2025-12-24 05:50:00
特朗普第二任期就职典礼上，大法官们站立 | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
同一批最高法院大法官，此前裁定特朗普有权利用总统权力犯下罪行，如今却在周二对特朗普的权力设定了实质性的限制。在“特朗普诉伊利诺伊州案”中，三位共和党大法官与三位民主党大法官共同裁定，特朗普在部署数百名国民警卫队成员镇压伊利诺伊州布罗德维尤移民拘留设施外的抗议活动时，违反了联邦法律。值得注意的是，大法官布雷特·卡瓦诺在一份单独意见中表示，他仅基于非常狭窄的法律依据就可能裁定反对特朗普。
因此，看来只有极少数的大法官投票支持对特朗普动用军队镇压美国境内民众的权力施加重大限制。特朗普试图利用军队镇压少数抗议者。据曾审理此案的联邦地区法官艾普里尔·佩里表示，“通常抗议人数不到50人”，“人群从未超过200人”。然而，特朗普声称，根据联邦法律，如果存在“对美国政府权威的叛乱或叛乱的危险”或“总统无法依靠常规力量执行美国法律”，他有权动用国民警卫队。最高法院周二的裁决并未回应特朗普荒谬的主张，即几十名抗议者构成“叛乱”，而是主要关注特朗普声称自己无法依靠常规军队执行法律。
最高法院的回应令人担忧。法院指出，“常规力量”一词在相关法律中“很可能指的是美国军队的常规力量”。因此，除非特朗普无法依靠美国陆军、海军、空军和海军陆战队等常规部队来执行法律，否则他不能动用国民警卫队。这一论点可能促使特朗普试图动用常规军队来镇压政治抗议者。然而，法院的裁决也包含一些语言，表明特朗普动用常规军队的权力同样受到限制。法院解释说，只有在“例外情况”下，特朗普才能这么做。这是因为另一项联邦法律禁止军队在“未获得宪法或国会法案明确授权的情况下”执行法律。此外，法院的简短裁决指出，特朗普并未援引允许他动用常规军队执行法律的法案。
尽管如此，伊利诺伊州的裁决不太可能终结这场冲突。正如卡瓦诺在单独意见中指出的，特朗普可能会尝试援引《叛乱法》（Insurrection Act）来动用常规部队，该法允许军队“在州内镇压任何叛乱、国内暴力、非法联合或阴谋”，但仅限于特定情况。司法部长期以来对这些情况的解释非常狭窄。例如，1964年时任副司法部长尼古拉斯·卡岑巴赫签署的一份备忘录指出，只有在“暴力行为者获得州政府的批准”或“像19世纪70年代的三K党那样实际控制了相关地区”时，才能援引该法。
目前尚不清楚，如果特朗普试图动用《叛乱法》，五位支持法院裁决的大法官是否会坚持卡岑巴赫的观点。然而，伊利诺伊州的裁决确实表明，即使是在最高法院，也对特朗普声称拥有广泛动用军队镇压美国公民的权力表示怀疑。
大法官塞缪尔·阿利托，最高法院中最坚定的共和党派系代表，撰写了一份反对意见，主张特朗普可以依据“常规力量不足”这一理由，拥有广泛动用军事力量镇压美国人的权力。但阿利托的意见仅得到大法官克拉伦斯·托马斯的支持。大法官尼尔·戈萨奇也持反对意见，但主要是基于程序问题。
总之，至少目前，最高法院的少数多数似乎认为，特朗普不应拥有无限动用军事力量镇压美国公民的权力。
The same Supreme Court that ruled that President Donald Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes finally placed a meaningful limit on Trump’s authority on Tuesday.
In Trump v. Illinois, three Republican justices joined all three of the Court’s Democrats in ruling that Trump violated federal law when he deployed a few hundred members of the National Guard to squelch protests outside of an immigration detention facility in Broadview, Illinois, which is about 12 miles west of Chicago.
Notably, however, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a separate opinion saying he would have ruled against Trump on very narrow grounds. So, it appears that only a bare majority of the justices voted to place significant limits on Trump’s authority to deploy the military against Americans located on US soil.
Trump attempted to use the military against a small number of protesters outside of the Broadview facility. According to Judge April Perry, a federal district judge who previously heard this case, “the typical number of protestors is fewer than fifty,” and “the crowd has never exceeded 200.”
Nevertheless, Trump claimed the authority to use National Guard members against this minor protest under a federal law that permits the federal government to take command of the Guard (which is ordinarily controlled by states) if there is “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” or if “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
The Supreme Court’s Tuesday order does not even engage with Trump’s implausible claim that several dozen people protesting an immigration facility (some of whom have been charged with crimes) constitute a “rebellion.” Instead, it focuses largely on Trump’s claim that he could deploy the Guard because he is “unable” to execute US law without it.
The first part of the Court’s response to Trump is a bit alarming. The Court’s order explains that the words “regular forces,” as it is used by the relevant statute, “likely refers to the regular forces of the United States military.” Thus, Trump cannot use the National Guard unless he is somehow unable to enforce the law by using the full might of the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.
This argument could be troubling, because it seems to goad Trump into actually attempting to use the regular Army or Marines on political protesters. But, the Court’s Illinois order also contains some language suggesting that his power to use the regular military is also limited.
The circumstances when Trump may do so, the Court explains, are “exceptional.” That is because a separate federal law prohibits the military from “execut[ing] the laws” outside of “cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.” And, as the Court’s brief order notes, Trump “has not invoked a statute” that permits him to use the regular military to execute the laws.
That said, the Illinois order is unlikely to be the end of this conflict. As Kavanaugh notes in his separate opinion, Trump might attempt to deploy regular troops under the Insurrection Act, which permits the military to “suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” — but only in limited circumstances.
The Justice Department has long interpreted these circumstances very narrowly. A 1964 memorandum signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, for example, indicates that the Insurrection Act may only be invoked when “those engaging in violence are either acting with the approval of state authorities or have, like the Klan in the 1870s, taken over effective control of the area involved.”
It remains to be seen whether all five of the justices who joined Tuesday’s full-throated rebuke of Trump will adhere to Katzenbach’s view if Trump does attempt to use the Insurrection Act. Still, the Illinois order does strongly suggest that even this Supreme Court is suspicious of a president who claimed broad authority to use the military against Americans.
Justice Samuel Alito, the Court’s most reliable Republican partisan, wrote a dissent that would have given Trump extraordinarily broad authority to target Americans with military force. Among other things, Alito argues that all Trump needs to do to overcome the “unable with the regular forces” language in federal law is to simply say that he has “determined that the regular forces of the United States are not sufficient.” But Alito’s opinion was joined only by Justice Clarence Thomas.
Justice Neil Gorsuch also dissented, but mostly on procedural grounds.
So, the bottom line is that, at least for now, a bare majority of the Supreme Court seems to believe that Trump should not have limitless power to use military force against US citizens on US soil.
