2025-11-27 23:49:41
2024年白宫火鸡赦免仪式如期举行，这是一场奇特的年度“庆祝火鸡的表演”，正如Vox的Kenny Torrella去年所言。今天，数千万美国人将参与这一全国性仪式，尽管许多人表示并不特别喜欢或觉得有意义。我们会一起吃掉超过4000万只火鸡，这些火鸡是工厂养殖、高度人工化的动物，与感恩节传说中那只野生火鸡的形象相差甚远（实际上，第一次感恩节可能并没有火鸡）。而且，我们还会吃这些被广泛认为味道平淡、令人不快的火鸡。记者Brian McManus在Vice上写道：“火鸡肉几乎总是干巴巴、令人沮丧的，像一块被阳光晒干的纸浆，又干又难嚼，毫无满足感，味道平淡无奇。”尽管我们内心知道这一点，但还是会把它埋藏在对过去感恩节的美好回忆之下。
所以，这个以吃肉为核心的国家节日，却围绕着一种几乎没人喜欢的菜肴展开。这与我们普遍认为难以说服人们放弃肉类或减少摄入量的原因——味道——似乎有些矛盾。毫无疑问，味道确实是一个因素，但我认为真正的原因更为复杂，而味道平淡的感恩节火鸡正是这一问题的体现。
人类渴望仪式感、归属感以及成为更大故事一部分的渴望，在感恩节的餐桌上达到顶峰。我们不想成为社交异类，抵制这个我们最珍视的国家节日的象征，因为它提醒我们火鸡养殖过程中对动物的折磨和对环境的破坏。有什么比顺应这种习俗更“人性化”呢？我们的从众本能在食物上尤为明显，因为食物是我们彼此联系、与过去建立联系的纽带。尽管如今我们许多人意识到肉类生产方式存在问题，但感恩节似乎是一个忘记这些问题的好时机。
在我的经验中，许多试图减少肉类摄入的人会在自己做饭时选择素食或纯素，但在别人家做客或庆祝特殊场合时，他们则会吃任何东西，以避免冒犯主人或引发关于工厂养殖的尴尬对话。但今年感恩节，我想邀请你换个思路。如果食物的社会和文化背景比味道本身更能塑造我们的饮食偏好，那么我们更应该在这些场合中努力改变美国的饮食习惯。
“在与他人共餐时，我们实际上有机会影响更广泛的变化，分享植物性食谱，引发讨论，并重新塑造传统，使其更加可持续和富有同情心。”我的朋友Natalie Levin（来自纯素Twitter）对我说。
数百年前，感恩节的火鸡可能象征着丰饶和好运——在那个食物匮乏的年代，这是一件值得感恩的事。但如今，火鸡却成了我们浪费和对非人类动物无节制虐待的象征。在一个旨在体现人类最美好一面的节日里，我们当然可以找到更好的象征。毕竟，我们并不喜欢火鸡，今年不妨跳过它。
2023年，我的同事Kenny Torrella发表了一篇深入调查美国火鸡产业状况的文章。他写道：“占超市火鸡99%的Broad Breasted White火鸡被专门培育以突出其胸部——这是鸟类中最值钱的部分。这些火鸡的生长速度是1960年代的两倍，体型也几乎翻了一番。由于体型过于庞大，加上快速生长和不卫生的工厂养殖环境带来的健康问题，它们往往难以行走。”
另一个问题是它们巨大的胸部。公鸡体型太大，无法爬到母鸡背上进行交配，因此必须进行人工繁殖。作者Jim Mason在他的著作《我们所吃的东西的伦理》中详细描述了这一过程，该书由哲学家Peter Singer合著。Mason曾为火鸡巨头Butterball工作，研究这本书时，他不得不手持公鸡，由另一名工人用真空泵刺激其提取精液。一旦收集到足够的精液，就会被带到母鸡棚，Mason会将母鸡按胸朝下固定，另一名工人则用气泵将精液注入母鸡体内。
农场工人每天要重复这一过程，每12秒处理一只母鸡，持续10小时。Mason称这是他“做过最艰难、最快、最脏、最令人作呕、报酬最低的工作”。
根据2024年ReFED（一个致力于减少食物浪费的非营利组织）的估计，感恩节期间，美国人会扔掉超过800万只这样的火鸡。而今年将是连续第四年，感恩节期间面临失控的禽流感疫情，数千万只鸡和火鸡因感染被以令人作呕的方式屠杀。
当我试图描述这种令人不安的现状时，只能用宗教术语来形容，这似乎是一种对地球丰饶、对人性、对生命本身的亵渎。在一年中的其他日子，这种行为就已经令人反感，而在本应表达我们对地球恩赐感激的节日里，难怪许多素食者和纯素者会将感恩节视为一年中最令人不适的一天。
尽管我属于这一群体，但我并不害怕感恩节。我逐渐爱上这个节日，因为它充满了创意重塑的可能。我通常会准备一顿以植物性菜肴为主的盛宴（虽然大多数人称之为“配菜”，但它们完全可以成为主菜）。其中包括：蘑菇 Wellington、奶油豆泥填充的南瓜、杏仁豆腐烤豆、色彩鲜艳的秋季羽衣甘蓝沙拉、烤红卷心菜配核桃和菲达奶酪（可替换为无乳奶酪）、蘑菇无蛤蜊浓汤（我加入大量白豆）、 Challah面包卷、比传统感恩节派更复杂有趣的南瓜味噌派，以及一种与节日氛围完美契合的孟加拉甜点Rasmalai。
纯素火鸡烤肉虽然不是必须的，但近年来已有许多非常出色的产品——我特别喜欢Gardein的面包屑火鸡烤肉和Field Roast的榛子与蔓越莓火鸡烤肉。你也可以自己制作。放弃肉类最难的并不是食物本身（如果真是这样，也许就更容易说服美国人放弃干巴巴的火鸡了）。“最难的是将令人不快的真相和伦理分歧公开讨论出来。”Levin说，这涉及在庆祝欢乐与给予的节日中，面对工业化生产带来的暴力冲突。
这些对话并不轻松，但它们值得进行。我们也不必担心失去定义我们作为美国人的传统仪式。相反，文化正是我们彼此之间关于珍视之物的持续对话——而任何不改变的文化都是死的。我们可以从重新定义不再符合我们价值观的传统开始，而感恩节正是一个绝佳的起点。
更新：2025年11月27日，早上7:30。本文最初于2024年发表，现已更新以适应2025年的背景。
Today, tens of millions of Americans will partake in a national ritual many of us say we don’t especially enjoy or find meaning in. We will collectively eat more than 40 million turkeys — factory farmed and heavily engineered animals that bear scant resemblance to the wild birds that have been apocryphally written into the Thanksgiving story. (The first Thanksgiving probably didn’t have turkey.) And we will do it all even though turkey meat is widely considered flavorless and unpalatable.
“It is, almost without fail, a dried-out, depressing hunk of sun-baked papier-mâché — a jaw-tiringly chewy, unsatisfying, and depressingly bland workout,” journalist Brian McManus wrote for Vice. “Deep down, we know this, but bury it beneath happy memories of Thanksgivings past.”
