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
an hour ago
- Vox
The LA protests reveal what actually unites the Trump right
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. When President Donald Trump and Elon Musk had their dramatic falling-out last week, it appeared the right was on the brink of civil war — with Musk's allies in the 'tech right' poised to battle Steve Bannon and his faction of populist tribunes. The battle lines reflected deep disagreements between the right's factions about the nature and purpose of government, divides made increasingly salient by Trump's policies in areas like trade. But now, after several days of protests and unrest in Los Angeles, everyone is once again reading from the same hymnal — condemning disorder and calling for a harsh crackdown. Even Musk is back to retweeting Trump like nothing happened. Why this intra-right ceasefire? Because what's happening in LA reminds every component of the modern right why they're in coalition together: They believe that progressives in general, and the 'woke' left activists in particular, represent an existential threat to everything good about the United States. This vision has deep philosophical roots on the right, which has always positioned itself around defending elements of the status quo from its enemies on the left. But the 2025 American right tells itself a very particular version of that general story, one that focuses on the events of summer 2020. On the Right The ideas and trends driving the conservative movement, from senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp. 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. In their minds, the combination of Covid restrictions, mainstream calls for wide-ranging social change, and mass street upheaval was the terrible terminus of modern progressive politics. Whatever their internal disagreements on issues like trade or spending or even immigration, the modern right agrees that the left must never be permitted another year like 2020 — and that Trump is the best vehicle for stopping it. The Trump coalition has appeared fractious for much of 2025 because the big policy moves, like tariffs, have made areas of disagreement in the coalition more salient. It appears united for now because the news cycle has shifted to a topic — the specter of radical left street disorder — on which nearly everyone inside of it agrees. The right's long 2020 Philosophically speaking, the right has long been defined by its emphasis on the value of stability — as odd as it may seem in the era of Trump's radically destabilizing administration. Conservative theorists, most notably Edmund Burke, have long maintained that political flourishing depends on the existence of stable social rules developed gradually and from the bottom up over the course of generations. Those who seek to overturn this order, either through sweeping legislation or revolutionary violence, will inevitably do more harm than good. For this reason, the right's intellectuals have long positioned themselves against what they saw as instances of leftist street violence. Yet Trump has spent the past 10 years setting the American political order on fire — demolishing its norms, enacting radical changes to its longstanding policies, and flagrantly violating its laws. He even incited an honest-to-God insurrection aimed at overturning an election. How could any of this fit with a tradition premised on the values of stability and order? The answer, in part, is that it doesn't. The intellectual right has adopted a self-consciously revolutionary mode of politics, seeing the current political order as a fundamentally corrupt system that deserves to be torn down. This is a reactionary rejection of Burkean conservatism, which is why so many erstwhile Burkeans became the Never Trumpers who publish at places like the Dispatch and the Bulwark. And yet, there's a crucial element of the Burkean emphasis on order that the Trump right has retained: a belief that some specific elements of American life remain uncorrupted, and that the 'woke left' must be defeated for those elements to again become the country's defining traits. Traditional religion, conservative cultural values, a market economy, the notion of national pride, and even nationhood itself — these are the elements of the United States that the modern right sees as being under attack from the left and the institutions (like universities) where it is in control. This sense of siege, of a need for counterrevolution, crystalized in the summer of 2020. It wasn't only that there was rioting in America's cities, or that major American cultural institutions were aligning themselves with once-radical views on race and gender. It's that both were happening at the same time, suggesting that radicals in the streets were seizing the commanding heights of American public life. 'The individual acts of violence — the sacking of urban police stations, the Molotov cocktails thrown at police cruisers, the toppling of historical statues, the wholesale looting of big-box stores — were, in fact, the representations of a long-running cultural revolution,' leading right-wing activist Chris Rufo wrote in his 2023 book America's Cultural Revolution. 