2025-12-24 00:00:00
美国国务院发布的一张图片显示了埃普斯坦和麦克斯韦。| 来自美国司法部，由Anadolu和Getty Images提供。上周五，司法部再次发布了埃普斯坦文件。这些文件不完整且被大量涂黑，引发了国会成员的不满。在数千份文件中，包括了对吉尔·麦克斯韦审判的陪审团记录。麦克斯韦目前因协助杰弗里·埃普斯坦多年性侵数百名女孩而被判入狱20年。《蜘蛛：杰弗里·埃普斯坦与吉尔·麦克斯韦的复杂关系》一书的作者巴里·莱文讲述了麦克斯韦如何从一位媒体大亨的宠儿变成数百起犯罪的帮凶。莱文与Today, Explained节目的主持人诺埃尔·金讨论了麦克斯韦的人生经历，以及她与前总统唐纳德·特朗普的关系可能对她的未来产生什么影响。这段对话经过编辑，以确保内容简洁清晰。完整播客中还有更多内容，因此请在Apple Podcasts、Pandora和Spotify等平台收听Today, Explained。
麦克斯韦的童年生活是怎样的？吉尔·麦克斯韦在英格兰长大，住在有50到60个房间的豪宅里。她的父亲是著名的舰队街媒体大亨罗伯特·麦克斯韦。她是家中九个孩子中最年幼的一个。她的成长环境非常奇特，因为她的父亲脾气暴躁，对孩子们要求极高。吉尔的母亲伊丽莎白后来在自传中提到，她的丈夫罗伯特经常因愤怒而对孩子们进行羞辱和严厉对待，包括体罚。因此，吉尔从小就在奢华与痛苦中长大。
她是否对父亲表现出敌意或怨恨？不，相反，她接受了这种角色。她可以说是父亲的掌上明珠。不仅在成长过程中与父亲关系亲密，罗伯特还希望将她培养成家族企业的一员。1988年，罗伯特·麦克斯韦收购了Macmillan出版社和《纽约每日新闻》，他从英国带来的就是自己的女儿吉尔。吉尔当时在社交圈中非常有名，拥有大量与名人和富豪的联系。因此，罗伯特希望借助她的影响力。
吉尔·麦克斯韦的父亲罗伯特的故事以悲剧收场，对吗？是的。罗伯特和他的儿子凯文和伊恩与英格兰银行发生了一场关于拖欠近7500万美元贷款的争执。在那场事件中，罗伯特当时正在加那利群岛海岸附近的一艘游艇上，这艘游艇以吉尔的名字命名，叫“Lady Ghislaine”。他早上在甲板上被看到，之后掉入海中。12小时后，西班牙渔民在大西洋中发现了他的尸体。尸检结果显示没有谋杀迹象，家人认为这是一起自杀事件。吉尔对此难以接受，她认为这是涉及以色列特种部队和西西里合同杀手的阴谋所致。
吉尔·麦克斯韦和杰弗里·埃普斯坦是如何相识的？吉尔和杰弗里·埃普斯坦从未明确说明他们是如何相遇的，当时的情况非常神秘。1992年，他们一起出现在巴黎的一场时装秀上。当时，吉尔正处于极度痛苦之中，她的父亲刚刚去世，她经常哭泣，情绪崩溃。她搬进了一间小公寓，对未来感到迷茫。然后，她突然与杰弗里·埃普斯坦在一起，住在纽约上东区的豪宅里。杰弗里·埃普斯坦能够为她提供她习惯的那种富裕生活。
吉尔·麦克斯韦是如何卷入杰弗里·埃普斯坦的性侵行为中的？大约在他们关系开始两年后，杰弗里·埃普斯坦邀请吉尔·麦克斯韦一起前往密歇根北部的音乐夏令营——Interlochen学校。杰弗里·埃普斯坦年轻时曾从纽约布鲁克林来到这里学习音乐，后来他赚了钱。为了纪念他，学校设立了以他名字命名的奖学金小屋。1994年，吉尔随杰弗里来到这里，杰弗里在那里遇到了一名13岁的女孩，法院文件中称其为Jane Doe。杰弗里对这名女孩说：“你有才华，我想带你去佛罗里达州棕榈滩跟我住，我将为你提供私人声乐课程，我和吉尔会照顾你，给你一个舒适的生活环境。”他们还见到了女孩的母亲，并邀请她到棕榈滩的庄园。吉尔则扮演杰弗里的情人，让母亲觉得这是一个会照顾女儿的伴侣。对这名少女来说，住在豪宅、获得衣物和礼物是她的梦想。但事情很快变得黑暗。杰弗里指示吉尔教这名13岁女孩学习性爱姿势。这让我感到震惊，因为吉尔现在成为了杰弗里的共犯，把这名小女孩送入了“狼口”。
随着时间推移，麦克斯韦在性侵中的角色发生了怎样的变化？他们回到棕榈滩后，杰弗里指示吉尔开始寻找其他女孩。吉尔会从当地学校和公园里招募女孩，让杰弗里的司机开车寻找目标。她会问女孩：“你愿意为我的朋友做一次按摩赚个几百美元吗？”这其实是性侵的代号。然后他们会支付女孩200到300美元，要求她们继续招募其他女孩。吉尔负责监督整个过程，她会以姐姐甚至母亲的角色来迎接这些年轻女孩。她为何要这么做，毁掉这些未成年人的童年，令人难以理解。
麦克斯韦现在在哪里？吉尔已经被转移到德克萨斯州的一家低安全级别的宿舍式设施，此前她被关押在佛罗里达州的联邦设施中。这与她最近接受的副检察长托德·布兰奇的采访有关，她声称自己从未见过唐纳德·特朗普有任何不当行为，也不了解他与杰弗里·埃普斯坦的任何事情。作为奖励，吉尔被转移到了低安全设施。她正在寻求总统的赦免。你认为麦克斯韦会得到特朗普的赦免吗？特朗普早在1980年代末就认识吉尔·麦克斯韦。我认为特朗普赦免她并不牵强。如果吉尔被赦免，对埃普斯坦和麦克斯韦的受害者来说将是极大的噩梦。如果吉尔·麦克斯韦被赦免，今天的受害者将再次经历创伤。她应该继续服刑，直到刑满。
Last Friday — and then again this Tuesday — the Justice Department released the Epstein files. The documents were incomplete and heavily redacted, angering the Congress members who’d pushed for the release for months. Among the thousands of documents were the grand jury records from the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for aiding Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of hundreds of girls over the course of years.
Barry Levine, the author of The Spider: Inside the Tangled Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, traced Maxwell’s path into Epstein’s orbit — from favored daughter of a media tycoon to the accomplice to hundreds of crimes. Levine spoke with Today, Explained host Noel King about Maxwell’s life story and what her relationship with President Donald Trump might mean for her in the coming years. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What was Maxwell’s upbringing like?
Well, Ghislaine grew up in England in a mansion with 50 or 60 rooms. Her father, of course, was Robert Maxwell, the famous Fleet Street media tycoon. She was the youngest of their nine children.
It was a very strange upbringing in the sense that her father was extremely explosive, and he demanded a great deal of his children. Ghislaine’s mother, Elizabeth, later, in her autobiography, said that her husband Robert would fly into these rages and subject the children to humiliation and harsh treatment, including corporal punishment.
So she grew up privy to a life of obscene luxury. However, it was a very difficult life growing up under her father,
Has she expressed hostility or resentment towards her father in the years since?
No. In fact, she embraced [her role]. She was daddy’s little girl in [every] sense. And not only were they close as she was growing up, but [her father] also wanted to groom her for the family business.
When Robert Maxwell acquired Macmillan Publishing in 1988, along with the New York Daily News, the person that he brought with him from England was his daughter Ghislaine. She was well-known and had a tremendous Rolodex of contacts of the rich and famous. And so Robert Maxwell wanted to tap into that.
Her father’s story ended in tragedy, is that right?
Her father and his sons — Kevin and Ian — had a battle with the Bank of England for defaulting on close to 75 million in loans.
[During that episode,] he was on a yacht off the coast of the Canary Islands, his yacht — which was named after Ghislaine, the Lady Ghislaine — and he was seen on the deck early that morning, and then he had fallen overboard.
His body was found 12 hours later in the Atlantic Ocean by Spanish fishermen. An autopsy interestingly revealed that there were no signs of foul play. The people around the Maxwell family believed it to be a suicide.
What did Ghislaine think?
Ghislaine didn’t want to believe that her father would take his life. So she said this was a result of a dark conspiracy involving [Israeli special forces] renegades and Sicilian contract killers who were responsible for her father’s death.
How did Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein meet?
Ghislaine and Jeffrey Epstein never specifically cited where they in fact met. It was very mysterious how the two of them came together at that time. And then, of course, they show up together at a fashion show in Paris in 1992.
You have to remember at the time that Ghislaine was really not herself. She was extremely distraught after her father’s death. People who I interviewed for my book said she was constantly crying. She was constantly breaking down. She was really not in any type of good graces. She moved into a small New York apartment, really just kind of wondering what her future was going to be.
And then all of a sudden she’s with Jeffrey Epstein, and she is spending time at his townhouse mansion on the Upper East Side. Jeffrey Epstein was able to provide this type of super wealthy lifestyle that she had become accustomed to.
How did Ghislaine Maxwell become part of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse?
Well, about two years into their relationship, Jeffrey Epstein invited Ghislaine Maxwell to travel with him to northern Michigan in the spring of 1994. There was a music camp there called the Interlochen School. Jeffrey Epstein had studied there as a young student from Brooklyn, New York, after he made his money. The school erected a Jeffrey Epstein Scholarship Lodge in his honour because Jeffrey Epstein gave the music school financial gifts.
So Ghislaine Maxwell goes with Jeffrey in 1994 to this music school, and Jeffrey Epstein met a 13-year-old girl there who is identified in court documents as a Jane Doe. And Jeffrey Epstein approached this girl and said, “You have talent. I would like to bring you to Palm Beach, Florida where I live, and I want to provide for you private voice lessons — and myself and Ghislaine — [and] we will take care of you. We will put you up in a nice place to live.”
They met the girl’s mother and invited the girl’s mother to their Palm Beach estate. And Ghislaine played the role of Jeffrey Epstein’s love interest, really legitimising the deal for the mother, seeming that this was a couple that was going to take care of [her] daughter, and it was a teenager’s dream to hang out in a mansion, be lavished with clothing and gifts.
But then it went to the dark side. Ghislaine was instructed by Jeffrey Epstein to groom this 13-year-old girl into learning about sexual positions. This was, to me, the rubber hitting the road in the sense that Ghislaine Maxwell was now becoming a co-conspirator to Jeffrey Epstein and basically feeding this young child to the wolf.
How did Maxwell’s role in the abuse change or evolve with time?
When they returned to Palm Beach, Ghislaine Maxwell was instructed by Jeffrey Epstein to begin finding other girls.
Ghislaine Maxwell would recruit girls from the local schools, from local parks. She would have Jeffrey Epstein’s driver drive around. She would spot a girl. She would say, “Would you like to make a couple hundred dollars giving my friend a massage?” Of course that was code for the sexual abuse that would take place. And then they would pay these girls $200, $300, and the girls were asked to recruit other girls that they knew.
Ghislaine was in charge of overseeing this entire operation. She would present herself as this big sister, even a motherly type of individual to welcome these young girls. It boggles the mind why she would do this, why she would destroy the childhoods of these minors.
Where is Maxwell now?
Well, Ghislaine has been moved to a minimum-security dorm-like facility in Texas from the federal facility lockup that she was in Florida. And this had to do with the fawning interview that she gave recently to [United States Deputy Attorney General] Todd Blanche that she never witnessed any wrongdoing involving Donald Trump while he was friends with Jeffrey Epstein, [and that] he didn’t know anything about any of this.
Ghislaine, as a reward, I believe, was moved to this minimum-security facility. She’s working on asking for clemency from the President.