So what is essentially the national holiday of meat-eating revolves around an animal dish that no one really likes. That fact clashes with the widely accepted answer to the central question of why it’s so hard to convince everyone to ditch meat, or even to eat less of it: the taste, stupid.
Undoubtedly, that has something to do with it. But I think the real answer is a lot more complicated, and the tasteless Thanksgiving turkey explains why.
• Why Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving, despite many of us not liking it very much!
• What life is like for a Thanksgiving turkey.
• What to eat instead of turkey, and why you might even see going turkey-free as more authentic to the values of Thanksgiving.
Humans crave ritual, belonging, and a sense of being part of a larger story — aspirations that reach their apotheosis at the Thanksgiving table. We don’t want to be social deviants who boycott the central symbol of one of our most cherished national holidays, reminding everyone of the animal torture and environmental degradation that went into making it. What could be more human than to go along with it, dry meat and all?
Our instincts for conformity seem particularly strong around food, a social glue that binds us to one another and to our shared past. And although many of us today recognize there’s something very wrong with how our meat is produced, Thanksgiving of all occasions might seem like an ideal time to forget that for a day.
In my experience, plenty of people who are trying to cut back on meat say they eat vegetarian or vegan when cooking for themselves — but when they are guests at other people’s homes or celebrating a special occasion, they’ll eat whatever, to avoid offending their hosts or provoking awkward conversations about factory farming.
But this Thanksgiving, I want to invite you, reader, to flip this logic. If the social and cultural context of food shapes our tastes, even more than taste itself, then it is in precisely these settings that we should focus efforts to change American food customs for the better.
“It’s eating with others where we actually have an opportunity to influence broader change, to share plant-based recipes, spark discussion, and revamp traditions to make them more sustainable and compassionate,” Natalie Levin, an acquaintance of mine from vegan Twitter, told me.
Hundreds of years ago, a turkey on Thanksgiving might have represented abundance and good tidings — a too-rare thing in those days, and therefore something to be grateful for. Today, it’s hard to see it as anything but a symbol of our profligacy and unrestrained cruelty against nonhuman animals. On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect world, surely we can come up with better symbols.
Besides, we don’t even like turkey. We should skip it this year.
In 2023, my colleague Kenny Torrella published a wrenching investigation into conditions in the US turkey industry. He wrote:
The Broad Breasted White turkey, which accounts for 99 out of every 100 grocery store turkeys, has been bred to emphasize — you guessed it — the breast, one of the more valuable parts of the bird. These birds grow twice as fast and become nearly twice as big as they did in the 1960s. Being so top-heavy, combined with other health issues caused by rapid growth and the unsanitary factory farming environment, can make it difficult for them to walk.
Another problem arises from their giant breasts: The males get so big that they can’t mount the hens, so they must be bred artificially.
Author Jim Mason detailed this practice in his book The Ethics of What We Eat, co-authored with philosopher Peter Singer. Mason took a job with the turkey giant Butterball to research the book, where, he wrote, he had to hold male turkeys while another worker stimulated them to extract their semen into a syringe using a vacuum pump. Once the syringe was full, it was taken to the henhouse, where Mason would pin hens chest-down while another worker inserted the contents of the syringe into the hen using an air compressor.
Workers at the farm had to do this to one hen every 12 seconds for 10 hours a day. It was “the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work” he had ever done, Mason wrote.
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Have questions or comments on this piece? Email me at [email protected]!
In the wild, turkeys live in “smallish groups of a dozen or so, and they know each other, they relate to each other as individuals,” Singer, author of the book Consider the Turkey, said last year on an episode of the Simple Heart podcast. “The turkeys sold on Thanksgiving never see their mothers, they never go and forage for food… They’re pretty traumatized, I’d say, by having thousands of strange birds around who they can’t get to know as individuals,” packed together in crowded sheds.
From birth to death, the life of a factory-farmed turkey is one punctuated by rote violence, including mutilations to their beaks, their toes, and snoods, a grueling trip to the slaughterhouse, and a killing process where they’re roughly grabbed and prodded, shackled upside down, and sent down a fast-moving conveyor belt of killing. “If they’re lucky, they get stunned and then the knife cuts their throat,” Singer said. “If they’re not so lucky, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat while they’re fully conscious.”
On Thanksgiving, Americans throw the equivalent of more than 8 million of these turkeys in the trash, according to a 2024 estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste. And this year will be the fourth Thanksgiving in a row celebrated amid an out-of-control bird flu outbreak, in which tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on infected farms have been culled using stomach-churning extermination methods.
When I search for the language for this grim state of affairs, I can only describe it in religious terms, as a kind of desecration — of our planet’s abundance, of our humanity, of life itself. On every other day of the year, it’s obscene enough. On a holiday that’s supposed to represent our gratitude for the Earth’s blessings, you can understand why Thanksgiving, for many vegetarians or vegans, is often described as the most alienating day of the year.
I count myself among that group, although I don’t dread Thanksgiving. I’ve come to love it as a holiday ripe for creative reinvention. I usually spend it making a feast of plant-based dishes (known by most people as “sides,” though there’s no reason they can’t be the main event).
To name a few: a mushroom Wellington, a creamy lentil-stuffed squash, cashew lentil bake, a bright autumnal Brussels sprout salad, roasted red cabbage with walnuts and feta (sub with dairy-free cheese), mushroom clam-less chowder (I add lots of white beans), challah for bread rolls, a pumpkin miso tart more complex and interesting than any Thanksgiving pie you’ve had, and rasmalai, a Bengali dessert whose flavors align beautifully with the holidays.
Vegan turkey roasts are totally optional, though many of them have gotten very good in recent years — I love the Gardein breaded roast and Field Roast hazelnut and cranberry. You can also make your own.
The hardest part of going meatless is not about the food (if it were, it might not be so hard to convince Americans to abandon parched roast turkey). “It’s about unpleasant truths and ethical disagreements being brought out into the open,” Levin said, about confronting the bizarre dissonance in celebrations of joy and giving carved from mass-produced violence.
These conversations are not easy, but they are worth having. And we don’t have to fear losing the rituals that define us as Americans. To the contrary, culture is a continuous conversation we have with each other about what we hold dear — and any culture that’s not changing is dead. There’s far more meaning to be had in adapting traditions that are no longer authentic to our values. We can start on Thanksgiving.
Update, November 27, 2025, 7:30 am: This story was originally published in 2024 and has been updated for 2025.
