and her work has also appeared in Politico, Washington Monthly, and the New Republic. President Donald Trump, joined by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, speaks to members of the media as he arrives for a House Republican meeting at the Capitol on May 20, fight over President Donald Trump's so-called big, beautiful bill is turning ugly. After passing the GOP-controlled House, the bill has moved to the Senate, where Republicans are facing a bitter divide over how to balance their competing priorities. They want to extend and expand Trump's tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the rich and come at a steep price tag, as well as bolster immigration enforcement and defense spending. However, some are reluctant to do so while increasing the national debt by almost $2.6 trillion and slashing Medicaid benefits. Republicans want to pass the bill by July 4 through a complex process known as budget reconciliation, which requires only 51 votes to pass. There are 53 Republicans in the Senate, but it's unclear whether they will be able to resolve their disagreements in time. Some Republican senators, including Ron Johnson (R-WI.) and Rand Paul (R-KY), have criticized the current version of the bill as unreasonable. Trump megadonor (and newly sworn enemy) Elon Musk has called on lawmakers to rework the legislation, which he dubbed a 'disgusting abomination.' 'Call your Senator, Call your Congressman, Bankrupting America is NOT ok! KILL the BILL,' Musk said in a post on X Wednesday. Today, Explained Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day, compiled by news editor Sean Collins. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said that Musk is 'flat wrong' about the bill and that there is not enough time to go back to the drawing board. So, what exactly is in the bill, and what does it mean — for the deficit and for Americans? We break it down, in charts. The bill would cause the US deficit to skyrocket This spending bill is expensive, and short of truly drastic cuts to nearly all social programs (and perhaps not even with such cuts), it's not clear that the government could feasibly pass it without increasing the national debt. The version that passed the House would raise the deficit by trillions of dollars over the next decade, not accounting for the potential effects the bill would have on the US economy. That spending is concentrated between 2025 and 2028, coinciding with the next presidential election. Republicans once campaigned against raising the national debt during the Obama administration, framing it as a national security threat and a burden to future generations. But it's no longer the rallying cry it once was. There are reasons to be concerned about a growing national debt. As my colleague Dylan Matthews writes, the bond market is already bristling at the prospect of such a significant increase in the deficit, a warning of potential economic downturn or even further increasing debt due to higher servicing costs if the bill becomes law. Tax cuts are what make the bill so expensive Trump wants to build on the tax cuts he passed during his first term. They are set to expire this year if Congress does not act, and the spending bill would keep them in place. It would also add some new ones, including the elimination of taxes on tips. That is going to cost the US government. A breakdown of the bill's budgetary effects published by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that the House Ways and Means Committee, which presides over tax policy, would be permitted to contribute an additional $3.8 trillion to the deficit — far more than any other House committee. That's at least in part because tax revenue would be lower under the bill. Meanwhile, the Armed Services and Homeland Security committees are the only others where Trump is seeking significant increases in spending as he seeks to deliver on his campaign promise of 'mass deportations' with assistance from the military. Any spending cuts in other areas aren't nearly enough to counterbalance the resulting increase in the US deficit. That would likely require Republicans to slash public benefits even further than they already have in this bill. While they haven't gone so far as to touch Social Security benefits, they have gone after Medicaid and insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act. Millions could become uninsured under the spending bill Republicans have also included measures in the bill that would greatly increase the number of people without health insurance, according to a CBO estimate. One provision allows enhanced premium tax credits for ACA insurance plans to lapse, which would increase premiums for millions of Americans who rely on them. After the Covid-19 stimulus bill was signed in 2021, these tax credits became available to anyone whose premiums were over 8.5 percent of their household income — not just people earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line. Enrollment in ACA plans subsequently doubled to 24.3 million people between 2020 and 2025. The House bill would allow those expanded tax credits to expire this year, effectively driving people out of the ACA marketplaces with higher costs. Another provision would significantly decrease Medicaid enrollment by creating a work requirement for people under the age of 64 who do not have a dependent under 7 years old. While not directly slashing Medicaid benefits, the work requirement would create additional barriers to Medicaid access, including administrative hurdles that could result in lower enrollment even among people who do work. (It's worth noting that most nondisabled Medicaid recipients already work.) Some states have already implemented similar work requirements with disappointing results. Arkansas and Georgia saw Medicaid enrollments plummet thereafter, with a court eventually overturning the Arkansas requirements on the basis that they violated federal Medicaid law. The spending bill disproportionately benefits the rich Under the tax cuts passed by Trump during his first term, the top 1 percent of earners saw the most significant gains, both in dollar amounts and as a percentage of their incomes. This time is no different. Top earners will again profit significantly from the House spending bill, according to the CBO. The lowest earners, meanwhile, will see their household resources shrink, primarily due to reduced access to public benefits programs such as Medicaid and SNAP and higher ACA insurance premiums. The bill could have a big impact on immigrant populations and their families abroad The House bill advances numerous provisions targeting immigrants and undermining their US-citizen relatives, from restricting access to public benefits for families in which at least one person is undocumented to imposing new fees on asylum-seekers. However, there is one that would have a sizable impact well beyond America's borders: a new tax on remittances, the payments that immigrants typically send to their families in their home countries. The US is the largest source of remittances worldwide. Some of the top receiving countries include America's neighbors in Central and South America — countries that have produced high numbers of migrants in recent years. That's significant because remittances have historically accounted for much larger sums than any foreign aid provided by the US and represent efficient, direct payments to individuals who can spend that money on what they need, mitigating economic incentives for them to migrate.
