Escape Velocity
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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12 hours ago
- Yahoo
Spain ombudsman probes town's ban on Muslim celebrations
Spain's ombudsman on Friday said he is looking into the Jumilla local authority's decision to ban Muslims from using public facilities such as civic centers and gyms to celebrate religious festivals. Jumilla, a municipality in the Murcia region led by the conservative Popular Party, approved a measure banning "cultural, social or religious activities unrelated to the City Council," including Muslim celebrations like Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha, from municipal sports venues. The measure passed following a proposal from the far-right Vox party, which had called for an outright ban on Islamic events. Vox abstained, allowing Mayor Seve Gonzalez to approve the revised version. The Popular Party relies on Vox's support to govern the region. Ombudsman seeks clarity from Jumilla authorities Gonzalez told Spain's El País newspaper that the measure did not single out any one group and that her government wanted to "promote cultural campaigns that defend our identity." Ombudsman Angel Gabilondo requested details on how the town plans to accommodate religious groups to exercise their right to worship in public spaces. He wants to know "the measures planned to facilitate the exercise of acts of worship by religious denominations which, due to their unique characteristics, must be held in public places such as pavilions or sports centers." According to El Pais, about 1,500 Muslims live in the town, which has a population of just over 27,000. Calls to defend public worship The council said the decision was made to "promote and preserve the traditional values and manifestations of our cultural identity." Mounir Benjelloun Andaloussi Azhari, president of the Spanish Federation of Islamic Organizations, described the restrictions as "Islamophobic and discriminatory." Mohamed El Ghaidouni, secretary of the Union of Islamic Communities of Spain that represents more than 900 Muslim communities in the country, meanwhile called the ban "institutionalized Islamophobia." The Vox party in Murcia welcomed the measure on social media, writing: "Thanks to Vox the first measure to ban Islamic festivals in Spain's public spaces has been passed. Spain is and will be forever the land of Christian roots!" "We must protect public spaces from practices foreign to our culture and our way of life," the party's leader Santiago Abascal wrote Friday, adding that "Spain is not Al Andalus," referencing the historic name for Islamic Spain, which fell in 1492 when the Catholics recaptured the lands. But Spain's Catholic bishops warned that the move violates fundamental rights and discriminates against all faiths. Spain's Migration Minister Elma Saiz said on Friday the ban was "shameful," and urged local leaders to "take a step back" and apologize to local residents. Edited by: Rana Taha
Vox
19 hours ago
- Vox
Mark Zuckerberg's unbelievably bleak AI vision
is a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox's Future Perfect section and has worked at Vox since 2014. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy. The future is Zuck, and all of us, using AI on our sunglasses, apparently. Allison Robbert/Bloomberg via Getty Images Of all the many famous Steve Jobs stories that tech industry folks like to share, perhaps the single most famous is his 1983 pitch to then-Pepsi president John Sculley to join Apple: 'Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?' Like many things Jobs said, the pitch was wildly arrogant, self-important and self-aggrandizing, but ultimately correct. What Sculley did at Apple (mostly after firing Jobs) to sell the Macintosh and popularize personal, graphics-centered computing changed the world more than his invention of the Pepsi Challenge had. There really was a huge difference between selling Macs and selling sugar water. After listening to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg lay out his vision of how AI 'superintelligence' would change the world, though, my main reaction was: man, this guy just wants to sell us sugar water. 'Personal superintelligence'? Maybe just 'superintelligence,' it's cleaner In an Instagram video (of course) posted last week, Zuck explains that Meta's goal is to develop 'personal superintelligence for everyone,' accessed through devices like 'glasses that can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day.' 'A lot has been written about the scientific and economic advances that AI can bring,' he noted. 'And I'm really optimistic about this.' But his vision is 'different from others in the industry who want to direct AI at automating all of the valuable work': 'I think an even more meaningful impact in our lives is going to come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, be a better friend, and grow to become the person that you aspire to be.' This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. The main reaction to this pitch I've seen from smart AI observers is: are you kidding? 