2025-11-27 20:00:00
关于假期，我们每个人都有不同的传统。但感恩节似乎有一个共同点：吃完火鸡和各种配菜后，大家都会感觉非常难受。这种状态，Trisha Pasricha医生非常熟悉。她是一名胃肠病学专家，同时在哈佛医学院领导一个研究肠道与大脑联系的实验室。感恩节期间，你很可能在医院看到她值夜班。“我们通常会在晚餐后四到五个小时看到人们因为食物卡在喉咙而前来就诊，”她告诉Vox。“因此，我们通常会进行内窥镜检查来帮助取出食物。所以，给所有听众的建议是：一定要仔细咀嚼食物。”除了仔细咀嚼，还有哪些方法可以让我们在消化方面更成功呢？Pasricha在Vox的最新一期播客《Explain It to Me》中对此进行了讲解。以下是对话的节选，已进行删减和润色。你可以通过Apple Podcasts、Spotify或其它播客平台收听完整节目。如果你想提问，可以发送电子邮件至[email protected]，或致电1-800-618-8545。
在感恩节当天，有哪些方法可以在早些时候为消化做好准备？首先，你得决定你家是否要一起“火鸡慢跑”（turkey trot）。支持火鸡慢跑的理由是，进行一些轻度运动实际上有助于你在当天的消化。因为任何形式的运动都能促进消化系统运作，使食物更顺畅地通过，并释放内啡肽和内源性大麻素，这些物质能在一天晚些时候帮助缓解家庭压力带来的情绪波动。如果你家不进行火鸡慢跑，我建议不要整天饿着肚子，这样在大餐时才能尽情享用。但这种方法其实适得其反，因为越饿，你吃东西越快，结果会突然感到饱腹。这是因为食物大约需要20分钟才能到达小肠并通知大脑你已经吃饱了。所以如果你狼吞虎咽，就会吃得过多。我其实更喜欢“慢慢品尝”的方法——我们家就是这样做的。我们下午就开始吃开胃菜。这种方法确实有效，这样到感恩节晚餐时，你就不会感到极度饥饿。所以，我作为家庭试吃员的官方头衔其实是个非常聪明的主意？百分之百正确。在感恩节时，谁担任试吃员，就等于赢得了家庭的“幸运大奖”。
那么，当我开始摆盘时，我应该放些什么呢？这取决于你的目标。有一类人会说：“感恩节这一天，我要吃我想吃的，吃多少都行，你们别管我。”对于这些人，我会说：“你知道吗？这是节日，尽情享受吧，活出你最好的生活。”但如果你的目标是吃完后不感到不适，那么我建议你在盘子里放适量的蔬菜和蛋白质，并先吃这些食物。所谓适量，我指的是盘子至少有一半要被这些食物填满。原因在于，先吃蔬菜能让你更快感到饱腹，而且相比先吃高热量食物，这样能减少血糖的剧烈波动。因此，把奶酪意面和红薯甜薯留到后面吃，把它们当作一种甜点。这已经被多项研究证实：为什么我们总是吃完所有食物后，还会有空间吃甜点？这是因为某些感官体验会让人产生饱腹感。如果你整盘都是咸味食物，身体仍然会渴望甜味。但如果你在晚餐中提前加入一些甜食，你可能会觉得不需要再吃两片派，只需吃几口就足够了。当然，如果你真的非常喜爱那种派，那就另当别论了。在节日里，我不会剥夺你享受最爱食物的权利。
你认为吃太多火鸡会不会有问题？以前有一种说法认为火鸡会让你感到困倦，这是因为火鸡中含有色氨酸这种化合物。但这种说法已经被推翻了。人们在感恩节大餐后感到困倦，主要是因为摄入了大量的简单碳水化合物。除了火鸡，感恩节上还常常有大量酒精。饮酒对感恩节后的感受有什么影响？酒精会延缓胃排空食物进入小肠的速度。因此，如果你在用餐前已经让胃变得迟钝，再吃一顿丰盛的大餐，就等于给自己设定了失败的条件。我建议大家在用餐前尽量避免饮酒。如果你想喝点什么，也许可以在吃完之后再喝。真正有助于加快胃部运作的方法是，在餐后进行短暂的散步。即使只是10到15分钟的散步，也能让肠道中的气体开始消散。如果吃得过多，是否应该散步？是的。但另一个建议是，如果你坐直，就能更有效地排出气体，而不是躺下。因此，至少在吃完后不要立刻躺下。如果无法散步，至少在椅子或沙发上保持良好的坐姿。感恩节就像是“吃”的奥林匹克。你认为我们感恩节的饮食方式是否在某种程度上限制了我们？是否需要调整？我认为感恩节实际上激发了我们最好的一面。有很多研究表明，我们正在变得越来越孤立和孤独，而与家人共进一餐是幸福和长寿的关键。感恩节是唯一一个我们都能一致做到这一点的时刻。因此，我不想破坏感恩节的氛围。我只是希望人们在吃完后不会感到不适和胀气。我认为我们可以通过一些小的调整来实现这一点。
When it comes to the holidays, we all have different traditions. But there does seem to be one commonality when it comes to Thanksgiving: feeling absolutely terrible after working your way through the turkey and all those sides.
It’s a state that Dr. Trisha Pasricha is familiar with. She’s a gastroenterologist, and she runs a lab studying the gut-brain connection at Harvard Medical School. On Thanksgiving, there’s a good chance you’ll find her working a shift at the hospital. “The classic thing we see is maybe four or five hours after dinnertime is people coming in with food stuck in their throats,” she told Vox. “So then we end up doing endoscopies to help get some of that food out. So the lesson for everyone who’s listening is to chew really carefully.”
Besides chewing our food, what are some other ways to set ourselves up for gastrointestinal success? Pasricha tells us on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
What are things you can do early in the day to set yourself up for success?
First, you have to decide if you are a family that turkey trots together or not. The argument in favor of a turkey trot is that doing a small workout will actually set you up for digestive success for the rest of the day. That’s because any form of exercise primes the gastrointestinal (GI) system. You’re going to get things moving. You’re also going to release some endorphins, endocannabinoids. Those can really buffer you emotionally later in the day as family stress builds up.
If you’re not a turkey trotter, I tend to tell people that the best way to approach Thanksgiving is not to starve yourself all day so that when the big meal is upon you, you can eat as much as you want. That actually backfires. The more hungry you are, the more quickly you eat because you’re so hungry. You end up feeling suddenly full because it takes about 20 minutes for food to reach your small bowel and then signal to your brain that you’re full. So if you scarf all your food down, you’re going to really overshoot what you should be eating at that moment.
I actually like the approach — my family does this — we graze. We start the appetizers early in the afternoon. That approach actually helps, so that by the time you get to Thanksgiving dinner itself, you’re not totally starved.
So my official title as family taste-tester is actually a very smart idea?
One hundred percent. I mean, whoever is the taste-tester on Thanksgiving has won the family lottery.
Let’s fast forward to building my plate. What should I be putting on there?
It all depends on your goals here. There’s one group of people who will say, “It’s Thanksgiving day, I’m going to eat what I want, in the quantities that I want, and don’t get in my way.” To those people, I say, “You know what? It’s a holiday. Enjoy yourself. Live your best life.”
If your goal is to not feel ill afterwards, which is common to all of us, then what I would say is to put an appropriate amount of vegetables and protein on your plate and eat those things first.
By appropriate amount, I mean at least half the plate should be filled with those things. The reason why is because eating those vegetables first is going to help you feel full sooner, and you’re actually going to spike your blood sugar a little bit less than if you ate the exact same thing but in a different order.
So save the mac and cheese and the sweet potatoes for last?
Think of that as part of the treat.