Do you think Maxwell could receive a pardon from President Trump?
Donald Trump knew Ghislaine Maxwell going back to the late 1980s. I don’t think it’s far-fetched that Donald Trump could do this.
It would be to the absolute horror of the Epstein and Maxwell survivors for Ghislaine to be pardoned. I think that [it] would cause traumas for [her victims] today if Ghislaine Maxwell was pardoned. She belongs behind bars for the remainder of her sentence.
2025-12-23 23:00:00
纽约的奥塞戈镇（Oswego）方圆10英里内已有三座核电站，而它现在希望再建一座。纽约州州长凯西·霍彻尔（Kathy Hochul）最近承诺将新增1吉瓦的核电供应，部分是为了满足蓬勃发展的AI行业对电力的需求。奥塞戈正争取成为新核电站的选址。为了深入了解奥塞戈为何如此热衷于建设核电站，以及如果成功会带来什么影响，Vox视频制作人内特·克里格（Nate Krieger）前往该镇，采访了市长并实地参观了核电站。
增加核电供应有许多好处。美国平均一座核电站可以为140万户家庭提供电力。核电站可以全天候运行，不会产生碳排放或传统空气污染，同时还能创造数百个就业岗位。然而，像三里岛、切尔诺贝利和福岛第一核电站这样的灾难事件仍深深影响着公众的想象。许多人不希望在自家后院建核电站，担心可能发生的事故和核废料处理问题。美国的核电站通常将核废料存放在干式储罐中，这是一种相对安全的方法，但并非永久性解决方案。此外，反对在州内建设新核电站的人还提到成本和建设周期的问题。即使奥塞戈被选为新核电站的选址，可能也需要十多年时间才能享受到其带来的好处。美国在核电建设方面一直存在进度延误和超预算的问题，最近建成的美国核电站是佐治亚州的沃格特（Vogtle），其建设比原计划晚了数年，预算也超出了数十亿美元。本视频回顾了美国在核能方面的历史，探讨了美国为何在这一领域落后，以及未来如何建设清洁高效的核电站，特别是对奥塞戈镇的影响。
延伸阅读：
The town of Oswego, New York, has three nuclear power plants within 10 miles — and it wants another one. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul recently announced a commitment to add a gigawatt of nuclear power to the New York state grid, partially to meet the electricity demands of the booming AI industry. And Oswego is vying to be chosen as a site for this new power plant.
To find out more about why Oswego is so eager for nuclear — and what would happen next if it’s chosen — Vox video producer Nate Krieger traveled there to meet with the mayor of Oswego and see the nuclear power plants up close.
There are a lot of benefits to adding more nuclear energy to the grid. The average US nuclear power station can provide enough electricity to support 1.4 million homes. Nuclear power operates 24/7 and doesn’t generate carbon emissions or traditional air pollution. Plus, these plants create hundreds of jobs.
But disasters like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima Daiichi loom large in the public imagination. Many people don’t want nuclear power in their backyard, understandably wary of possible disasters and the issue of nuclear waste. Nuclear power plants in the US store their waste in dry casks, which is a relatively safe method but is not designed to be permanent. And other opponents of building a new nuclear plant upstate cite issues of cost and the length of the construction project.
Even if Oswego is chosen to be the site of the next nuclear power plant in New York state, it would likely take over a decade before it gets to reap those rewards. The United States has not had a great track record of building nuclear on time and on budget. The most recent power plant built in the US was Vogtle, Georgia, which was years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
This video looks into the country’s history with nuclear power, trying to figure out why the US fell so far behind and what building clean and efficient power could look like in the future, especially for the town of Oswego.
2025-12-23 19:30:00
许多国家都深陷债务之中，美国也不例外。发展中国家的债务总额接近31万亿美元，相当于为全球每个人提供3750美元的支票，或者足以让杰夫·贝索斯在威尼斯每周末举办价值5000万美元的婚礼长达11900年。然而，实际上，非洲、亚洲和拉丁美洲的许多国家因债务负担过重，每年在利息支付上的支出甚至超过了教育和医疗的投入。这并非新鲜事，但近年来情况变得更糟，形成了一个恶性循环，就像许多美国人因信用卡或学生贷款逾期而陷入的困境一样。
债务螺旋的受益者往往是华尔街的贷款机构，它们收取高昂的利率，从中获利。解决全球债务陷阱没有简单的办法，但纽约和伦敦正在起草相关法律，旨在防止最严重的债务滥用。同时，任何有助于简化债务重组的措施，都可能帮助国家更快摆脱债务循环。
对于贫困国家来说，债务就像一个无底洞，无法摆脱。联合国官员Penelope Hawkins形容这种状况就像“加州旅馆”，你随时可以离开，但永远无法真正走出。当债务危机加剧时，这些国家会削减医院建设、学校投资，甚至停止支付基本的公共服务，导致经济放缓和信用评级下降。
债务偿还的真正代价是，发展中国家不得不将大量资金用于支付利息，而不是用于发展。例如，马拉维这个世界上最贫困的国家之一，其政府每年仅在医疗上花费4.4亿美元，教育上花费7.7亿美元，而用于支付利息的金额却高达12.5亿美元，远超医疗和教育的总和。由于75%的马拉维人每天收入不到3美元，政府几乎无法通过税收来偿还债务，只能继续借贷，使债务循环持续下去。
尽管如此，仍有一些希望。由于外国援助大幅削减，许多国家开始寻求改变现有体系的道德依据。一些私人债权人也开始呼吁改革，认为持续施压发展中国家偿还不可持续的债务最终会伤害所有人，包括债权人自己。纽约和伦敦正在推动相关法律，以帮助这些国家获得债务减免和重组的机会，尽管这些法律不会立即解决问题，但它们为发展中国家提供了新的希望。
然而，国家无法像个人或公司一样申请破产，因此当像斯里兰卡这样的国家无法偿还贷款时，只能回到债权人桌前谈判。即便没有“恶狼基金”（vulture funds）的干预，这种谈判过程也极其艰难。正如债务正义组织的Tim Jones所说，这种债务重组过程对债务国来说“就像一场噩梦”。如果纽约或伦敦能够通过相关法律，更多国家将有勇气申请债务减免。否则，他们只能继续借贷，而这些贷款往往来自世界银行等国际组织，这些贷款无法进行重组，且附带的政策可能长期抑制发展。
Like many Americans, most countries are in a lot of debt.
Developing countries, alone, carry nearly $31 trillion worth of debt. Enough debt to give everyone in the world a check for $3,750. Or to pay for Jeff Bezos to throw a $50 million wedding in Venice every weekend for the next 11,900 years. Or, at least in theory, to solve world hunger with trillions to spare.
But instead, many countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America are saddled with so much debt that today more than 3 billion people — over one-third of humankind — live in nations that spend more on interest payments than they do on health care or education. This is nothing new. But it’s gotten far worse in recent years as part of a vicious cycle that will be all too familiar to most Americans who’ve ever fallen behind on a credit card bill or a student loan payment.
You take out a new credit card to pretend you can pay the old one. No matter how much you pay off each month, somehow the amount you owe seems to grow larger each year. And if a disaster strikes at the absolute worst possible moment — be it a hurricane or a medical emergency — then forget it.
For poor countries, as with people, debt twists into a financial hole with no end in sight.
“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Penelope Hawkins, senior economic affairs officer at the United Nations focusing on debt and development finance. “You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.”
And when the crisis gets deep enough, indebted countries stop building hospitals, just like deeply indebted Americans forgo health care and trips to the dentist. The nations defund their schools. Their economies slow. And their credit rating tanks, meaning that any future loans will be even more expensive.
“These aren’t just statistics,” said Joel Curtain, director of advocacy at Partners in Health, which has been pushing for reform to the system for resolving runaway debt. “This crisis is embodied in sickness, ill health, and death.”
To understand a pernicious piece of how this all works, look no further than the handful of Manhattan hedge funds that effectively control the financial fate of some entire countries — just like they may control your mortgage and your own highly profitable credit card debt.
The terms of most countries’ debt contracts — also known as sovereign bonds — are not handled by some international body or within the debtor country, but rather, are split between the jurisdiction of judges in the two largest financial hubs in the world, New York and London. After all, that’s where the money is.
And thousands of miles away, it is ordinary people who face the hidden but profound consequences of that debt deal gone wrong. They are the ones who will hurt the most when the government cuts kick in, when the price of bread doubles, their kids’ classrooms size balloons, and the hospitals go dark.
But as poor countries face down a broader shortage of funding for critical development projects driven by sweeping foreign aid cuts, some activists see a real opening for relief.
Starting on Wall Street.
There is nothing inherently wrong with having some debt.
It costs money to get ahead. If you want a well-paying job, you probably have to go to college. And if you don’t have family who can cover the bill, then you probably need to take out loans.
The same is true for countries. If you want to grow your economy, you’ve got to build schools, staff hospitals, and invest in infrastructure. And if your country is not wealthy to begin with — if you got the short end of colonialism’s stick — then the only way to pay for that is to take out loans.
“No country has grown without some debt,” Hawkins said. “No country has developed without debt.”
Vietnam, for example, was once one of the poorest countries in the world. But a series of economic reforms in the late ‘80s — accompanied by $26 billion in World Bank loans since 1993 — literally catapulted the country into the global middle class, nearly eradicating extreme poverty in the process.
The problem is, the loans that poor countries take out these days have become so expensive — and the growth they’re supposed to fuel is often so sluggish — that they can never pay them back. The interest adds up before the returns come in.