'Superintelligence,' by definition, means a system that performs better than a human, sometimes vastly better, across most if not all domains. And the most ambitious thing Zuck can think of to make with that is… VR glasses? As Fortune's Sharon Goldman put it, while Steve Jobs called his computers 'a bicycle for the mind,' 'Zuckerberg, by contrast, imagines superintelligence as a pair of Ray-Bans that help you…be a better friend?' The lack of ambition in Zuckerberg's rhetoric is all the more striking when one considers the extreme ambition of his spending on AI. This year alone, he's hired former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and veteran AI founder Daniel Gross; Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang (as part of a quasi-purchase of Scale, a massively important company whose training data is used by just about every AI company); Apple AI chief Ruoming Pang; and ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao, among several others. His hiring spree, and the gargantuan amounts he's willing to pay top talent, have roiled the sector for weeks now. At one competitor (former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab), Zuckerberg reportedly sent offers to more than a dozen of the company's 50 staffers, one of which was for over $1 billion over a few years, while the rest ranged from $200 million to $500 million over four years. Even for a company as rich as Meta, billion-plus offers for talent are unheard of. ($1 billion is how much Zuckerberg paid for all of Instagram in 2012.) It's a pretty vivid sign that Zuckerberg sees AI as the future of his business. But what does that future look like? I've seen the best digital minds of my generation wasted on Reels One could, very charitably, reason that Zuckerberg knows that a world of vastly superintelligent AI systems would lead to massive, far-reaching social ramifications that are not adequately summarized as 'you get smart sunglasses,' but he has concluded that most of his investors and customers aren't in a place to understand the gravity of those changes. Hence, talk about glasses. That could be what's happening, and I have some sympathy for his position if so. Trying to game out what a post-superintelligence world looks like is in fact extremely difficult, not least to those of us limited to mere human intellects. And it's usually scary — even if the changes ultimately prove positive. For all the uncertainty, there is no plausible world where people have access to 'personal superintelligence' and they and businesses do not use that to automate huge numbers of tasks, and there are a number of conceivable scenarios where that leads demand for human wage labor to totally collapse. Other scenarios see wages skyrocket. It's a tough situation for a CEO to message. But it's also worth considering the possibility that Zuckerberg means exactly what he's saying: that the AI systems his team is building are not meant to automate work but to provide a Meta-governed layer between individual human beings and the world outside of them. Facebook and Instagram are, in a sense, very crude versions of that layer, synthesizing and compressing the outside world into a digestible and addictive form people can consume throughout their days, and Zuckerberg's earlier obsession with the metaverse seemed a logical continuation. This approach has been immensely profitable. (Though, not so much the metaverse.) Imagine how much more profitable it'd be if a digital mind much smarter than Zuck's was designing it. Conversations like Zuckerberg's with the business writer Ben Thompson in May give credence to this interpretation. Zuckerberg sees four opportunities with AI: improving his products' recommendation algorithms to better target advertising, driving greater engagement on 'consumer surfaces' like Instagram Reels, 'business messaging' (i.e., businesses doing transactions through WhatsApp and Messenger, using AI), and lastly direct AI use à la ChatGPT. The promise of AI, to Zuckerberg, is that it can help him sell you more ads and convince you to spend more time watching Instagram brainrot. My reaction to that pitch was the same as AI writer Zvi Mowshowitz's: 'It was like if you took a left wing caricature of why Zuckerberg is evil, combined it with a left wing caricature about why AI is evil, and then fused them into their final form. Except it's coming directly from Zuckerberg, as explicit text, on purpose.' At least the sugar water from Pepsi tastes good. That the sixth largest company on Earth is devoting billions of dollars toward this vision is not, y'know, great. But it has a silver lining. One thing I've learned from talking to AI researchers over the years is that most of them are driven by a conviction that this thing they're building is really, really socially important. Sometimes that comes with a safety tinge ('this thing could kill us, and we need to make it so it doesn't'), sometimes with an accelerationist tinge ('this thing could liberate mankind from economic scarcity'), but either way it's usually stated with real conviction. If they only wanted money they'd go work for a hedge fund. But they also want to build something they're proud of. That character trait will, I think, cause the 'throw money at smart people until they all join' strategy that Zuckerberg is attempting to fail. If superintelligence is built, it will be built by a team that is productive due to a passionate, shared, optimistic vision for what a world with superintelligence will look like. It will be made because its makers want to change the world, not sell sugar water. A team of researchers joining primarily for the money, under a leader whose boldest vision is 'what if we sold more ads on sunglasses,' is not going to make it.