This has been shown in several studies: Why do you think we all are bloated, we’ve eaten everything we can possibly eat, yet we so often have room for dessert? It’s because you can become satiated and full to just certain types of sensory experiences. So if your whole plate is savory, your body is still going to crave something sweet. But if you incorporate something sweet into your plate earlier on as part of the dinner, you actually might say, “I don’t need two slices of pie after this. I’ll be totally fine with just a few bites.”
Unless what you want in life is two slices of that pie because it’s your favorite pie in the world. I’m not going to rip that from your hands on a holiday.
Is there such a thing as too much turkey?
There was this older thinking, that turkey can make you really sleepy, and that’s because it contains these compounds called tryptophan. That’s kind of been debunked. The reason people feel sleepy after a big Thanksgiving meal is because of all the simple carbs that we’re loading up on.
Aside from the turkey, another thing that is plentiful at Thanksgiving tends to be alcohol. How does drinking on Thanksgiving affect how you feel after that meal?
Alcohol delays how quickly your stomach can empty food into your small bowel. So if you’re priming your stomach to already be sluggish and then you’re walking into the biggest meal of your year, you are setting yourself up for failure. I would try to avoid alcohol beforehand. If you want to have a glass of something, maybe have it a little bit after you’ve eaten.
Really the best thing you can do to help speed up your stomach is go for a short walk after the meal. All of your intestinal gas will start to dissipate if you go for even just a 10- or 15-minute walk.
If you overindulge at the meal, is that what you should do?
Yes. But the other thing I tell people is if you sit up straight, you are able to expel gas more efficiently than if you’re lying down. So at very least don’t lie down right after the meal. If you can’t go for the walk, at least have some good posture in your chair or on the couch.
Thanksgiving is kind of like the Olympics of eating. Do you think the way we’re eating on Thanksgiving is holding us back at all? Do we need to adjust that?
I think Thanksgiving is actually what brings the best of us out. There have been so many studies about how we are becoming more disconnected and lonely, and one key to happiness and longevity is just having a meal with family. Thanksgiving is one time where we all do that really consistently. So I don’t want to break Thanksgiving at all. I just want people to not feel sick and gassy afterwards. And I think there’s small tweaks we can make to so that part doesn’t happen.
2025-11-27 06:30:00
2025年11月26日，华盛顿特区市中心发生枪击事件，两名国民警卫队成员中弹。目前，一名嫌疑人已被拘留，据称也受了伤，但动机尚不清楚，也不确定该事件是否针对国民警卫队或白宫。两名伤者均来自西弗吉尼亚州，其伤情状况尚不明朗。西弗吉尼亚州州长帕特里克·莫里赛在最初称两名伤者因伤去世后，表示其办公室收到“相互矛盾的报告”。
枪击事件发生在白宫附近的商业区，而特朗普目前并不在华盛顿。特朗普在Truth Social上称嫌疑人是“一头野兽”，并表示他将为此付出“沉重代价”。国防部长彼得·海格赛特也表示，特朗普曾要求向该市增派500名国民警卫队。副总统JD·范斯则在肯塔基州的军事基地表示，目前尚不清楚枪击案的动机，并呼吁为受害者祈祷。
自8月份以来，国民警卫队一直在华盛顿特区部署，以防止犯罪。然而，他们主要在高可见度区域巡逻，并参与美化工作，如垃圾清理。多个由共和党领导的州，包括西弗吉尼亚州，也派出了国民警卫队。在最初部署后，人们担心城市内可能发生冲突，但直到周三之前，局势一直平静。此次事件引发了对美国政治暴力的担忧，特别是考虑到保守派活动人士查理·库克此前遭到枪击，这可能成为另一个冲突的导火索。但目前尚无法确定事件的全部细节或未来可能发生的情况。
好了，现在是时候“下线”了。祝大家提前感恩节快乐！本新闻通讯将在周四和周五完全停更。希望你们也休息一下，我们将在周一重新上线，届时将为大家更新最新消息。如果你还没读过我同事克里斯蒂安·帕兹和亚历克斯·阿巴-桑托斯之间的“火鸡大辩论”，我建议你读一读——无论你支持哪一方，这都是一篇值得一看的文章。
最后，我想表达一份感激之情：非常感谢所有阅读和订阅本通讯的读者，尤其是那些给予建设性批评、温馨话语和可爱动物照片的朋友们。谢谢你们成为如此优秀的读者群体，祝你们与家人朋友共度美好时光，享受美食！
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Two National Guard members were shot in downtown Washington, DC, near the White House on Wednesday afternoon.
What do we know? This is a breaking news story, which means it’s still evolving in real time, and early reports sometimes turn out to be incorrect. With that caveat, here’s what’s been reported so far:
How is the White House responding? In a post to Truth Social, Trump described the shooting suspect as an “animal” who will “pay a very steep price.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also told reporters Trump had requested 500 additional National Guard troops be deployed to the city.
Vice President JD Vance, speaking at a military base in Kentucky, emphasized that the motive in the shooting was still unknown and asked for prayers.
What’s the context? National Guard troops have been deployed in DC since August in what Trump has described as an effort to prevent crime in the city; however, they have largely been focused on patrolling in high-visibility areas of DC and pursuing beautification efforts like trash pickup. Multiple Republican-led states, including West Virginia, deployed troops in addition to DC’s own National Guard.
Concerns about potential clashes in the city were high after the initial deployment, but until Wednesday, it had been peaceful.
After the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, concerns about political violence in the US have also been rising — and, depending on what we learn about the motives of the shooter, this could be another flashpoint. But it’s far too soon to say exactly what happened here or what might happen next.
Happy early Thanksgiving! This newsletter will be fully logged off on Thursday and Friday. We hope you will be too, and we’ll be here to catch you up when we get back on Monday.
If you haven’t read the Great Turkey Debate between my colleagues Christian Paz and Alex Abad-Santos yet, I recommend it — whichever side of the argument you’re on, it’s a good time.
And before we go, I want to end with a quick note of gratitude: I’m very thankful for everyone who reads and subscribes to this newsletter, and especially to everyone who has written in with constructive criticism, kind words, cute animal photos, and more. Thanks for being a great audience, and I hope you have a wonderful day with friends, family, and good food!