And yikes, has that bill added up over the years.
Developing countries have seen their total debt balloon by almost 160 percent over the past decade. More than 60 of those countries now spend more than 10 percent of their government revenues on interest payments.
Since you’re a responsible news-consuming citizen, this is the moment when you might be wondering: Doesn’t the US owe gazillions of dollars to its creditors, too?
Yes, in fact, it absolutely does.
While Americans say they care about the debt, they don’t vote like they do, though they probably should! But they don’t, largely because a rich country like the United States gets to borrow in its own currency and it can almost always take out more cheap loans to pay off the old ones.
This means that the national debt rarely affects the lives of ordinary Americans. The US does not need to cut Social Security or stop paying for road maintenance to indefinitely manage its debt. Not yet, at least.
But poorer countries lack that luxury.
Just like low-income Americans often contend with backbreaking interest rates if they want to borrow cash, so too do low-income countries. African nations pay an average of 10 percent interest on their loans, whereas interest rates for rich countries like the US are typically under 3 percent.
And this is where we get to Wall Street. Because private creditors like hedge funds and insurance companies increasingly hold the bulk — about 60 percent in 2023 — of low- and middle-income countries’ external debt, a trend that has been rising since 2010.
That wasn’t always the case. For much of the 20th century, when a developing country needed finance, it usually turned to the Paris Club, an informal grouping of Western creditor countries, or newly formed Western-controlled multilateral institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, while working more sporadically with private creditors like banks.
But in the early 2000s, the Paris Club pulled back on lending after a protest campaign endorsed by Bono and the Vatican caused it to forgive billions of dollars in poor countries’ debt. Then, boom — the Great Recession hit and interest rates plummeted, forcing private creditors to start looking for a new way to earn cash.
They found it in poor countries, where they could charge much higher interest rates than they could in rich countries. In fact, bonds became so unprofitable in places like Germany that they entered negative territory a few years after the financial crisis, whereas interest rates across Africa hovered above 5 percent. The modern sovereign debt business was born. And these private companies made a killing on those high-interest loans.
“It’s good business to lend,” said Martín Guzmán, an economist and former economy minister of Argentina. “Almost too good of a business.”
Few countries know that as well as Argentina does. After years of debt drama, a slew of neoliberal reforms compelled by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a debilitating economic crisis, the country stopped paying off its $100 billion debt on Christmas Eve 2001.
It was the second-largest sovereign debt default in history, one that sent its creditors — from Wall Street barons to pension funds — into a tailspin. Fear of exactly this worst-case scenario illustrates why loans are so expensive for low- and middle-income countries: The higher the risk, the higher the interest rates demanded by lenders. In Argentina’s case, chronic overspending and cycles of inflation have made borrowing especially expensive.
Almost nobody benefits when a country defaults. Lenders have to take a haircut on their loans, while the debtor country has to make painful cuts and becomes a sort of pariah in the global financial world. But there are exceptions.
Most creditors eventually accepted new discounted terms to Argentina’s debt, but others, hoping to make a quick buck and wash their hands of the crisis, sold off their Argentine bonds — or loan contracts — for pennies to the dollar to vulture funds, investors that specialize in hounding debtors for what they’re owed.
You can imagine what came next. The vultures who bought up Argentina’s loans pounced, the most notorious of them being the hedge fund Elliott Management. Elliott sued the bejeezus out of Argentina for nonpayment, even seizing an Argentine naval ship ported in Ghana in an attempt to recoup the loans in 2012.
Creditors who lend to poor and middle-income countries “want to charge high interest rates, but they also demand to be repaid in full when risks happen,” said Tim Jones, policy director of the longstanding advocacy group Debt Justice. “They want to have their cake and eat it too.”
In the end, Elliott won. After a 15-year battle in New York state court — since about half of all sovereign debt is litigated on Wall Street’s turf — Elliott managed to score a highly profitable $2.4 billion settlement, a 392 percent return on the original value of the bonds, but since Eliott paid very little for those bonds, the company earned a profit of 10 to 15 times what it initially paid.
At the time, Elliott’s CEO, Paul Singer, blamed Argentina for its own “sad path” to financial crisis as a “once very impactful country economically” coming out of World War II. “They are imposing damage on themselves way out of proportion to the cost of paying the debt,” he said.
It’s true that Argentina was in part a victim of its own mistakes. But it’s also true that Argentina, which was once one of the wealthiest countries in the world, has never fully recovered. And it was ordinary Argentinians, not those who were making the decisions, who paid the price.
There is no shortage of reasons that poor and middle-income countries fail to pay off their loans, including the most obvious: overspending.
When the southern African country of Zambia defaulted on its debt in 2020, the IMF and other analysts blamed it on years of unsustainable borrowing, corruption, and poorly targeted infrastructure projects underwritten mostly by private creditors and, increasingly, China. There were also factors mostly outside of Zambia’s control, like a drought the year prior that strained the country’s finances to its breaking point, and an extractive economy based around copper mining that developed under colonialism that forces the country to take out more loans when the price of the commodity drops..
“There is a school of thought that whenever a country is in default, it is all the fault of the lenders, and that is usually not the case,” said Gregory Makoff, a self-professed sovereign debt obsessive, author of Default: The Landmark Court Battle Over Argentina’s $100 Billion Debt Restructuring, and a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
As a result, 3.4 billion people now live in the 46 developing countries that spend more — $921 billion in 2024, a 10 percent increase from 2023 — on interest payments alone than they do on health or education, according to the United Nations.
“It is usually the fault of the borrower,” he said, because the borrower is the one who makes the decision to take out a loan, the one who “uses the funds and has to take responsibility for itself.”
But for every handful of nations that stop paying their loans, dozens dutifully take out new loans to pay off their old ones each year.
One reason that debt burdens are so high today is the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced many countries to take out additional loans to keep their economies and healthcare systems afloat.
Another is interest rates. Remember when the Federal Reserve hiked the price of borrowing to try to quell inflation in the US? That didn’t just impact your mortgage rates — it made borrowing that much more expensive for poor countries too.
Add in the war in Ukraine, which drove up energy and food prices globally, and increasingly frequent climate disasters that force countries to borrow even more just to rebuild, and you’ve got a recipe for the worst sovereign debt crisis in decades.
But even as countries’ debt balloons, defaults like Argentina’s are relatively rare these days, largely because nobody wants to be chased by a vulture fund or find themselves locked out of global financial markets. Instead, many countries are digging deep into whatever savings or spending cuts they can muster to pay off those loans.
“Countries are not defaulting on debts,” Guzmán said. “But they’re defaulting on development.”
Developing countries spent $741 billion more on paying back their loans than they received in new finance between 2022 and 2024, the largest gap in 50 years. But despite these payments, their debt has just grown larger, rising at twice the rate of rich countries.
If you’re an austerity hawk, that might sound like a good thing.
These kinds of cuts are compelled by the IMF not because that institution is mean-spirited, but because it’s a way to bring countries closer to eventually paying off their loans and finding a stronger financial footing in the long term.
If your uncle is “drunk and always is running up his credit card and running personal bankruptcy, are you going to blame his credit card lenders and his mortgage provider for his problems?” Makoff asked. “Or maybe he made some bad decisions.”
At the end of the day, the IMF is brought in to “do math” for countries that have “generally made a lot of bad decisions,” said Makoff. “They make sure the money [that comes] in and out adds up” and do their best to avoid catastrophic social spending cuts in the process.
But for billions of people around the world, this kind of fiscal responsibility can also mean hospitals that don’t get built. Schools that don’t get textbooks. Roads that don’t get paved.
Every dollar of interest lining the pockets of Wall Street’s Bonobos pants and fleece-lined vests is a dollar less for development.
“Western governments tend to only see it as a crisis when people stop paying,” Jones said, but “the real crisis is the fact that they are paying and the cost that’s happening through cuts” to service these debts, which he described as “catastrophic for the future.”
And this is more or less by design. For decades, the US-dominated IMF has required countries looking to restructure their debt to impose cuts to social services.
So Malawi’s government has taken out loans. A lot of loans, many of which carry very high interest rates, because lenders don’t trust that the impoverished country will be able to pay them back. Over the past several years, Malawi’s total public debt has soared to above 80 percent of its GDP or around $12 billion, up from 35.5 percent of GDP — under $3.2 billion — a decade ago.
Take Malawi, for example. The landlocked southeast African country, the world’s third poorest per capita, is in the midst of the worst economic crisis in its history. Since 2019, it has faced back-to-back climate disasters, including the region’s worst drought in a century, which has plunged over half of Malawians — most of whom are subsistence farmers — into profound food insecurity.
Long story short, if you want to understand the dystopian and often surreal reality of global debt financing, look at Malawi’s budget for the coming fiscal year. The country will spend just over $440 million — $20 per person — on health care. It will spend just over $770 million on education.
And it will spend over $1.25 billion, more than what it spends on health and education combined, on interest payments. Again, these are just interest payments, which go straight into the pockets of commercial banks and foreign investors who own them.
Given that 75 percent of Malawians live on less than $3 per day, the government can hardly rely on tax revenue, so it will need to borrow even more money to make those payments on time.
And so the cycle continues, and ordinary Malawians suffer the most.
