2025-12-19 21:30:00
泰国街头的一只狗被“Soi Dog Foundation”救助。| Justin Mott / Kindred Guardians Project / We Animals 我们所构建的世界对动物来说是一个无情残酷的环境。到2025年底，数百万只动物将被关在狭小的笼子里，为了获取毛皮而被暴力杀害。数亿只动物将被用于痛苦的实验，包括被药物处理、被强迫或被切割。近1万亿只动物将被饲养以获取肉类、牛奶或鸡蛋，其中绝大多数是在工厂化农场中被饲养的。与此同时，无数动物被从野外捕捉或在人工环境中繁殖，以供动物园、水族馆和马戏团展出，或被当作宠物出售。尽管大多数人对这些残酷行为持反对态度，但利用动物谋利的行业在经济、政治和文化上都具有强大的影响力，使得为动物争取法律保护变得异常困难。全球动物权益倡导运动正在增长，但面对的挑战依然巨大。同样，开发无动物技术的初创企业也在迅速发展。尽管困难重重，今年仍有一些渐进和具有变革意义的运动取得了成功，逐步减少了动物所承受的巨大痛苦。以下是一份不完整的清单。
1）波兰禁止毛皮养殖，全球毛皮产业持续萎缩
几周前，波兰——全球第二大毛皮生产国——禁止毛皮养殖。波兰总统Karol Nawrocki称这一决定“体现了我们的同情心、文明成熟度和对所有生命体的尊重”。这一举措是在过去十年毛皮产业崩溃的背景下发生的；从2014年到2024年，用于毛皮养殖的动物数量从1.4亿只骤降至2050万只。
2）美国“无笼蛋”趋势加速
目前，美国大多数产蛋鸡仍被强制关在狭小的笼子里。虽然“无笼蛋”远非“无虐待蛋”，因为母鸡仍会经历许多痛苦的处理方式，且通常没有户外活动时间，但相比笼养仍是一个重大进步。今年，美国无笼蛋的比例从2024年12月的38.7%上升到2025年9月的45.3%，拯救了约2000万只母鸡免于笼养生活，这是自2000年代初动物倡导者发起禁笼运动以来最快的转变。这一趋势也在全球范围内加速，但必须保护这一进展；美国行业团体曾试图在国会和法院推翻州级的无笼蛋法规，但幸运的是，这些努力在2025年失败了。
3）美国25个以上地区禁止销售狗、猫等动物
每年，美国人都会从宠物店和繁殖者那里购买数百万只狗和猫。这些动物大多来自“小狗/小猫养殖场”，在这些地方，动物被关在狭小、不卫生的环境中，缺乏保护和政府监管。与此同时，数百万只可被收养的猫狗却在收容所中挣扎，许多最终被安乐死，因为收容所空间有限。为解决这一问题，动物倡导者成功推动了数百个城市、县和州通过禁止宠物店销售宠物的法律。2025年，这一趋势继续发展：拉斯维加斯、丹佛、底特律和佛罗里达州门田县等超过20个地区都通过了此类禁令。
4）瑞士要求肉类公司披露虐待行为
肉类、牛奶和鸡蛋生产中存在一些鲜为人知的残酷行为，如动物的残肢处理。由于过度拥挤，动物可能会互相啄咬，因此生产者会切断小猪的尾巴、烙去母鸡的喙、剪掉奶牛的角，甚至切掉火鸡的鼻部，通常都不给予麻醉。瑞士并未禁止这些做法，但通过法律要求食品公司、杂货店和餐厅在包装标签上注明所售动物产品是否来自未经麻醉处理的动物。
5）全球技术进步，减少雏鸡的残酷屠杀
在蛋产业中，数百亿只公鸡因无法下蛋且生长速度不够快而被在出生当天屠杀，通常以极其残忍的方式进行，如活体碾碎、窒息、焚烧、电击或溺水。好消息是，现在已有多种技术可以在鸡蛋中检测出雏鸡的性别，从而在孵化前进行处理。这些技术正在迅速推广。截至2025年春季，欧洲超过四分之一的鸡蛋都使用了这些技术进行检测，较上一年增长了8%，这将在未来几年内避免数百亿只雏鸡的暴力死亡。2025年也是这些技术在美国和巴西实现商业化的年份。
6）政府机构承诺减少动物实验
美国国家卫生研究院和其他联邦机构承诺减少动物实验，并加快开发高科技、非动物实验方法，以测试药物和化学品的安全性，以及进行生物医学研究。上个月，英国政府也宣布了类似的计划。这一议题的政治复杂性较高（详情请参阅Vox的相关报道），但如果执行得当，将减少动物在实验中所承受的痛苦，并提高科学研究的效率和准确性。
7）美国乳制品行业的暴政有所削弱
美国的一项奇怪法规要求学校每餐都提供或供应牛奶，其中41%被浪费。学校被禁止主动提供植物性奶替代品，如大豆奶，即使大多数有色人种儿童对乳糖不耐受。然而，最近一项在国会通过的法案（预计总统唐纳德·特朗普将签署），允许学校主动提供大豆奶与牛奶，并且学生如果想饮用植物性奶，只需家长的便条，而不再需要医生的证明。这不仅有利于学生的选择和减少食物浪费，也对奶牛有利，因为它们在乳制品行业中经常遭受各种残酷待遇。