Vox
2 days ago
- Vox
What makes Israel's starvation of Gaza stand apart
is a correspondent at Vox, where he covers the impacts of social and economic policies. He is the author of 'Within Our Means,' a biweekly newsletter on ending poverty in America. Israel's use of starvation as a weapon of war has been well-documented by human rights organizations since 2023. Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Anadolu via Getty Images 'We are imposing a complete siege on [Gaza]. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel — everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we must act accordingly.' That was Yoav Gallant, then the Israeli defense minister, two days after Hamas's attack on October 7, 2023, killed some 1,200 Israelis and took 250 more hostage. The following week, Israel's national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir echoed a similar sentiment: 'So long as Hamas does not release the hostages,' he posted on X, 'the only thing that should enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of air force explosives — not an ounce of humanitarian aid.' So why is it that it took this long for the world to turn its attention to this humanitarian disaster? Part of the answer is that in recent weeks, the situation really has gotten much more dire, after Israel ended its 42-day ceasefire with Hamas in March and stopped allowing any aid into Gaza for two months, as my colleague Joshua Keating recently wrote. But there's another factor: The images coming out of Gaza have been absolutely heart-wrenching. Photos and videos have gone viral — on news sites and on social media — clearly showing malnourished babies starving to death, as well as those showing children and adults with their skin clinging to their bones with barely anything in between. 'It is tragic that it takes those types of really graphic, really horrible images to break through,' said Alex de Waal, an expert on famine who serves as the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University. 'And that is such a terrible commentary on just a gargantuan failure.' This, of course, is nowhere near the first time horrific images from Gaza have surfaced and sparked outrage around the world. But there's something about the visibility of a human-made famine that, for many people — including some of Israel's most ardent supporters — crosses a moral threshold. Starving an entire population cannot be spun as collateral damage or merely the cost of war — a messaging tactic that Israel has turned to to justify its killing of innocent people despite plenty of evidence that it has routinely targeted civilians. 'You can't starve anyone by accident. It has to be deliberate and sustained,' de Waal said. 'It is beyond dispute that you have to starve people systematically because it takes so long.' Indeed, Israel's use of starvation as a weapon of war has been well-documented by human rights organizations since 2023, and both Gallant and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare. Israel's mass starvation of Gaza is, by definition, a form of collective punishment — imposing potentially fatal consequences on every Palestinian living in the enclave, whether they are a combatant or an innocent civilian. That's why using starvation as a weapon of war is illegal under international law. But that wasn't always the case. What Israel is doing is part of a long history of weaponizing food and basic resources. Still, while there are many examples of countries intentionally creating or exacerbating famine conditions on populations, there are also aspects of Israel's current policies in Gaza that are unique. How countries have used starvation as a weapon of war Using starvation as a weapon of war wasn't always explicitly illegal under international law. The siege of Leningrad by the Nazis and their allies, which lasted from 1941 to 1944, was one of the deadliest sieges in history, killing more than one million people. Many of these deaths were attributed to starvation. An American-run tribunal, however, determined that the forced starvation was compatible with international law. After all, it was a tactic that the Allies themselves had used as well, notably in their blockades of German-occupied territories and in Japan. There are many examples throughout history of famines that were either entirely engineered or deliberately made worse through reckless colonial and war policies. In 1943, as the British empire's colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent was nearing its end, the Bengal famine killed up to 3 million people. Since then, studies have uncovered scientific evidence that the famine was not a result of climate conditions like serious drought. Instead, British policies, under Prime Minister Winston Churchill — which included confiscating rice and boats from the coastal parts of Bengal and exporting rice from India to other parts of the empire — seriously exacerbated famine conditions. Churchill denied this, saying that the reason there was a famine was because Indians were 'breeding like rabbits' and suggesting