“We don’t have enough doctors. We don’t have enough nurses,” said Makhumbo Munthali, director of partnerships at Partners in Health’s office in Malawi. In Malawi, he said, a generation of trained local health professionals can’t get jobs because the “government is trying to meet austerity measures” imposed by the IMF. Most end up moving abroad for work, leaving the country with just two physicians for every 100,000 people.
“The IMF has been saying that there will be some sort of pain for a while and then later on things will stabilize,” he said. “But that has not been the case.”
Malawi is far from alone. Almost half of low-income countries are now in or at high risk of debt distress, meaning they’re struggling to pay their loans.
To make matters more complicated, sweeping foreign aid cuts have left many countries scrambling to fill funding gaps this year. Many poor countries normally rely on foreign donors — chief among them, the United States — to subsidize the majority of health and education programs in their country. The United States previously subsidized at least half of all annual health spending in Afghanistan, Somalia, South Sudan, and Malawi. Countries like Nigeria have already begun taking out new loans to keep their health systems afloat.
And so far, it appears that Trump’s new foreign policy prerogative will mean that when the US does choose to fund development, it will increasingly be in the form of loans, rather than grants. China, an increasingly important lender for poor countries — especially in Africa — also conducts much of its foreign aid this way, and has also faced its own criticism for leading nations into debt spirals.
One of Trump’s first actions upon taking office was to stop all US funding to a program that helped vulnerable countries prepare and adapt to climate change. Many of those countries have no choice but to regularly take out enormous new loans in the aftermath of every new disaster, like Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica. It’s a burden that seems to grow every year.
These countries “are piling on debt not to build infrastructure, not to grow, not to develop like other countries,” said Ritu Bharadwaj, a climate finance and resilience expert at the International Institute for Environment and Development, but simply “to rebuild and bring the economy back on track” when disaster strikes.
Sri Lanka, for example, was recently forced to ask the IMF for a multimillion-dollar loan to fuel its recovery in the aftermath of Cyclone Ditwah last month, even as the country continues to recover after defaulting on its loans in 2022.
At the time, Sri Lanka’s debt crisis forced schools to cancel exams because they ran out of paper. Hospitals canceled surgeries because they ran out of medication. Fuel shortages forced doctors to stitch wounds in the dark and food prices rose by 90 percent, leaving over a quarter of people food insecure.
But if there is one silver lining to the aid cuts, it is that countries struggling widely with debt burdens have gained a powerful new moral argument for changing the system.
If wealthy countries are unwilling to help subsidize what it costs for poor countries to adapt to climate change, Bharadwaj said, then “we really need to at least provide them a fair chance to do it themselves,” because most developing countries spend far more on interest payments than they’ve ever received in foreign aid.
Even some private creditors are calling for change. At recent meetings with bondholders, UNCTAD’s Hawkins said, some acknowledged that pushing countries to keep paying unsustainable debts ultimately hurts everyone — including creditors who want borrowers to stay solvent enough to keep doing business.
For some activists, the solution starts on Wall Street. Over the past few years, organizers in the financial hubs of New York and London have been exploring changes to local law that could shield vulnerable countries from the most egregious debt litigation.
We’re talking about Elliott Management in Argentina. Or more recently, an entity called Hamilton Reserve Bank, which has refused to agree to a debt restructuring plan for Sri Lanka, instead suing the country for $250 million in a lawsuit still ongoing in New York.
The proposed New York state law would offer countries a framework for obtaining relief and restructuring their debt, with provisions against private creditors that attempt to hold out on a deal. Amid a concerted lobbying effort from Wall Street firms, the deal failed to move forward this year, but will be coming up for a vote again in the year ahead.
Even if this bill — and a similar one in London — passes next year, it’s not going to transform the problem overnight. There’s no silver bullet for dismantling the debt vortex that so many poor countries find themselves in — especially if it doesn’t involve significant loan forgiveness.
But anything that makes it easier for countries to renegotiate their debt — which both the New York and London bills aim to do — would be a big win. Unlike individuals or companies, countries don’t have the option of declaring bankruptcy. So when a nation like Sri Lanka can no longer pay its loans, its only option is to head back to the negotiating table with its creditors.
And even when there are no supervillainous vulture funds involved, such renegotiations are “just a monstrous process for a debtor to go through,” said Jones of Debt Justice, citing Zambia, a neighbor of Malawi that defaulted on its loans in 2020 and has been renegotiating its debt ever since.
“My daughter was born around the time the Zambian process started, and she can now read and write,” he said, noting that if New York or London manages to eke out a restructuring bill, then more countries will feel empowered to apply for debt relief.
Without it, they’ll just keep borrowing, often from multilateral organizations like the World Bank, whose loans are ineligible for restructuring and contingent on painful policies that can stifle development in the long run.
And without comprehensive structural reform and genuine debt forgiveness, those countries will never escape. Every “extension of term” on loan repayments may give them a “breather,” said Hawkins, but only delays the inevitable for countries made insolvent by deals that were often rotten to begin with.
“This idea that we can continue to kick the can down the road” is no longer tenable, she said. “That horizon is coming very much closer to us.”
2025-12-23 19:30:00
最高法院大法官塞缪尔·阿利托（左）和克拉伦斯·托马斯在特朗普第二次就职典礼结束后等待离开讲台。| 芝普·索莫德维拉/Getty Images
关键要点：
在过去几十年里，最高法院一直是一个相对技术性的机构。尽管它曾做出过一些历史性的判决，如布朗诉教育委员会案（1954年）和罗诉韦德案（1973年），但这些高度政治化和文化敏感的案件在最高法院的案件中一直只占很小一部分。如今，我们生活在一个不同的时代。在2024-25年度的审判中，最高法院预计将废除《投票权法案》的剩余部分，使所有50个州合法化反LGBTQ的“转化治疗”，允许各州禁止跨性别运动员参加学校体育活动，赋予特朗普几乎完全控制“独立机构”的权力，扩大持枪权，决定特朗普是否可以单方面剥夺美国公民的国籍，并裁定特朗普的数千亿美元关税政策的命运。
最高法院的变化之一是，目前的九位大法官似乎对文化战争问题特别关注，如宗教、枪支、LGBTQ权利和堕胎权。虽然这四个问题并未涵盖美国政治中所有的文化分歧，但它们反映了共和党当前的文化不满。目前最高法院以6-3的共和党多数，比奥巴马时期听到的这类案件数量多出两倍以上。在奥巴马任期内的八个总统任期中，最高法院只审理了12起相关案件；而自2020年艾米·康奈利·巴雷特大法官确认以来的五个任期中，最高法院已审理了18起相关案件。
尽管自1980年代以来，最高法院审理的案件总数一直在下降，但其审理的具有政治色彩的案件却在增加。首席大法官约翰·罗伯茨曾开玩笑说，法院每年只审理大约150起案件是令人安心的。但近年来，最高法院审理的案件数量远低于这个数字。在2024-25年度的审判中，最高法院仅审理了62起案件，其中包括完整的简报和口头辩论。因此，尽管整体工作量下降，但最高法院却越来越多地介入具有政治色彩的案件。
最高法院对文化政治问题日益关注并不令人意外。近年来，共和党多数似乎在执行一项清单，识别并推翻20世纪的先例，这些先例在共和党内已不再受欢迎。例如，最高法院废除了堕胎权的宪法保障，几乎禁止了所有大学校园的平权行动，并赋予自己对行政部门政策的否决权。
从数据来看，最高法院现在经常审理那些在奥巴马时期很少涉及的问题。虽然宗教案件一直是最高法院的重要议题，但其数量在奥巴马时期相对较少。在奥巴马任期内的八个任期中，我识别出的12起文化战争相关案件中有8起是宗教案件。因此，即使在奥巴马时期，最高法院也每年审理大约1起宗教案件。相比之下，自巴雷特确认以来，最高法院在堕胎问题上已作出三次裁决，每次都支持反堕胎立场。
为什么最高法院审理的案件类型发生了变化？最可能的原因是，大法官们通常选择自己审理的案件，因此多数派可以挑选那些符合其政治和政策目标的案件。共和党人多年来一直反对罗诉韦德案，因此在获得最高法院超级多数后不到一年，最高法院就受理了推翻罗诉韦德案的案件。此外，随着最高法院的右翼多数变得更加稳固，大法官们在审理争议案件时面临的风险也更小。过去，最高法院在堕胎问题上存在分歧，有四位反对堕胎的大法官、四位支持堕胎权的大法官，以及安东尼·肯尼迪大法官，他虽然支持许多限制堕胎的法律，但也拒绝推翻罗诉韦德案。因此，那些坚定支持堕胎权的大法官可能避免审理堕胎案件，因为他们无法确定肯尼迪是否会反对他们。如今，六位共和党大法官通常作为一个整体投票，当其中一位大法官与同僚意见不一致时，往往只是基于狭隘的法律理由。
另一个可能的原因是，当大法官们意识到最高法院的立场向左或向右倾斜时，诉讼方和州立法者往往会调整自己的行为。一个6-3的共和党多数意味着那些过去会被法官阻止的反堕胎法律现在可以完全实施，而那些过去几十年在法院中被忽视的保守派主张现在可以取得胜利。例如，联邦法院过去通常拒绝家长要求改变公立学校课程的请求，因为这些请求基于宗教信仰，而法院担心学校无法满足所有家长的宗教观点。然而，在最近的马哈茂德诉泰勒案（2025年）中，共和党大法官裁定，公立学校必须提前通知家长某些课程可能与其宗教信仰相冲突，并允许家长选择让孩子退出这些课程。
最后，最高法院在新法律规则出台后，经常需要发布裁决以澄清这些规则，尤其是在规则模糊或可能引发下级法院分歧的情况下。目前的最高法院多数派在司法技艺方面明显不如以往几代大法官。例如，共和党大法官在布伦案（Bruen）中确立的持枪权标准非常复杂，以至于至少有12位来自不同政党的法官都发表了意见，抱怨无法理解如何应用这一标准。布伦案要求法官判断现代枪支法律是否与几个世纪前的枪支法规“相关相似”，如果不相似则应推翻。然而，支持布伦案的大法官们难以明确说明两个法律必须有多相似，而下级法院法官在应用布伦案时经常意见不一。这意味着最高法院将不得不花费大量时间解决这些分歧，直到找到一个更可行的标准。
总之，巴雷特确认后，最高法院对文化问题的关注变得显而易见。如果共和党在未来继续控制最高法院，这种对文化问题的专注可能会减弱。随着共和党大法官在这些领域获得足够的时间，他们可能会耗尽想要推翻的先例，并澄清目前令下级法院困惑的许多问题。因此，文化战争政治可能最终从最高法院的议程中淡出。但至少在目前，这六位共和党大法官似乎非常热衷于在文化政治上留下自己的印记，并不太可能很快退缩。
The Supreme Court for much of the last several decades has been a fairly technocratic body.