'In city after city, [Black Lives Matter] activists, including its paramilitaries in the black nationalist and anarcho-socialist factions, shut down urban neighborhoods, intimidated residents, and established their ideology as a social requisite.' This is, to my mind, a wildly exaggerated narrative of that summer's events (a consistent problem in Rufo's work). It vastly overstates the pervasiveness of the violence and paints with an ideologically overbroad brush, ignoring that most people were in the streets because they were deeply and sincerely concerned about racism in policing. Yet there's some truth as well. The summer's events, including riots in Minneapolis and Seattle's disastrous 'autonomous zone', did real harm to real people — in ways that many mainstream liberals and leftists were unwilling to admit at the time. That liberal elites endorsed street protest amid the Covid pandemic, when the public health establishment was recommending people stay away from mass gatherings, fueled the right's outrage. It was, to them, a sign that the so-called establishment was not only flawed but fully corrupt; so shot through with political bias that it would tell people to go protest for George Floyd, but stop attending church. From this was born the mythic underpinnings of the modern Trump right: a deep fear of chaotic, violent left-wing radicals, paired with a sense that mainstream liberals and nonpartisan experts are in thrall to said extremists. This is the narrative that knits together the various factions of MAGA 2.0: the tech right, the national populists, the atheist anti-wokes, the Christian nationalists, and on down the line. There are reasonable grounds to doubt that everyone believes it sincerely, but it defines much of the conceptual vocabulary right-wingers use to communicate across factional lines. We may not agree on everything, they say, but we are all against that. What's happening in LA right now brings this set of uniting concerns to the fore. Once again, progressives and radicals have taken to the streets to demonstrate against what they see as social injustices. Once again, there are clear instances of looting and violence (though I'd add that these are once again being widely exaggerated). And once again, it appears to many on the right as if the liberal establishment were siding with the people in the streets — with LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (correctly) downplaying the scale of the violence and rejecting Trump's efforts to send in the troops, in large part because they believe it to be at once unnecessary and counterproductive. It is thus no surprise that in the face of recent events, the right's infighting would give way to a display of unity. When the right sees the specter of 2020 looming over America, its cadres feel an urgent need to form ranks.
Vox
a day ago
- Vox
How a little-known law became Trump's weapon of choice against immigration
covers politics Vox. She first joined Vox in 2019, and her work has also appeared in Politico, Washington Monthly, and the New Republic. Demonstrators gather to protest against a sweeping new travel ban announced last week by President Donald Trump, outside Los Angeles International Airport on June 9, 2025. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images President Donald Trump can't stop using — and abusing — his legal authority to block the entry of noncitizens into the country. When he issued a travel ban on citizens of Muslim-majority countries early in his first term, he did so by invoking Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows him to block any foreigner if he deems that their entry would be 'detrimental to the interests of the United States.' When he issued a proclamation turning away noncitizens who could not demonstrate the ability to pay for their health care costs, he cited Section 212(f). When he halted most legal immigration at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, first from China and then from other countries, there was Section 212(f) again. Finally, last week, he announced that he would block foreign students from receiving student visas to attend Harvard and implement a travel ban on 12 countries, as well as restrictions on seven others. The travel ban took effect on Monday, just after midnight, and the legal framework for both orders was built on Section 212(f). Some of Trump's attempts to invoke Section 212(f) have been challenged in court. Judges struck down several versions of Trump's first-term travel ban before the third iteration was ultimately upheld by the US Supreme Court (after it was expanded to include non-Muslim-majority countries). President Joe Biden rescinded the travel ban, as well as the Covid-19 and health care-related bans, when he took office, refusing to defend them in legal challenges. Most recently, a federal judge in Massachusetts also blocked Trump's order on Harvard students, and as of Monday, the State Department had returned to processing international student visas. However, in testing the limits of 212(f) through these policies, Trump has succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to affirm his broad powers to ban foreign nationals under immigration law, marking a key expansion of executive authority. While previous presidents invoked Section 212(f), none of them did so as frequently or as aggressively as Trump. The law has become a key tool to keep people out as Trump tries to implement his restrictive vision of US immigration policy. How Trump expanded presidential powers to ban foreigners Before Trump, both Democratic and Republican presidents used the 212(f) authority sparingly. It was typically employed in order to enforce United Nations sanctions or target individuals or groups associated with terrorism, human rights violations, drug trafficking, or specific international crises. Former President Barack Obama, for instance, used the authority to block Russian officials from entering the US following their country's 2014 invasion of Crimea. Former President George W. Bush used it to block Syrian officials after the 2005 assassination of the Lebanese prime minister at the hands of the Syrian-backed militant group Hezbollah, which the US designates as a terrorist organization. Former President Bill Clinton used it to impose restrictions on Nigerian military officials who impeded the country's transition to democracy by annulling the country's 1993 elections. Trump's conceptualization of 212(f), however, is markedly different. He has used the authority to block broad swaths of noncitizens from a variety of countries, not just their government officials or people involved in criminal activity. He has not spared US visa or green card holders in some cases, including those affected by his first travel ban. That has created a new legal paradigm that has afforded the president sweeping powers to keep immigrants out. The Supreme Court's 2018 decision narrowly upholding Trump's first travel ban made that shift clear. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that Section 212(f) 'exudes deference to the President in every clause.' For that reason, the court refused to question the superficial national security rationale Trump provided for the travel ban. That's despite substantial evidence that the actual motivation behind the ban was, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in the dissent, 'anti-Muslim animus' that violated the Constitution's religious liberty protections. That evidence included Trump's 2015 campaign statements calling for 'a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,' which lower-court judges pointed to in blocking earlier versions of the travel ban in 2017. The question is whether the justices will again defer to Trump if the new travel ban and ban on international students at Harvard come before the Supreme Court. According to Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired immigration law professor at Cornell Law School, 'court challenges to this travel ban are likely, but they may fail.' However, Yale-Loehr said, 'even if this expansion is legal, it is not good policy. We are not necessarily safer by banning immigrants from these countries.' Notably, the new travel ban includes exemptions for green card holders, noncitizens from affected countries who are already in the US, and athletes from the affected countries competing in international competitions like the Olympics. He's also invoked the potential for visa overstays, in addition to the usual national security grounds, in the rationale for his latest ban. All of that might help Trump's case if the policy is challenged in court. Unlike a blanket ban on immigrants from the affected countries, it is tailored to withstand legal scrutiny by targeting only would-be immigrants who are currently not in the US. Additionally, the ban's invocation of national security concerns puts it in territory where the president has generally been afforded considerable discretion by the courts. (A fact he has taken advantage of in issuing a flurry of national emergency declarations on all sorts of issues.) Given the particulars of the new ban and the administration's previous history before the Court, some immigrant advocates have turned to Congress, rather than the courts, to intervene. They are asking for a legislative fix to stop Trump from implementing policies that will affect both US citizens who might be separated from their families and citizens of foreign countries hoping to enter the US, though such a measure would almost certainly have to wait on unified Democratic control of government.
Vox
2 days ago
- Vox
Trump asks the Supreme Court to neutralize the Convention Against Torture
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court. President Donald Trump shakes hands with Justice Brett Kavanaugh before delivering the State of the Union address at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on February 5, 2019. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images Federal law states that the United States shall not 'expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture.' This law implements a treaty, known as the Convention Against Torture, which the United States ratified more than three decades ago. Federal regulations, moreover, provide that even after an immigration judge has determined that a noncitizen may be deported to another country, that judge's order 'shall not be executed in circumstances that would violate Article 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.' And those regulations also establish a process that immigrants can use to raise concerns with an immigration judge that they may be tortured if sent to a specific country. SCOTUS, Explained Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser. 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. The Trump administration, however, claims it has discovered a loophole that renders all of these legal protections worthless, and is now asking the Supreme Court to explicitly give it the authority to make use of that loophole in order to enact its immigration policies. According to President Donald Trump's lawyers, the administration can simply wait until after an immigration judge has conducted the proceeding that ordinarily would determine whether a particular noncitizen may be deported to a particular country, and then, if that noncitizen is allowed to be deported, announce that the immigrant will be deported to some previously unmentioned country — even if that immigrant reasonably fears they will be tortured in that nation. Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D., the case where the Trump administration asks the justices to neutralize the Convention Against Torture, is unlike some of the more high-profile deportation cases that reached the Supreme Court — such as the unlawful deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador — in that no one really questions that the immigrants at the heart of this case may be deported somewhere. D.V.D. involves immigrants who have gone through the ordinary process to determine whether they can be removed from the country. The Trump administration even claims that some of them were convicted of very serious crimes. According to the administration, 'all were adjudicated removable.' But the Convention Against Torture and the federal law implementing it forbid the government from deporting anyone to a country where there is good reason to believe