2025-11-27 05:15:00
2025年11月19日，俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔·普京参观了莫斯科的一场人工智能展览。| 基斯坦娜·科米尔伊茨纳/法新社/盖蒂图片社
美国的28点和平计划现已缩减为19点。特朗普总统表示，上周向基辅提出的结束俄乌战争的计划，该计划严重偏向俄罗斯的要求，以至于乌克兰总统泽连斯基称其为“我们历史上最困难的时刻之一”，经过美乌谈判代表的讨论后已进行了“微调”。乌克兰方面表示，这份新协议包含了更有力的战后安全保障措施，因此他们认为该协议是可以接受的，泽连斯基正寻求与特朗普会面，讨论乌克兰割让领土给俄罗斯这一棘手问题。那么俄罗斯方面又如何呢？特朗普正派遣他的特使史蒂夫·维特科夫向普京介绍新计划。（维特科夫与俄罗斯同行的对话似乎催生了最初的28点计划。）但目前克里姆林宫对新计划的反应并不积极。外交部长谢尔盖·拉夫罗夫表示，如果新计划与他在8月与特朗普在阿拉斯加达成的协议精神和内容不符，那么“局势将完全不同”。该协议涉及乌克兰向俄罗斯割让东部顿巴斯地区，包括目前未被俄罗斯控制的地区。
特朗普似乎希望复制最近在加沙达成的停火协议，当时美国成功迫使以色列总理本雅明·内塔尼亚胡与哈马斯达成一项他并不完全满意的协议。美国对乌克兰的武器和情报支持使其在战争中拥有一定的筹码，这也是为什么泽连斯基尽管面临特朗普频繁改变立场带来的外交压力，仍继续与华盛顿保持接触。然而，目前似乎没有人能对普京施加影响，因此这场战争是否能很快结束，取决于普京认为哪些条件是可接受的。这让人不禁质疑，只要普京还在位，和平是否就不可能实现。
乌克兰方面可能别无选择，只能继续参与由美国主导的和平谈判，但基辅的高级官员显然对这些谈判并不乐观。去年夏天，前外长德米特罗·库列巴在接受ABC采访时表示，如果普京还在世，战争就无法结束。“不，”他回答道，“虽然可能有较低强度的冲突，但我无法想象在普京执政期间，乌克兰和俄罗斯能实现持久和平。”这种观点认为，即使达成暂时停火，也可能只是战争的暂停，之后俄罗斯会继续推进其战略目标。
实际上，就连最初的28点计划是否符合普京的预期也不明确。该计划可能在乌克兰和西方看来更像是克里姆林宫的“愿望清单”。但该计划也允许乌克兰保留60万军队（这将是欧洲仅次于俄罗斯的第二大军队），要求俄罗斯放弃对扎波罗热和赫尔松等争议地区的控制，并迫使俄罗斯仅承认克里米亚等被吞并地区的“事实控制”而非正式主权。而新计划则允许乌克兰保留80万军队，并获得“北约式”的安全保障，这可能更加难以被接受。
即使特朗普能让泽连斯基同意割让顿巴斯地区，战后的乌克兰很可能仍是一个高度军事化、对俄罗斯充满敌意的国家。这显然不是普京四年前发动这场战争时所设想的，他原本希望迅速占领基辅，将泽连斯基政府替换为一个顺从的傀儡政权。
尽管俄罗斯军队仍在乌克兰推进，但进展缓慢，且小型致命无人机的广泛使用进一步拖慢了他们的步伐。2025年，俄罗斯又占领了乌克兰约1%的土地，据估计，为此付出了20万士兵伤亡的代价。根据美国的“战争研究研究所”计算，按照目前的进展速度，俄罗斯最早要到2027年8月才能占领整个顿巴斯地区。然而，普京仍可能认为自己在这场战争中占了上风，而战争的进展速度也足以维持他的这种信念。他认为这场战争对俄罗斯的未来至关重要，因此不会轻易放弃。
目前，华盛顿和莫斯科在时间框架上存在明显分歧。特朗普上任时承诺在一天内结束战争，给普京设定了两周的期限，而几天前他甚至希望能在感恩节前结束战争。然而，普京则认为一个独立的乌克兰是对其的威胁，他的时间规划是以世纪为单位的。在阿拉斯加的会面中，他似乎让特朗普感到沮丧，因为他引用了俄罗斯历史上的重要人物，如诺夫哥罗德的留里克和智者雅罗斯拉夫，来阐述他对乌克兰问题的看法。
或许会有一个转折点。也许当俄罗斯最终占领整个顿巴斯地区，或者泽连斯基因内部政治斗争和丑闻失去权力，普京就会认为自己取得了胜利。然而，随着欧洲现在承担了美国之前提供的大部分经济和军事支持，短期内乌克兰全面崩溃的可能性似乎不大。或者，乌克兰可能能够与俄罗斯僵持不下，使俄罗斯社会承受更大的经济压力，最终迫使普京改变策略。又或者，他可能认为这是一场关乎文明的斗争，无论需要多长时间，或付出多大的代价，都值得继续。
根据现行的俄罗斯法律，普京可以继续执政至2036年。尽管有传言称他身体欠佳，但73岁的他似乎仍保持良好的健康状况，而俄罗斯的权力继承计划仍是个谜。目前，他的统治看起来相当稳固，尽管战争和制裁给俄罗斯社会带来了巨大压力。距离叶夫根尼·普里戈任叛乱的动荡时期已经过去很久，当时政权似乎随时可能崩溃。然而，正如俄罗斯反对派领导人所指出的，这类政权往往在崩溃前显得异常稳固。但对乌克兰及其盟友来说，寄希望于这种局面并不现实。
目前看来，普京似乎愿意将剩余的任期全部投入这场战争，他并不设限于愿意为胜利付出多少俄罗斯的鲜血和财富，甚至特朗普也无法让他感到自己已经取得了成功。
The 28-point peace plan is now a 19-point peace plan.
President Donald Trump says the plan for ending Russia’s war in Ukraine that was presented to Kyiv last week, and was so heavily tilted toward Russia’s demands that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it “one of most difficult moments in our history,” has been “fine-tuned” after talks between US and Ukrainian negotiators. The Ukrainians say the deal — which now includes more robust post-war security guarantees for Ukraine — is acceptable for them, and Zelenskyy is seeking a meeting with Trump to discuss the thorny issue of Ukraine ceding territories to Russia.
What about the Russians? Trump is dispatching his envoy Steve Witkoff to present the new plan to President Vladimir Putin. (Witkoff’s conversations with his Russian counterparts appear to have been the source of the original 28-point plan.) But the initial response from the Kremlin is not very positive. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that if the new plan differs from the “spirit and letter” of the deal Putin thought he had reached with Trump in Alaska in August, the “situation will be fundamentally different.” That understanding involved Ukraine ceding the rest of the eastern Donbas region, including areas not currently under Russian control, to Russia.
Trump appears to be hoping for a repeat of the recent Gaza ceasefire, where the US was able to strongarm Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a deal with Hamas that he wasn’t all that happy with. The importance of American weaponry and intelligence sharing to the Ukrainian war effort gives Trump leverage over Zelenskyy — that’s why the Ukrainian leader continues to engage with Washington despite the diplomatic whiplash of Trump’s frequently changed stances on the war.
But at this point, nobody seems to have leverage over Putin. Which is why the question of whether this war will end soon comes down to what terms Putin finds acceptable. This raises the depressing question of whether peace is possible at all as long as Putin is alive and in power.
The Ukrainians may have little choice but to continue to engage with the US-led peace negotiations, but senior officials in Kyiv are clearly not optimistic about it. In an interview with ABC last summer, former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba was asked if the war can end while Putin is still alive.
“No,” he replied, adding that while a “lower intensity conflict” was possible, “I cannot imagine eternal peace between Russia and Ukraine achieved during President Putin’s lifetime.” Even a temporary ceasefire, this line of thinking goes, may only be a pause before Russia resumes its efforts.