Vox
2 days ago
- Vox
Elon Musk couldn't change Trump's mind on electric vehicles
is a correspondent at Vox writing about climate change, energy policy, and science. He is also a regular contributor to the radio program Science Friday. Prior to Vox, he was a reporter for ClimateWire at E&E News. Elon Musk and President Donald Trump — two of the most powerful, outspoken billionaires in America — are still tangled up in a messy breakup over a variety of issues. It's no shock that these two men with huge egos would have friction, but it's interesting to look at some of the specific things that seem to be causing trouble between them. In particular, Trump's and Musk's differing views on climate change and clean energy have evidently become an irritant again. Recall that Musk, CEO of the electric car company Tesla, participated in White House councils during Trump's first term, but left after Trump began the process of pulling the US out of the Paris climate agreement. But Musk began to drift to the political right. He publicly backed Trump's campaign for a second term — onstage and with money — and was rewarded with a high-profile quasi-governmental post as the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency that laid off thousands of federal workers. It seemed like they were accomplishing their mutual goals. Trump even turned the White House into a sales lot for Tesla and got one himself. However, Tesla made about one-third of its profits over the past decade from selling compliance credits to other carmakers in states that adopted California's vehicle emissions rules as well as in several other countries. The Trump administration is also targeting the programs that created this line of business through executive orders. The back-and-forth over the years between Trump and Musk was mirrored in the perceptions of Tesla's products. The sleek electric cars were once rolling billboards projecting that their owners were concerned about climate change and are now attacked as endorsements of fascism. More broadly, it shows that there are stubborn political divides on how people view clean technology — electric vehicles, renewable energy, battery storage, and so on. A poll this week from the Pew Research Center showed that Republicans have less and less favorable views of clean tech. The exception is nuclear energy, which has seen increasing support among both Democrats and Republicans. Pew Research Center But on the flip side, Republicans tend to strongly support fossil fuel extraction from offshore oil drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and coal mining — far more than Democrats do. California and 11 other states now plan to end the sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035. Two-thirds of Americans say they are against this idea, but here, too, there's a political divide, with 85 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats in opposition. Looking back over the past five years, it's apparent that even when Trump and Musk were in alignment, they couldn't change the political valence of electric cars. Pew Research Center Now, at least one more Republican has soured on EVs: Trump is reportedly looking for a buyer for his red Tesla Model S after his dustup with Musk. It will take more than a thumbs-up from the White House or the enthusiastic backing of a billionaire to change Republicans' minds about technologies that help limit climate change. There are some outliers, though, like the Iowa Trump supporters who also back wind power. Related Meet the Trump supporters who love wind energy But the momentum behind these tools is massive and mounting. Wind, solar, EVs, and grid batteries have all seen tremendous price drops, huge performance gains, and surging deployment in recent years. The Trump administration's policies could sap some of this momentum, but they can't stop it.