8）虾类动物福利引发关注
被养殖数量最多的动物并非鸡、猪或鱼，而是甲壳类动物，如虾和对虾，每年约有6300亿只。今年，几家大型欧洲超市承诺确保其供应链中的虾和对虾在屠宰前至少接受电击麻醉（而非窒息处理）。此外，一家主要的海鲜认证机构也承诺要求贴有其标签的公司不再使用“眼 stalk 剥除”这一残忍做法，即割除母虾的眼睛以加快繁殖。虾类动物福利的支持也因《每日秀》（The Daily Show）等节目引发了一定的关注（同时Vox.com和Vox的Unexplainable播客也对此进行了报道）。
9）鸡类动物获得一定缓解
全球最大的动物虐待问题之一是肉鸡的基因改造，使其生长更快、体型更大，这种做法会导致它们遭受极大的痛苦。一位鸡肉行业组织负责人甚至表示，这些动物“存在本身就是痛苦的”。好消息是，今年欧洲一些大型鸡肉公司和超市承诺转向生长较慢、健康状况更好的鸡种，这将每年减少数百亿只鸡的痛苦。
尽管这些改变看似微小，但它们是通过大量倡导活动、联盟建设和公众说服而艰难取得的。这些进展证明，尽管动物产业在经济和政治上有强大影响力，但它们并非不可战胜。通过聪明的倡导和新技术，动物权益的变革是可能的。希望2026年能取得更多进展。
本文最初发表于Vox的Future Perfect通讯。点击此处订阅！
The world we’ve built is an unrelentingly cruel one for animals. By 2025’s end, millions of animals will have been locked in tiny cages and violently killed for their fur. Hundreds of millions will have been drugged, prodded, or sliced up in painful experiments. And close to 1 trillion animals will have been farmed for their meat, milk, or eggs, with the vast majority reared in factory farms.
Meanwhile, countless animals are caught from the wild, or bred in captivity, to be put on display in zoos, aquariums, and circuses, or sold as pets.
Even though most people oppose these cruelties to a degree, the industries that exploit animals for profit are economically powerful, politically connected, and culturally entrenched, making it incredibly difficult to win animals legal protections. The global animal advocacy movement is growing, but remains tiny in light of what it’s up against. So too are startups developing animal-free technologies.
But despite the odds, a number of incremental and transformative campaigns were won this year to chip away at the immense suffering experienced by animals. Here’s an incomplete list.
Weeks ago, Poland — the world’s second biggest fur producer — banned fur farming. Polish President Karol Nawrocki called it a decision that “reflects our compassion, our civilizational maturity, and our respect for all living creatures.”