It’s not even completely clear that the original 28-point plan would have been acceptable to Putin. It may have looked to many in Ukraine and the West like a Kremlin wish list. But it would also have allowed Ukraine to keep a military of 600,000 troops (which would be the largest in Europe after Russia), required Russia to relinquish control of the disputed regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, and forced Russia to settle for “de facto” rather than official recognition of its control over Crimea and other annexed regions.
The new deal reportedly allows Ukraine to keep 800,000 troops along with “NATO-style” security guarantees; it is probably even more of a nonstarter. Even if Trump can push Zelenskyy into parting with the Donbas, post-war Ukraine is likely to be a highly militarized and implacably anti-Russian country on Russia’s borders. That’s not what Putin had in mind when he launched this war nearly four years ago in hopes of quickly taking Kyiv and replacing Zelenskyy’s government with a complacent vassal.
Russia’s forces continue to advance in Ukraine, but their pace has been slow and the widespread use of small deadly drones is making it slower. In 2025, Russia took an additional 1 percent of Ukraine’s land area at an estimated cost of 200,000 troops killed and wounded. The US-based Institute for the Study of War calculates that at its current rate, it will take Russia until August 2027 at the earliest to conquer the rest of the Donbas.
But Putin likely still believes he is winning this war, and the pace of progress is just enough for him to continue with that belief. He considers this war too important for Russia’s future to give up now.
There’s a disconnect in time frames between Washington and Moscow right now. Trump came into office pledging to end the war in a day, has given Putin various two-week deadlines, and just a few days ago appeared to hope this could be wrapped up by Thanksgiving.
Putin, meanwhile, considers the very existence of an independent Ukraine a threat and is thinking in terms of centuries. He apparently exasperated Trump at their meeting in Alaska by launching into one of his trademark historical lectures about figures from Russian history like Rurik of Novgorod and Yaroslav the Wise to explain his position on Ukraine.
It may be that there will come a tipping point. Perhaps if Russia can finally take the rest of the Donbas, or if Zelenskyy’s internal political struggles and scandals remove him from power, it would be enough for Putin to take the win. (With Europe now making up much of the economic and military support the US previously provided, a complete Ukrainian collapse seems unlikely in the short term.) Or perhaps the Ukrainians will be able to fight the Russians to a standstill, and the economic pressure on Russian society will grow to the point that he has to change course. Or perhaps, he views this as a civilizational struggle that’s worth continuing no matter how long it takes, or how massive the human cost.
Under current Russian law, Putin can remain in power until 2036. Despite periodic rumors of illness, he seems to be in fairly good health at 73, and Russia’s succession plan is a complete mystery.
For the moment, his rule looks remarkably stable despite the stresses on Russian society caused by war and sanctions. We’re a long way from the heady days of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny, when it looked like the regime might collapse at any moment.
As Russian opposition leaders point out, regimes like this one often appear totally stable just before they fall — but hoping for that outcome is not exactly a viable strategy for Ukraine or its allies.
But it does appear there’s a chance that Putin is willing to devote the rest of his time in office to victory in Ukraine, that he does not have a limit on the amount of Russian blood and treasure he’s willing to spend to achieve it, and that even Trump is not able to give him what he needs to feel he’s accomplished it.
2025-11-26 20:50:44
在孟加拉国，女性参与劳动力市场的比例较低，仅有7.2%的小企业由女性拥有。长期以来，女孩因性别而受到歧视，常常在完成学业前就被嫁出去，成年之前就成为母亲，并一生依赖丈夫生活。雷斯玛的故事也是如此开始的，但她成功地改变了命运。她决定自己创业，生产苹果醋。随着需求的增长，她寻求支持以扩大业务。通过欧盟资助的培训计划，雷斯玛掌握了创业所需技能，从零开始发展自己的事业。雷斯玛说：“那项培训对我而言就像魔法一样。”她深受启发，开始雇佣本村的女性，如今她不仅在支持自己的家庭，还在为社区中的其他女性创造机会。研究表明，女性将收入的90%再投资于家庭，从而改善教育和医疗条件，提高教育水平，使家庭更加繁荣。在像孟加拉国这样的国家，这种影响具有巨大意义。因此，欧盟正在投资像雷斯玛这样的女性，使她们能够按照自己的方式领导、创业并取得成功。有许多像雷斯玛一样的女性，充满潜力和决心。她们掌握正确的技能后，也在改变自己的生活，支持家庭，并推动社区变革，正如雷斯玛所做的那样。雷斯玛的故事并非独一无二，但它证明了投资女性是明智的经济选择。因为当女性领导时，整个社区都能获得成功。
In Bangladesh, women’s participation in the workforce is low, and only 7.2% of small businesses in the country are owned by women.*
For generations, girls have been discriminated against just because they are girls. Too often, they are married off before finishing school, become mothers before they reach adulthood, and spend their lives being dependent on their husbands.
Reshma’s story began like this. But she managed to change its course. She decided to start her own business by producing apple cider vinegar on her own. As demand grew, she sought support to help expand her business.
Through a training program funded by the European Union, Reshma equipped herself with the entrepreneurship skills she needed to succeed and grow her business from the ground up.
“That training worked in my life like magic,” Reshma says. “I was very inspired.” She began hiring women from her own village and today, she’s not just supporting her family, she’s also helping to create opportunities for other women in her community.
Studies show women reinvest up to 90% of their income into their families **, improving access to education and healthcare, causing education rates to rise, and families to thrive. In a country like Bangladesh, the ripple effects of this can have a huge impact.
That’s why the European Union is investing in women like Reshma so they can lead, create and rise on their own terms. There are many women like her, full of potential and determination. Armed with the right skills, they too are transforming their lives, supporting their families, and driving change in their communities, just as Reshma has done. Reshma’s story is not unique, but it is proof that investing in women is smart economics. Because when women lead, entire communities can succeed.
2025-11-26 20:45:00
What could you do with energy that’s cheap, clean, and near unlimited?
You could live in a home built to your precise needs that stays cozy and cool all year long. You could swim in a heated pool filled with ultra-pure recycled water. You could grill a steak grown in a factory, from cell on up, marbled, textured, and flavored to perfection. You could visit a nature preserve on land reclaimed from mines and farms, teeming with once-endangered animal life. You could get whisked comfortably and quietly anywhere by robots, whether down the street or the other side of the world. You could plan every weekend outing for the next month, counting on reliable, far-reaching weather forecasts. And all of your garbage would break down into its constituent elements, destined to be reassembled into new shoes, cars, and refrigerators.
This is all speculation, but the pace of improvement in clean energy and the scale of its deployment put these ideas within the realm of possibility.
Energy shapes the limits of what a society can build, sustain, and imagine, and the more of it we have at our disposal, the further we can push those boundaries. What we would decide to do with vastly more energy has huge implications for our politics, our economy, our environment, and our prosperity.
This year, the world is poised to spend $2.2 trillion on clean energy — power from the wind, the sun, the water, and splitting atoms. It also includes upgrades to the power grid, new forms of energy storage, and increased efficiency.