The Court, to be sure, has handed down its share of historic cases: Case names like Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Roe v. Wade (1973) are familiar to most Americans, but such highly political and culturally salient cases have historically made up only a small percentage of the Court’s work.
We live in a different world today. In its 2024-25 term alone, the Court is expected to gut what little remains of the Voting Rights Act, to legalize anti-LGBTQ “conversion therapy” in all 50 states, to permit states to bar transgender athletes from school sports, to give President Donald Trump near-total control over “independent agencies” that Congress insulated from the president, to expand gun rights, to decide whether Trump can unilaterally strip Americans of their citizenship, and to determine the fate of Trump’s multitrillion-dollar tariffs.
One way that the Court has changed is that the current panel of nine justices appears to be fixated on culture war issues such as religion, guns, LGBTQ issues, and abortion. Though these four issues do not exhaust the many cultural divides that drive much of US politics, they capture many of the Republican Party’s current cultural grievances. And the current Court, which has a 6-3 Republican majority, now hears more than twice as many cases touching on these four issues than it did during, say, the Obama presidency.
During those eight years under President Barack Obama, the Court heard a dozen cases that focused on those issues. By contrast, in the five Supreme Court terms that began with Republicans controlling six votes on the Court (2021-present), it has heard 18 cases that focus on these issues. That works out to 3.6 cases per Supreme Court term, compared to 1.5 under Obama.
This is true even as the number of cases heard by the justices has been in steady decline since the 1980s. When Chief Justice John Roberts was a young attorney in the Reagan White House, he once quipped that it is reassuring that “the court can only hear roughly 150 cases each term.” But the Court hasn’t heard anywhere near that number for years. In its 2024-25 term the Supreme Court decided just 62 cases that received full briefing and an oral argument.
So the justices are hearing more and more politically charged cases, even as their overall workload declines.
The Court’s growing interest in cultural politics won’t surprise anyone who has paid close attention to the Court. In the last few years, the Court’s Republican majority appears to have been going down a checklist — identifying 20th-century precedents that are out of favor within the GOP, and overruling those decisions. This is the period when the Court abolished the constitutional right to an abortion, banned affirmative action on nearly all college campuses, and gave itself a veto power over the executive branch’s policy decisions, among other things.
The shifting docket reveals a Court that sees — and is seizing — many opportunities to reverse, or at least reconsider, some of liberals’ biggest cultural wins.
To assess just how the Court’s attention has shifted, I looked at two separate periods.
I examined all eight of the Supreme Court terms that began while Obama was president, meaning the term that began in October of 2009 through the term that began in October of 2016. I also examined the 2021-22 through 2025-26 terms — the five full terms after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation in 2020.
Overall, I identified a dozen “culture war” cases that the Court decided during the Obama terms, and 18 that the Court decided (or will decide) in the five most recent terms. You can see the cases I identified in this spreadsheet.
I looked at cases concerning four issues — abortion, guns, LGBTQ rights, and religion. Here is how I defined those four categories:
One consequence of these definitions is that some high-profile cases are excluded. I did not code Snyder v. Phelps (2011) as either an LGBTQ case or a religion case, for example, even though that case concerned a church group that held up signs with anti-gay slurs outside a military funeral. The reason is that the legal question in Snyder neither involved the Constitution’s religion clauses, nor did it involve the substantive rights of LGBTQ people. Instead, it was a free speech case and the Court almost certainly would have reached the same result if this church group had held up equally offensive signs that did not target gay people.
Similarly, I did not include Garland v. Cargill (2024), a statutory guns case that legalized “bump stocks,” devices that can convert a semiautomatic rifle into an automatic weapon, because that case did not raise a constitutional question.
In coming up with these lists of cases, I made several judgment calls. Although Justice Barrett was confirmed in late October 2020, for example, I did not look at the 2020-21 term because the Court typically decides which cases it will hear months in advance, so Barrett played no role in choosing many of the cases that the Court heard in that term. I wanted to compare the mix of cases the Court took before Trump made any changes in its membership to the mix of cases it took after all three of the justices he appointed joined the Court.
I also only included cases that received full briefing and oral argument, and excluded cases handed down on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters the Court decides on an expedited basis and often without explaining its decision. (Had I included shadow docket cases, the numbers would show that the current justices are even more interested in weighing in on cultural grievances than their Obama-era counterparts, as the Court started deciding significantly more cases on its shadow docket under Trump.)
The cases I included all fit into at least one of four categories: abortion, guns, LGBTQ rights, or religion. If you want to know how I define these four categories, I explain it in a sidebar to this essay.
Although the Supreme Court now hears religion cases more often than it did under Obama — a trend that is even more pronounced if you include shadow docket cases — religion has always been an important part of many Americans’ identity. So the Court has heard a steady diet of religion cases for quite some time.
Eight of the 12 culture war-related cases I identified from the eight Supreme Court terms that began under Obama are religion cases. So, even under Obama, the Court was hearing about one religion case each term, including very significant and politically contentious cases like Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), which held that employers with religious objections to birth control may refuse to include contraception coverage in their employees’ health plans.
By contrast, prior to Barrett’s confirmation it was a fairly monumental event when the Supreme Court announced it would hear an abortion case. The Court decided only one such case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), during all eight years of the Obama presidency.
Since Republicans gained a supermajority on the Court, by contrast, they’ve handed down three abortion decisions: Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (2021), Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), and Medina v. Planned Parenthood (2025). In each case, the Court ruled against the pro-abortion rights side.
Similarly, the Court decided only one Second Amendment case under Obama, McDonald v. Chicago (2010). Indeed, the Court used to hear Second Amendment cases so infrequently that Justice Clarence Thomas complained in a 2018 dissenting opinion about his Court’s “continued inaction” on the right to own a gun.
By contrast, the Court’s current majority has decided two such cases, and it plans to hear two more in its current term.
It’s likely that the most important factor driving the Court’s new focus is that the justices typically get to choose which cases they hear, and so justices in the majority can simply pick cases that advance their political and policy goals.
Republicans have campaigned against Roe v. Wade for decades; it makes sense that the Court took up Dobbs, the case that overruled Roe, less than a year after Republicans gained a supermajority on the Court.
Another factor is, as the Court’s rightward majority becomes more secure, justices in that majority risk much less when they take up a contentious case. For many years, the Court was split between four anti-abortion justices, four who supported abortion rights, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, who voted to uphold many abortion restrictions but who also refused to overrule Roe. So it’s likely that the eight justices with firm views on the right to terminate a pregnancy avoided abortion cases because they could never be sure if Kennedy would vote against them.
Now, by contrast, the six Republicans often vote as a bloc. And when one of them does dissent from their fellow Republicans, it is often on narrow grounds. In Dobbs, for example, Chief Justice John Roberts did not vote to overrule Roe, but he did vote to restrict abortion rights and his opinion largely argued that the Court should have taken a more incremental approach to dismantling Roe.
Another likely reason why the Court is hearing so many cases that focus on Republican cultural grievances is that both litigants and state lawmakers typically shift their behavior when they perceive the Court moving left or right. A 6-3 Republican Court means that anti-abortion laws that would have been blocked by judges just a few years ago will instead take full effect. And it also means that conservative causes that were laughed out of court for many decades can now prevail.
Federal courts, for example, have historically rejected claims by parents who seek to alter a public school’s lessons or curriculum because they object to it on religious grounds — largely due to concerns that it would be impossible for a school to tailor its lessons to align with the religious views of every single parent. Last term, however, in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), the Republican justices held that public schools must give parents advance notice of lessons that offend their religious beliefs, along with an opportunity to opt their child out of the lesson.
A final factor that contributes to the Court’s new fixation on culture war issues is that the Supreme Court often has to hand down decisions clarifying a new legal rule in the years after that rule is announced. This is especially true if the new rule is confusing or otherwise likely to spark disagreement among lower courts.
The justices in the Supreme Court’s current majority are, to put it mildly, less skilled at judicial craftsmanship than previous generations of justices. One example: The Republican justices’ decision in Bruen — which lays out their approach to Second Amendment cases — is so confounding that at least a dozen judges from both political parties have published opinions complaining that they cannot figure out how to apply it.