that if the situation was indeed as dire as people claimed, then Mahatma Gandhi would be dead. Another example is the Holodomor, the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians under the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Joseph Stalin pursued a range of policies that engineered famine conditions — including restricting the movement of people, seizing grain even when there wasn't enough to feed the local population, and exporting grain even as Ukrainians starved — in part, historians argue, to tamp down Ukrainian nationalist movements. Several countries and scholars have since recognized the famine as an act of genocide. The US also used blockades as a means to advance its war interests. One of its military campaigns against Japan during World War II was named 'Operation Starvation' — which aimed to destroy Japan's economy by limiting the distribution of food and other imports. The military assault deprived Japan of essential raw materials and led to food shortages. That, along with naval blockades and America's destruction of agricultural infrastructure contributed to widespread malnutrition and starvation. It was only after World War II that the Geneva Conventions of 1949 established some rules about the responsibility to allow food and other essentials into enemy territory for vulnerable populations. But even then, by and large, starvation tactics were still permissible. 'The reason it was permitted was because the Americans and the British rather liked using it,' de Waal said. 'It really wasn't until the British and the Americans had abandoned their colonial wars — the American one being Vietnam in the '70s — that they thought, 'Okay, now we're not going to fight these kinds of wars, and we can get around to banning it.'' The Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, which were agreed to in 1977, finally prohibited the 'starvation of civilians as a method of warfare [or combat].' And just over 20 years later, in 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court officially codified weaponizing starvation as a war crime. How Israel's starvation of Gaza is different 'Here, what we see is all the ingredients coming together in a deliberate way. We see the [Israeli leaders'] statements; we see the total bombing of all the food production,' said Neve Gordon, a professor of human rights law at Queen Mary University of London. 'I don't think there's [another] case in history, because other cases had to do with other stuff going on that were not human-made. Here, the whole starvation — from beginning to end — is human-made.' Israel has also significantly limited traditional aid groups' operations and, for months, entirely blocked aid from entering Gaza. Generally, UN-coordinated aid providers, which include UN agencies and established NGOs, have been able to enter and operate in war zones. But since the ceasefire ended in March, Israel has placed unprecedented constraints on those organizations. Instead, since May, Israel has been coordinating with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a newly formed US- and Israel-backed private entity that operates militarized distribution sites in central and southern Gaza. Israeli troops have also shot at aid-seekers at GHF's distribution sites, and, according to the UN, some 1,000 Palestinians have been killed trying to get aid from GHF. Gordon calls GHF 'a famine profiteering company,' adding that it 'does not actually provide the necessary food, while producing these hunger games that everyone was watching, [showing] starving people are going to get food and getting shot at.' While Egypt has been complicit in enforcing the blockade through its border with Gaza, the reality is that even aid going into Gaza through the Egyptian border has to go through Israeli inspection. The result is that Israel has effectively vacuum-sealed Gaza, with full control of what aid gets in. Israel could have chosen to prevent a famine at any point. Instead, it has repeatedly hampered or entirely rejected efforts to deliver life-saving aid to Palestinians — all in contravention of international law. 'Israel is not unique at all in using hunger as a weapon of war,' de Waal said. 'What is unique about the Israeli one is just how rigorous and how sustained it is, and how it is in defiance of an international humanitarian capacity that can respond just like that. So if Netanyahu wanted every [child in Gaza] to have breakfast tomorrow, it can be organized.' One example of Israel's (and the world's) capacity to stop the worst from happening is the polio vaccination campaign that happened last year. When polio — which had been eradicated from Gaza for 25 years — resurfaced as a result of the humanitarian and sanitation crisis imposed by Israel's war, governments around the world pressured Israel to agree to a humanitarian pause in combat, in order to vaccinate children across the Gaza Strip. In the middle of the war, the vaccination campaigns were successful, reaching 95 percent of the target population. An effort to stop malnutrition can be similarly efficient.