Vox
3 days ago
- Vox
Why Trump probably can't cut Musk loose
is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood , an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map. Elon Musk gives a tour to President-elect Donald Trump and lawmakers of the control room before a test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024, in Brownsville, up is hard to do — especially when one party is a billionaire with near-unassailable dominance of the nation's ability to launch things into space, and the other is a president who has staked a significant portion of his legacy on wildly ambitious space-based projects. As President Donald Trump and his erstwhile financial backer and former DOGE boss Elon Musk traded blows on social media Thursday, the president at one point posted, 'The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it!' This prompted Musk to announce that he was decommissioning SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, used to transport astronauts to the International Space Station, though he later backed down from the threat. Trump may soon find, however, that canceling Musk's contracts is a lot harder than selling his Tesla, particularly if he wants to pursue goals like his much-vaunted Golden Dome missile defense project. To get to space, the US needs SpaceX During President Joe Biden's administration, concerns were indeed raised about Musk's lucrative government contracts as well as his access to classified defense information, given his partisan political activities (unusual for a major defense contractor), communications with foreign leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, and ties to the Chinese government. But as Vox reported last year, unwinding the government's relationship with Musk's companies is a near impossibility right now, particularly when it comes to SpaceX. The company is simply better at launching massive numbers of objects into space than any of its competitors, and it's not close: SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket was responsible for 84 percent of all satellite launches last year, and the constellation of more than 7,000 Starlink communications satellites accounts for around 65 percent of all operational satellites in orbit. The reusable Falcon 9 has become the space launch workhorse of choice for a US military and intelligence community that is ever more dependent on satellites for communications and surveillance. 'If one side or the other severed that relationship, which I don't think is practical, you would very quickly see a backlog of military satellites waiting for launch,' said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow and space defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute. Ambitious plans like the National Reconnaissance Office's ongoing project to launch a constellation of intelligence and surveillance satellites for military use would come to a 'screeching halt,' said Harrison. The US military is also increasingly reliant on SpaceX for mobile internet connectivity via a specialized military-only version of Starlink known as Starshield. For NASA, the situation is, if anything, even more dire, as shown last March when two US astronauts returned, months late, from the International Space Station on a SpaceX Dragon capsule when problems were detected on the Boeing craft that brought them into orbit on its first ever flight. Losing SpaceX 'would basically just end the US participation in the space station,' said David Burbach, an associate professor and space policy expert at the Naval War College. NASA's space shuttle program shut down in 2011. Boeing's Starliner is probably years from being a viable alternative, and going back to relying on Russian rockets — as the US did for nearly a decade between the end of the Space Shuttle and the advent of Dragon — would probably be a tough sell these days. Burbach, speaking in his personal capacity, not as a representative of the US military or war college, said such a break 'would be the kind of thing that could trigger something truly drastic' such as the White House using the Defense Production Act to take control of the program. It's not surprising Musk quickly backed down from the threat. NASA's ongoing Artemis program, which aims to eventually return humans to the Moon and establish a permanent lunar space station, is also heavily dependent on SpaceX's Starship launch vehicle, as are longer term plans for a mission to Mars. These are (or at least were) priorities for the White House: The moon and Mars missions are the only parts of NASA's budget that were increased in the president's recent budget request and the president mentioned planting 'the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars' in his inaugural address. Mars is, to put it mildly, something of a fixation for Musk, and it's hard to imagine an ongoing US program to get there without his involvement. Trump's golden dreams may require Musk A true Trump-Musk rift would also have implications for 'Golden Dome,' the ambitious plan to 'protect the homeland' from ballistic missiles, drones, hypersonic cruise missiles, and other aerial threats. Plans for Golden Dome are still a little vague and no contracts for its construction have been awarded yet, but SpaceX is reportedly a frontrunner to build a constellation of hundreds of new satellites to detect missile launches and determine if they are headed toward the United States, and possibly even intercept them from space. According to Reuters, SpaceX is bidding for portions of the project in partnership with Anduril and Palantir, two other defense tech companies also led by staunch Trump backers. SpaceX's vision for the satellite network reportedly envisions it as a 'subscription service,' in which the government would pay for access, rather than owning the system outright, a model that would presumably give Musk much more leverage over how Golden Dome is developed and deployed. Critics of the program charge that it is little more than a giveaway to Musk and his allies and Democratic members of Congress have raised concerns about his involvement. Advocates for the program, including the Heritage Foundation, which called for investments in ballistic and hypersonic missile defense in its Project 2025 document, have cited SpaceX's success with Starlink and Starshield as proof-of-concept for their argument that deploying a layer of hundreds or thousands of satellites for missile defense is more practical today than it was in the days of President Ronald Reagan's 'Star Wars' project. Even if Golden Dome could be effective, which many doubt, Trump's stated goal of having it operational with 'a success rate close to 100 percent' in 'less than three years' for around $175 billion (the Congressional Budget Office projects half a trillion dollars) is eyebrow-raising. The Pentagon had already backed away from the three-year timeline even before the president began feuding with the only person in the world who's built anything close to this. 'Even for SpaceX, it would be challenging,' said Burbach. 'I don't think any other company has the capability. They're really out in the lead on assembly line satellite capability.' Some experts think Golden Dome could be reconfigured with a greater role for land-based radar and interceptors, but this would almost certainly put it short of Trump's expansive vision. As nuclear expert Ankit Panda succinctly put it on Thursday, 'Golden Dome is cooked.' Is there an alternative? If anyone had a good day on Thursday, it was Musk's fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos. In January, Bezos's space company Blue Origin carried out its first successful launch of New Glenn, a reusable rocket meant to compete with SpaceX's game-changing Falcon for contracts including military launches. The company has also begun launching satellites for its Kuiper communications network, a potential competitor to Starlink. Both projects have suffered from long delays and have a long way to go to catch up with Musk's space behemoth, but it's still presumably good news for the company that their main competitor is no longer literally sleeping feet from the White House. Finding ways to at least encourage competition with Musk, if not cut him loose entirely, would likely have been a priority for a Kamala Harris administration, and may now be one for Trump as well. In response to Vox's questions to the White House about the future of SpaceX's contracts, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt responded in an emailed statement, 'President Trump is focused on making our country great again and passing the One Big Beautiful Bill.' SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