Bruen requires judges to ask if a modern-day gun law is “relevantly similar” to a gun regulation that existed centuries ago, and to strike down the modern-day law if it is not. But the justices who support Bruen have struggled to articulate just how similar the two laws must be, and lower court judges frequently disagree on how to apply Bruen to a particular case. That means that the Supreme Court will have to spend an unusual amount of its time resolving these disputes until Bruen is scrapped for a more workable standard.
All of which is a long way of saying that the Court’s new interest in cultural grievances was easy to predict after Barrett’s confirmation.
It is reasonably likely that, if Republicans maintain firm control of the Supreme Court in the future, that the Court’s fixation on cultural issues will end. Given enough time in power, Republican justices are likely to exhaust the list of precedents they wish to overrule and clarify many issues that currently confuse lower court judges. So culture war politics may fade from the Court’s docket as Republicans entrench their victories on these issues.
But, for the moment, at least, the six Republican justices appear quite eager to put their mark on US cultural politics. And they don’t appear likely to back away from these cultural grievances any time soon.
2025-12-23 19:00:00
如果你关注美国的气候政策，2025年无疑是一个艰难的一年。在华盛顿，特朗普政府迅速采取行动，削弱联邦气候行动的基础设施：再次退出《巴黎协定》、冻结或撤回清洁能源资金、加快化石燃料项目、甚至威胁联邦气候监管的法律基础。借助埃隆·马斯克所谓的“政府效率部”，整个气候、科学和保护项目被大幅削减，公职人员被解雇，联邦网站上的气候相关内容也被删除。就在上周，政府还试图摧毁国家大气研究中心（NCAR）——这可能是全球最重要的气候科学研究机构之一，几乎影响着美国所有天气和气候预测领域，从野火建模到大学依赖的计算基础设施。
我们于今年4月发布的《逃离速度》（Escape Velocity）项目认为，清洁能源转型已经积累了足够的经济和技术动能，变得几乎无法逆转。因此，我们不禁怀疑这一观点是否能经受住当前的冲击。然而过去八个月的数据显示，这一观点依然成立。回顾自项目发布以来的情况，我最惊讶的不是发生了多少问题，而是即使在如此环境下，仍然取得了如此多的进展。以下是2025年让我对我们的未来感到乐观的七个发展。
2025年，清洁能源转型迈过了一道难以回头的门槛。首次，可再生能源超越煤炭成为全球发电的主要来源。今年上半年，太阳能、风能和水力发电占全球电力生产的34.3%，超过了煤炭的33.1%——这是一个安静但具有历史意义的转折点。更令人印象深刻的是，太阳能和风能的增长不仅与电力需求同步，还完全满足了需求的增长。随着全球电力使用量增长约3%，太阳能和风能的扩张填补了全部增长，其中太阳能单独贡献了超过80%。变化的速度令人震惊。仅在六个月里，全球新增太阳能装机容量就达到380吉瓦，比2024年同期增长了64%。这使得2025年有望再次打破纪录。曾经被视为“替代能源”的太阳能，如今已成为人类历史上最便宜、最快发展的能源。正如比尔·麦基宾在2025年出版的《太阳来了》（Here Comes the Sun）一书中所指出的，真正的突破不是新技术，而是我们终于意识到能源转型正在由经济驱动，而非理想主义。事实上，太阳一直在做它该做的事，而我们终于准备好了利用它。
第一个原因是转型跨越了临界点，第二个原因是推动这一转变的国家是——中国。中国已成为全球清洁能源转型的最重要推动力。它在国内大规模安装太阳能、风能和电池储能设施，但更重要的是，它将制造成本压低到几乎全球其他地方都能负担得起的水平。（同时，我们也要清楚，这一切发生的同时，中国仍在继续其“全面能源”战略，包括增加煤炭和天然气产能。）因此，屋顶太阳能在美国欧洲、南亚和全球南方迅速普及。电池成本也在下降。许多国家不再面临“气候行动”与“能源获取”之间的两难选择。
只有在全球最难改变的地方取得进展，能源转型才有意义。2025年，这种进展出现了。波兰，这个欧洲最依赖煤炭的国家之一，在6月首次从可再生能源中获得的电力超过了煤炭。煤炭在波兰的电力结构中占比首次低于50%，这是象征性和实质性的突破。与此同时，英国的煤炭几乎从电网消失，而风能已成为该国最大的电力来源。不幸的是，在美国，特朗普政府正竭尽全力挽救煤炭产业，这在一定程度上减缓了其在美国的衰退速度。尽管如此，2025年煤炭需求仍创下历史新高，但显然我们已经到达或接近峰值。未来前景是不可避免的：煤炭的衰落只是因为其在经济计算中已经不再具有竞争力。
尽管特朗普政府对可再生能源进行了激烈的言论和政策攻击，但太阳能仍然是美国新增电力的主要来源。今年，太阳能在新安装的发电能力中占主导地位。到12月初，太阳能占美国今年新增发电能力的约75%，远超风能、天然气和核能。这一切要归功于各州。2025年，各州通过了清洁能源成本效益法案、现代化电网、投资公共交通、扩大太阳能可及性、取消煤炭补贴、推出热泵补贴，并捍卫受到联邦攻击的项目。从伊利诺伊州和缅因州到内布拉斯加、俄亥俄州和俄勒冈州，进展并非来自全国性的立法，而是来自众多较小但更具韧性的胜利。更有趣的是，这些进展发生在特朗普支持的地区。今年，美国80%的太阳能制造投资流向了共和党控制的地区，而目前太阳能安装量最高的州中，大多数是共和党占主导的州。得克萨斯州领先，其太阳能发电量预计将在今年首次超过煤炭。佛罗里达州、佐治亚州、阿肯色州等紧随其后。自2024年以来，太阳能安装量最高的20个州中，有14个州在去年投票支持特朗普，而这些州的太阳能装机容量已经超过了支持哈里斯的州。这意味着，我们实际上正处于一场发展竞赛中。各州正在争相加快风能和太阳能项目的建设，以在特朗普撤销联邦清洁能源税收抵免政策之前完成。这些税收抵免政策由《通胀削减法案》设立，可降低项目成本30%至50%，成为几乎所有正在推进的可再生能源项目“财政支柱”。自特朗普在7月取消这些税收抵免后，科罗拉多州、缅因州、加利福尼亚州、纽约州、俄勒冈州和明尼苏达州等州加快了许可、采购和电网连接，以帮助开发商在2026年7月4日之前开工。这些项目将运行几十年，意味着当前的冲刺将永久地使能源系统向可再生能源倾斜，无论华盛顿接下来会发生什么。
今年，全球每四辆新车中就有一辆至少部分由电动机驱动。这一增长并非由美国或欧洲引领，而是由东南亚等新兴市场推动，这些地方的消费者正在将电动汽车视为新购车的首选。截至目前，全球超过25%的新售车辆为电动汽车或插电式混合动力车。根据全球能源智库“Ember”本周发布的一份新报告，分析了60个国家的月度数据，新兴市场正在迅速转向插电式车辆，这推翻了之前认为电动汽车在欧洲和中国之外难以普及的观点。在美国，情况更为复杂，政策的不确定性正在减缓更高效车辆的普及。但全球趋势已经清晰：汽车制造商正在为一个电动未来设计产品，因为这就是消费者的需求所在。
多年来，批评者一直认为风能和太阳能不可靠。但在2025年，电池储能终于让这一论点显得过时。美国今年的储能安装量创下历史新高，大型电池储能系统正在增强电网的稳定性，并在可再生能源供应充足时吸收廉价电力，然后在需要时释放。新兴技术正在延长电池寿命并降低成本；太阳能与电池储能的组合以及风能与电池储能的组合，甚至有望在本十年结束前在全球范围内以更低的成本取代化石燃料。这就是为什么可再生能源基础设施不仅仅是能源来源，更是整个系统的一部分。
好吧，到目前为止，我知道你们在想什么：数据中心呢？人工智能的迅猛发展会不会让所有积极进展都功亏一篑？确实，数据中心在美国各地如雨后春笋般涌现。截至2025年11月，美国已建成5427个数据中心，其总容量比年初增长超过40%，使其成为全球最大的数据中心市场。随着数据中心需求激增，公司越来越多地依赖太阳能和风能等可再生能源，通过电力购买协议来获取电力。然而，由于这些能源来源具有间歇性，开发商往往将它们与电池储能系统或更常见的是天然气发电厂搭配使用，以确保全天候供电。实际上，这意味着数据中心在可再生能源可用时大量使用清洁能源，而在电网和储能系统难以跟上时，它们则依赖化石燃料，尤其是天然气。但这里也有积极的一面：随着电网对能源的需求不断增加，电网运营商越来越倾向于使用可再生能源来扩展整体容量，因为它们成本低廉。此外，人工智能驱动的数据中心在美国各地的扩张也引发了社区的强烈反对，这种反对正在迅速增长。这让我对气候运动感到乐观，因为环保运动似乎已经失去了方向，而数据中心的扩张正为环保活动提供了一个具体且具有广泛公众吸引力的目标。在费城郊区、密歇根州、佐治亚州和弗吉尼亚州等地，居民们正在组织抗议，反对大规模建设数据中心，担心电费上涨、污染和噪音问题。美国消费者的电价已经飙升，社区反对已经导致近1000亿美元的项目被推迟或取消。令人惊讶的是，这种反对是跨党派的，并且具有很强的政治影响力。数据中心正在将抽象的气候和能源问题转化为具体的地方性斗争，为气候运动提供了一个新的、具体的斗争目标。就在上周，佛蒙特州独立参议员伯尼·桑德斯提议暂停新建数据中心，因为他认为人工智能的发展速度太快，我们需要时间让“民主跟上”。
It’s been a rough year if you care about climate change policy in the United States.