they will be tortured. And federal immigration law and regulations lay out the process that should be used to determine if an immigrant may be deported to a particular country. How immigration hearings are supposed to work As the district judge who heard this case explained in his opinion ruling that Trump must comply with the Convention Against Torture, when the government wishes to deport a noncitizen, that individual is typically entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge. That hearing determines 'not only whether an individual may be removed from the United States but also to where he may be removed.' In these proceedings, the immigrant is given an opportunity to name where they want to be deported to, if the immigration judge determines that they should be removed. If the immigrant does not do so, or if the United States cannot deport them to their designated country, federal law lays out where they may be sent. The United States may deport someone to a country where they have no ties only as a last resort, and only if that nation's government 'will accept the alien into that country.' The immigration judge will generally inform the noncitizen which nations they could potentially be sent to, giving that noncitizen an opportunity to raise any concerns that they may be tortured if sent to a particular country. The immigration judge will then decide whether those concerns are sufficiently serious to prohibit the United States from sending the immigrant to that particular country. The D.V.D. case concerns noncitizens who have been through this process. In many cases, an immigration judge determined that they could not be deported to a particular country. According to the immigrants' lawyers, for example, one of their clients is a Honduran woman. An immigration judge determined that she cannot be sent back to Honduras because her husband 'severely beat her and the children after his release from prison' and she fears that he would find her and abuse her again. And that brings us to the loophole that Trump's lawyers claim he can exploit to bypass the Convention Against Torture. Related The Supreme Court signals it might be losing patience with Trump Ordinarily, if the government wants to deport someone to a country that did not come up during their hearing before an immigration judge, it can reopen the process. The government will inform the immigrant where it wishes to deport them. The immigrant will again have the opportunity to object if they fear being tortured, and an immigration officer and, eventually, an immigration judge, will determine if this fear is credible. But the Trump administration claims it can bypass this process. If a country 'has provided diplomatic assurances that aliens removed from the United States will not be persecuted or tortured,' the Trump administration claims it can deport people to that country 'without the need for further procedures.' In other cases, it claims that it can give the immigrant such a brief period of time to raise an objection that it would be exceedingly difficult for them to find legal counsel, much less compile enough evidence to show that their fears are justified. So Trump's lawyers claim that the government can wait until after a noncitizen has received a hearing before an immigration judge, and only then reveal where it intends to send that noncitizen — even if that country is one of the most dangerous locations on Earth. And the immigrant may receive no process whatsoever after they learn about this decision. Can Trump actually deny due process to people who might be tortured? Recently, in A.A.R.P. v. Trump (2025), the Supreme Court ruled that a different group of immigrants that Trump hoped to deport without due process 'must receive notice…that they are subject to removal…within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek' relief from a federal court. The district judge that heard the D.V.D. case determined that a similar rule should apply to noncitizens the Trump administration wants to deport to a surprise third country. The Trump administration, however, primarily argues that three provisions of federal law governing which courts are allowed to hear immigration disputes mean that the district judge lacked jurisdiction to hear the D.V.D. case in the first place. One of these provisions generally forbids federal courts from second-guessing the government's decision to bring a removal proceeding against a particular immigrant. It also typically prohibits judges from intervening in the government's decision to execute an existing removal order once that order has been handed down by an immigration judge. But, as the district judge explained, the D.V.D. plaintiffs do not challenge the government's 'discretionary decisions to execute their removal orders.' Nor do they 'challenge their removability.' They merely challenge the government's decision to bypass the ordinary process it must use to obtain an order permitting an immigrant to be deported to a specific country. The other two provisions, meanwhile, largely govern the appeals process that immigrants may use if they lose a case before an immigration judge. Such cases are typically appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, and then to a federal circuit court, not the district court that heard the D.V.D. case. But, again, the D.V.D. plaintiffs do not seek to appeal an immigration judge's decision. They object to the Trump administration's refusal to bring them before an immigration judge in the first place. Trump's lawyers, moreover, are quite candid about what it means if the Supreme Court accepts these jurisdictional arguments. 'To the extent an action does not fit' within their proposed process, they argue, 'the result is that judicial review is not available.' So, if Trump prevails, many of the immigrants he hopes to target will not have any recourse in any court.