This investment has mostly been trumpeted as a way to help limit climate change. Humanity’s collective deployment of clean energy and increasing efficiency so far has already helped take some of the worst-case scenarios off the table.
However, climate change is a low political priority now. A more compelling case for clean energy is that it’s often the best way to get cheap energy, and to get a lot of it. The deployment of wind and solar power around the world continues to defy expectations, while the growth trajectory of energy storage is following close behind. This suite of technologies is taking off around the world — not because of a carbon tax or even environmental concerns, but because clean energy is simply better at meeting the needs of a moment when energy appetites are growing.
Suppose we alter the framing and approach solving climate change not as a task merely of curbing emissions, but of increasing access and lowering costs of better ways to power the world even further. It’s an approach that leads with prosperity and quality of life, while creating a more stable climate in the process.
If we make it a priority to get more clean energy, that raises the interesting — and fun — question of what we should do with it. After all, we’re not collecting energy for the sake of energy but to do stuff.
Cheap, clean, plentiful energy doesn’t just help people save money on their power bills; it unlocks new industries, makes thorny political problems moot, and helps repair the planet. These use cases are important motivations for why the transition to clean energy needs to happen and how it can bring about a better world for all of us. It’s why we’re doing this at all.
We can exchange heat and electrons for just about anything on Earth. How much energy a person uses is an effective proxy for how well off they are — how much food they can eat, how comfortable they are at home, how educated they are. We can see this play out in the cost and quality of lighting, which, in the UK alone, dropped 99.9 percent since 1700, tracing how economies grew as people shifted from campfires, to kerosene lamps, to LED bulbs, and beyond.
The global energy landscape is changing rapidly. Fossil fuels are still the dominant ways we heat, power, and get around the world, but renewable energy capacity is rocketing upward.
“Energy is prosperity,” said Eric Toone, chief technology officer at Breakthrough Energy, a high-tech clean energy funding firm founded by Bill Gates in 2015. “Energy is the capacity to do work. Energy is the capacity to build things, to make things, to move things.”
The potential of near-unlimited energy has been tantalizing researchers for decades, since the last big energy revolution, the dawn of the nuclear age.
“It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age,” said Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, in 1954. “This is the forecast for an age of peace.”
Nuclear power didn’t make this dream come true. It did provide huge amounts of electricity, but its construction and operating costs rose as other energy sources got cheaper. Meanwhile, environmental activists and some policymakers shifted their energy strategy to conservation rather than expanding the pool of power. Yet, the prospect of producing energy in such vast quantities that its cost is a minor concern is still one that lures scientists, engineers, and investors. And the recent technology trends do give some observers hope that this dream is within reach.
“Long-term, I think there’s good reason to think that at least lots of places in the world will have much less expensive and more stable energy, especially once they’ve made the investment in the next generation infrastructure,” said Daniel Vermeer, a researcher at Duke University studying the future of energy. “And I think that’s going to happen in a lot of places.”
How much more energy? “I think we’re looking at double the electricity production,” Vermeer said.
So, in the best tradition of economic thought experiments, let’s assume a can opener. What do we open first?
If we vastly increase our energy supply from current levels, food and water are where we can get the most bang for the British Thermal Unit (BTU). “It’s so fundamental to human prosperity,” Vermeer said. “It’s also where people will see benefits the fastest.”
We already spend a huge amount of our energy to produce food, and agriculture accounts for one-third of humanity’s greenhouse gas output. The fertilizer used to grow crops alone accounts for 5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than aviation and shipping combined — and most fertilizers rely on natural gas as a feedstock. If we had the power and materials to produce more zero-emissions fertilizer, farmers could extract greater yields from the same amount of land. And decarbonizing the supply chain with electric tractors and trucks to bring food to markets would further increase efficiency. Getting the most out of our existing farms will be essential to feeding the world’s growing population. Otherwise, expanding farms will continue to devour forests and wildlands.
The next generation of farming techniques could create similar yields on even smaller plots of land, allowing food to be produced year round, nearer to major population centers or even within them. One approach is vertical farming, where crops are grown vertically in controlled indoor environments instead of horizontally across fields. Many vertical farming techniques are already being used today. But with more cheap energy to run pumps, lights, and fans, we can scale this up further.
Water is essential to all life as we know it, and we haven’t been doing a great job of judiciously using it. In recent years, some major cities have been teetering on the brink of running out of water. And with average temperatures rising, many regions are poised to see more severe droughts.
However, two-thirds of the world is covered in water, and widespread desalination would allow the world to tap into that vast, currently undrinkable supply. The main techniques for desalination are distillation and reverse osmosis, and right now, both require a lot of energy. But, if there’s a lot of cheap power on tap, then desalination could be a primary source of water for some communities, allowing freshwater rivers and aquifers to recharge. It would also resolve many of the political conflicts around water.
Unlimited energy could allow us to bioengineer our food sources from individual nutrients to maximize nourishment. Precision fermentation, or electro-food, is an emerging technology that uses specially designed microorganisms like yeast or bacteria to make proteins, fats, or nutrients like those found in animal products. Instead of raising cows or chickens, you could “brew” milk, eggs, or meat ingredients in fermentation tanks — just like the process of making beer.
Cheap, clean electricity can power these breweries as they use captured carbon and hydrogen as ingredients. Companies are already selling animal-free dairy and egg proteins made this way. As renewable power becomes abundant, precision fermentation could scale up, feeding growing populations with a fraction of the land, water, and emissions of traditional agriculture
Now, let’s take precision fermentation even further. Cultivating cells into whole steaks is starting to become possible, but it’s an expensive and involved process. If this could truly get off the ground, it would have huge knock-on benefits for the environment. Raising livestock right now draws a huge toll in terms of land use, energy and water consumption, and waste production, not to mention the immense ethical problems embedded in raising and killing animals for food. If we can turn energy into meat that replaces conventional livestock, that would solve so many environmental issues all at once. But, convincing people to eat it remains a barrier. Already, there are seven states that have banned lab-grown meat. “Laboratory agriculture and producing things without animals is possible from a technical perspective, but we have to get a lot more sophisticated about how people make those decisions,” Toone said.
Whether or not you’re bullish on AI, it’s clear that more of our jobs and lives hinge on access to computing power and storage. Right now, data centers are a big part of the story of growing electricity demand, and speculation about their future energy needs is already starting to drive up electricity prices for ordinary people.
But with fewer energy constraints, more computing tools could become available to more people, and these resources can then be used to resolve some of our biggest energy and environmental challenges. It may also be a necessary investment for the US to retain a competitive edge. “I, for one, have become completely convinced that it’s necessary to win at AI for national security,” said Neil Chatterjee, a former commissioner on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. “How do we generate the power to win the AI race while keeping electricity affordable and not backsliding? There’s no simple solution, but I’m confident we can get there.”
How can we mitigate their worst effects?
Utilities can require tech firms to pay a deposit to for their future power needs so they don’t over-inflate their needs. Data centers can also face mandates to bring their own generation and energy storage, which could also support the broader grid.
Operators of these facilities can shift energy-intensive tasks to low-demand periods, though this flexibility may be limited. Their size incentivizes efficient electricity use, and computing will likely grow more energy-efficient over time as the technology improves.