In Washington, the second Trump administration has moved quickly to dismantle the scaffolding of federal climate action: pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement (again), freezing or clawing back clean energy funding, fast-tracking fossil fuel projects, and even threatening the legal foundation of federal climate regulation itself.
With the help of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, whole climate, science, and conservation programs have been gutted, public servants fired, and climate language scrubbed from federal websites. And just last week, the administration moved to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research — arguably the world’s most crucial climate-science research institution that touches nearly every corner of US weather and climate forecasting, from wildfire modeling to the computational backbone universities rely on.
So when we published Escape Velocity back in April — a project arguing that the clean energy transition had gathered enough economic and technological momentum to become effectively unstoppable — it was fair to wonder whether that thesis could survive this onslaught.
The past eight months suggest it can.
Looking back at the period since we published the project, what’s surprised me most isn’t how much went wrong — it’s how much progress kept happening anyway. Here are seven developments from 2025 that have me feeling hopeful for our future.
• Even with the Trump-era rollbacks, clean energy continued to expand because it’s now cheaper, faster, and structurally difficult to stop.
• Around the world, solar, wind, batteries, and EVs are winning on cost — which means adoption no longer depends on climate virtue or friendly governments.
• The world isn’t waiting for the US. China, Europe, and emerging markets are driving the transition forward, whether Washington participates or not.
• But even in the US, red and blue states alike have kept expanding clean power — often for purely economic reasons.
• This shift is sticky. Projects breaking ground now will shape the grid for decades, locking in progress that future administrations can’t easily undo.
In 2025, the clean energy transition crossed a line that will be hard to uncross. For the first time, renewables overtook coal as the world’s leading source of electricity. In the first half of the year, solar, wind, and hydropower generated 34.3 percent of global electricity, edging past coal’s 33.1 percent — a quiet but historic turning point. Just as striking, solar and wind didn’t merely grow alongside rising demand — they met it entirely. As global electricity use rose about 3 percent, solar and wind expansion covered 100 percent of that increase, with solar alone supplying more than 80 percent.
The pace of change has been startling. The world added 380 gigawatts of new solar capacity in just six months — a 64 percent jump from the same period in 2024 — putting 2025 on track to shatter records yet again. What once felt like “alternative energy” is now the cheapest, fastest power humanity has ever built.
Bill McKibben captures this inflection point in his 2025 book Here Comes the Sun, arguing that the real breakthrough isn’t a new technology, but the realization that the energy transition is finally running on economics, not idealism. The sun, it turns out, is doing exactly what it always has — and at last, we’re ready to use it.
If Reason 1 is that the transition crossed a threshold, Reason 2 is who pushed it there: China has turned clean energy into the default global option.
China is now the single most important force in the global clean energy transition. It is installing vast amounts of solar, wind, and battery storage at home — but just as importantly, it has driven manufacturing costs so low that clean energy is affordable almost everywhere else. (Let’s also be clear that this is all happening as China continues to take more of an all-of-the-above approach — boosting coal and natural gas capacity, too.)
That’s why rooftop solar is spreading rapidly across Europe, South Asia, and the Global South. It’s why batteries are getting cheaper. And it’s why many countries no longer face a stark choice between climate action and energy access.
A global transition only matters if it shows up in the hardest places. In 2025, it did.
Poland, one of Europe’s most coal-dependent countries, generated more electricity from renewables than from coal for the first time in June. Coal also fell below 50 percent of Poland’s electricity mix for an entire quarter — a symbolic and material break from the past.
Meanwhile, in the UK, coal has all but disappeared from the grid, while wind has become the country’s single largest power source. Unfortunately, in the US, however, the Trump administration is trying anything it can to save coal, which is beginning to modestly slow down its rate of decline here.
Coal demand still reached a record high in 2025, but it’s clear that we are at or nearing the peak. The future prognosis is terminal: Coal is dying simply because it’s losing the math.
Despite aggressive rhetorical and policy attacks on renewables, solar continues to dominate new electricity generation in the United States. And solar energy is the star of 2025: By early December, solar accounted for roughly 75 percent of all new generation installed this year, far outpacing wind, gas, and nuclear.
We can thank the states for that.
In 2025, states passed clean energy affordability laws, modernized grids, invested in transit, expanded solar access, repealed coal bailouts, launched heat-pump rebates, and defended projects under federal attack.
From Illinois and Maine to Nebraska, Ohio, and Oregon, progress came not from sweeping national legislation but from dozens of smaller — and arguably more durable wins.
And where it gets really interesting is in Trump country. This year, 80 percent of US solar manufacturing investment went to Republican-held districts, and most of the top solar-installing states now vote red. Texas leads as solar expansion in the state is on track to produce more electricity on the state’s power grid than coal for the first time. Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, and others are close behind. Of the 20 states that installed the most solar capacity since 2024, 14 of them voted for President Donald Trump last year, and there is now more solar capacity installed in Trump states than in states that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris.
All of this means that, ironically, we’re actually in the midst of a development sprint.
States across the country are racing to fast-track wind and solar projects before Trump’s rollback of federal clean energy tax credits takes full effect. The credits, created under the Inflation Reduction Act, cut project costs by 30 to 50 percent, making them “the financial backbone of nearly every renewable energy project currently in the pipeline,” said Patty O’Keefe of Vote Solar.
Since Trump ended the credits in July, states including Colorado, Maine, California, New York, Oregon, and Minnesota have accelerated permitting, procurement, and grid connections to help developers break ground before the July 4, 2026, construction deadline.
Those projects will keep generating power for decades, meaning today’s scramble will permanently tilt the energy system slightly more toward renewables, regardless of what happens in Washington next.
This year, more than one in four new cars sold globally was at least partially powered by an electric motor.
That surge wasn’t led by the United States or even Europe, but by emerging markets — especially in Southeast Asia — where EVs are becoming the obvious choice for new buyers. Globally, more than 25 percent of new cars sold so far this year were either an EV or plug-in hybrid.
According to a new report published this week by global energy think tank Ember, which analysed available monthly data for 60 countries, new markets are making a rapid switch to plug-in vehicles, putting to bed the theory that EV adoption would stall outside of Europe and China.
In the US, the story is messier, with policy uncertainty slowing adoption of more efficient cars. But globally, the direction is clear: automakers are designing for an electric future because that’s where the customers are.
For years, critics dismissed wind and solar as unreliable. In 2025, battery storage finally made that argument feel outdated.
The US hit record-breaking storage installations this year, with utility-scale batteries strengthening grids and soaking up cheap renewable power when it’s abundant — then delivering it when it’s needed. Developing technologies are already extending lifespans and cutting costs; solar combined with battery storage and wind with battery storage as a combo deal are even on track to undercut fossil fuels in cost worldwide before the end of the decade.
This is what makes renewables infrastructure, not just energy sources.
Okay, okay — by this point in the story, I know what you’re thinking: What about data centers???? Isn’t the insatiable buildout of AI going to derail any positive developments?
It’s true that data centers are sprouting up across the American landscape like weeds. As of November 2025, the US had built 5,427 data centers — with capacity up by more than 40 percent since the start of 2025 — making it the world’s largest data center market by a significant margin. As data center demand explodes, companies increasingly rely on renewables like solar and wind through power purchase agreements — but because those sources are intermittent, developers are pairing them with battery storage and, more often, natural gas plants to provide round-the-clock reliability. In practice, that means data centers are pulling heavily on clean energy where available, while leaning on fossil fuels, especially gas, to guarantee constant power as grids and storage struggle to keep up.
But there’s even a silver lining here: As the grid needs more and more energy, grid operators are increasingly looking to build out overall capacity with renewable energy sources because they are so cheap.
And then there’s also something interesting happening that makes me feel hopeful about climate activism: As AI-driven data centers spread across the U.S., community backlash is growing — and fast. This feels like a purpose that the environmental movement, which has seemed unmoored for quite some time now, could glom onto. In places like suburban Philadelphia, Michigan, Georgia, and Virginia, residents are organizing against massive data centers over concerns about rising electricity bills, pollution, and noise.
Power prices are already spiking for American consumers, and community opposition has delayed or canceled nearly $100 billion in projects so far. What’s striking is how bipartisan and local the resistance is — and how politically potent it’s becoming. Data centers are turning abstract climate and energy issues into tangible, neighborhood-level fights, offering climate activism a new, concrete target with broad public appeal.
And just last week, Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, proposed a moratorium on new data centers because he says artificial intelligence is coming along too quickly and we need time for “democracy to catch up.”
None of this means the climate fight is won. Clean energy is growing fast, but not yet fast enough to avoid serious harm. Infrastructure bottlenecks remain. Inequities persist. And US political sabotage carries real costs.
But the clean energy transition no longer depends on a single election, a single country, or a single president. It’s being driven by economics, technology, and global demand — forces that are far harder to reverse than a regulation.
The United States may be choosing to give up its head start. The rest of the world isn’t waiting.
And every megawatt we build anyway still matters — because every fraction of a degree we avoid is lives saved, futures preserved, and disasters that never happen.