AI can further accelerate the clean-energy transition by streamlining permitting applications for wind and solar projects, improving materials design, enhancing weather forecasting, and strengthening models of energy demand.
With food and water sorted, we can then start to chip away at the root cause of climate change: the rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels that are heating up the planet. Halting climate change thus means stopping these emissions entirely. And in the increasingly likely scenario where we overshoot our goal of limiting global average temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, it also means deliberately pulling carbon back out from the environment. It’s not enough to simply produce more energy; the world needs negative greenhouse gas emissions.
Humanity currently spews more than 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. So, to move the needle, we need to think about carbon management solutions that can work on this scale.
There are a few ways to do this. One is capturing carbon dioxide at the source. At conventional coal and natural gas-fired power plants, carbon capture systems currently impose a large parasitic load, around a quarter of the generator’s power output. That makes it hard to build a business case for carbon capture at fossil fuel power plants. But other industrial processes, like steel production, also emit carbon dioxide, and point-source capture can decarbonize this and other processes that don’t currently have an easy zero-emissions alternative.
We can also capture carbon dioxide straight from the air. There are already companies developing machines that can filter carbon from the atmosphere. Some businesses are also working on ways to pull carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater. The challenge is that it requires a lot of energy to move the amount of air and water needed to draw out significant amounts of carbon, which in turn raises the cost.
“Two things have to happen: One is that we have to continue to work to bring down the cost of air capture,” Toone said. Currently, it costs around $500 per ton to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. The goal is to get it down to $100 per ton or less. “Then societies have to become affluent enough that they’re willing to do it and recognize the dangers caused by climate change,” Toone added.
Another approach is enhanced weathering, which speeds up natural processes where rocks like limestone react with carbon dioxide in rainwater, forming a chemical bond that permanently locks it away.
If you don’t lock away carbon dioxide, you can put it to work. It’s an important raw ingredient for chemicals and materials. You can use it to make fuels reconstituted from the air, polymers, enzymes, concrete, as well as make your drinks bubbly. This has the potential to become a trillion-dollar industry.
Waste is a mounting problem, and many synthetic materials like plastics have no natural mechanisms that break them down, making them a problem that can last for generations. Recycling plastic materials has largely failed to live up to the promise, and the bulk of plastic waste ends up in landfills. To meaningfully reuse and reconstitute polymers, the process needs to be competitive with producing virgin materials, which means the energy you use for recycling has to be dirt cheap. When we get there, we may be able to close the loop, making, unmaking, and remaking everything we need with minimal extraction from the Earth.
The next place to look is transportation. Cheap fossil fuels have shrunk the world, allowing people to cross continents and oceans in hours rather than months. How we get around is now the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Four-wheeled vehicles already have a glide path to zero emissions with electrification. The tougher challenges are going to be electrifying or decarbonizing bigger vehicles like ships and airplanes.
Container ships are the gargantuan worker ants of the global economy, transporting just about every tangible good around the world. Right now, most container ships burn some of the cheapest and dirtiest fuels imaginable, but with abundant clean energy, they could draw on cleaner sources of power. These ships may be too big to run on batteries, but with much cheaper, clean electricity, shipping companies can generate hydrogen, ammonia, methanol, or synthetic versions of conventional fuels, moving cargo without the carbon footprint.
Climate-friendly flying is still trying to get off the ground. Right now, there aren’t any batteries that come anywhere close to the energy density of fossil fuels. Some airlines are deploying electric aircraft on shorter routes. However, without a breakthrough, long-haul flights will need to run on synthetic zero-emissions fuels, which demand vast quantities of low-cost energy. Or, they’ll need a mechanism like direct air capture to offset their emissions.
With even more energy, we can begin thinking about commercializing promising innovations that exist only in labs or are still on the drawing board. Many of these ideas sound far-fetched, but abundant clean energy moves them into the realm of possibility.
Materials built molecule-first Imagine designing stuff the way you’d build a playlist: starting from tiny pieces and crafting exactly what you need. Shoes that bounce just right. Home insulation that actually understands seasons. Skin grafts that heal without scars. We already 3D print things, but scaling it is pricey and slow. Smarter, custom materials could make industrial printing faster, cleaner, and way less wasteful.
Space that’s closer — and cleaner Getting to orbit still takes a ton of energy, and today’s rocket fuels leave a pretty heavy carbon footprint. Pulling carbon dioxide out of the air could help offset launches, and cleaner electricity can make low-carbon fuels from the start. The result: space access that’s not just cheaper, but easier on the planet.
Solar power that never sleeps Above the atmosphere, sunlight doesn’t quit. Space-based solar collectors could soak up that uninterrupted energy and beam it back to Earth via microwaves. No clouds, no sunsets — just steady power when we need it.
Become a spacefaring civilization And instead of dragging every nut and bolt off Earth, we could mine asteroids for the raw materials already floating out there. That opens the door to building more in space — moon bases, deep-space missions, the whole sci-fi starter kit — without the crushing cost of launching every ounce from Earth.
Even if we could realize all of the exciting potential of this clean energy-powered future, some new problems could emerge if we’re not careful.
First, there will be a big dislocation in the job market. There are almost 2 million people in the US working in coal, oil, and gas sectors — mining, building, transporting, and combusting these fuels. They will need new jobs or a soft landing pad that will help them move or retire. “We’re potentially seeing huge shifts in governance and unionization around the world,” said Adam Cowart, who is on the faculty of foresight at the University of Houston.
Additionally, “abundant” does not necessarily mean “equal” when it comes to energy. In the year 2025, there are still 685 million people in the world who don’t have access to electricity, and there’s no guarantee that increasing the global supply of energy will benefit them without concerted policies to match.
Having more energy could also end up indulging people’s worst impulses. Already, we’ve seen across much of the world that as fuels and electricity get cheaper, people end up driving bigger cars over longer distances, running their thermostats less efficiently, and eating more meat.
Valerie Thomas, professor of industrial engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, noted that our recent history shows that we have not used the energy we already have in a judicious way. “If we look back in history just a little bit, what do we do? We use it up on things maybe we don’t even understand, like bigger houses with more air conditioning, or we would commute even longer distances,” Thomas said. It will take concerted effort to make sure new energy doesn’t just go to frivolous uses.
And in her work looking at some of the poorest populations in the world, Thomas said she found that the key limits to prosperity are often things like local corruption, a lack of prenatal care, not enough vaccines, political instability, and bad economic policies. “What tends to be the barrier to the good life? I don’t think it’s energy,” Thomas said. That said, the world’s poorest stand to gain the most from the transition to clean energy, not just for having more useful power in their lives but breathing in less pollution and having more economic autonomy.
The post-energy abundance world is not one where every problem is solved, but it’s one with greater prosperity, improved human welfare, and generally a more stable climate. It will raise its own challenges, so there’s no scenario where we can take it for granted.
The fossil fuel era, and much of human history, was governed by constraints. The age of clean energy is poised to be one that’s more limited by imagination and choices, and the remaining solutions will be much more fun to implement.
This series was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.