The move followed a decade of industry collapse; from 2014 to 2024, the number of animals farmed for their fur plummeted from 140 million to 20.5 million.
Most egg-laying hens in the US are still forced to live in tiny cages for their whole lives. Cage-free eggs are far from cruelty-free — the hens still suffer from a number of painful practices and likely don’t spend any time outdoors — but they’re a big improvement from cages. And this year, a lot of hens were spared from cage confinement.
In the US, the share of cage-free eggs jumped from 38.7 percent in December 2024 to 45.3 percent in September 2025 — saving about 20 million hens from life in a cage, which is the fastest shift since animal advocates began campaigning to ban cages in the early 2000s.
The trend is accelerating globally, too.
But progress on the cage-free issue has to be protected; US industry groups have tried to repeal state cage-free laws in Congress and the courts, and fortunately, those efforts failed in 2025.
Each year, Americans buy millions of dogs and cats from pet stores and breeders. Most of them come from puppy or kitten mills, where animals are raised in small, unsanitary enclosures with few protections and little governmental oversight. Meanwhile, millions of adoptable cats and dogs languish in shelters, and many are euthanized because there isn’t enough space to house them all.
To address the problem, animal advocates have successfully campaigned to pass laws in hundreds of cities, counties, and states that prohibit pet stores from selling pets. Momentum continued in 2025: Las Vegas, Denver, Detroit, and Manatee County, Florida — and more than 20 other US jurisdictions — passed such bans.
One of the lesser-known horrors of meat, milk, and egg production are the mutilations. Because overcrowded animals sometimes peck or bite at each other, producers cut off piglets’ tails, sear off egg-laying hens’ beaks and cows’ horns, and slice off turkeys’ snoods — all generally without pain relief.
Switzerland didn’t ban these practices, but it did pass a law requiring food companies, grocers, and restaurants to disclose on package labels whether the animal products they’re selling came from animals mutilated without pain relief.
Because the hundreds of billions of male chicks in the egg industry can’t lay eggs, and they don’t grow big and fast enough to be efficiently raised for meat, they’re killed on the day they’re born — and brutally so: Usually they’re ground up alive, but some producers suffocate, burn, electrocute, or drown them.
Here’s the good news: There are now numerous technologies to detect the sex of a chick while they’re still in the egg so they can be disposed of before they hatch. And these technologies are taking off quickly. As of spring 2025, over a quarter of eggs in Europe were scanned with these technologies — an 8 percent increase over the prior year — which will prevent hundreds of millions of these violent deaths in the years ahead. And 2025 marked the year that these technologies became commercialized, though on a small scale, in the United States and Brazil.
The National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies have committed to reducing animal testing and accelerating the development of high-tech, nonanimal methods to test the safety of drugs and chemicals and conduct biomedical research.
Last month, the UK government announced similar initiatives.
The politics of this issue are complicated — check out this Vox story for more — but if executed well, the outcome will be fewer animals subjected to painful experiments and more efficient, accurate scientific research.
One of the more bizarre US food regulations requires that cow’s milk be offered or even served at every school meal; 41 percent of it is thrown away.
Schools are barred from proactively offering plant-based milk alternatives, like soy milk, even though most kids of color are lactose intolerant to some degree, and if a kid wants plant-based milk, they need a doctor’s note.
A bill recently passed in Congress, which President Donald Trump is expected to sign, will allow schools to proactively offer soy milk alongside cow’s milk, and students who want plant-based milk will only need a note from a parent, not a doctor.
It’s a win for student choice and food waste, but also for cows, who are subjected to a lot of terrible practices in the dairy industry.
The animals farmed in the highest numbers are not chickens, pigs, or fish, but crustaceans, like shrimp and prawns, totaling some 630 billion animals each year.
This year, several large European grocery chains committed to ensuring that the shrimp and prawns in their supply chains are at least electrically stunned before slaughter (as opposed to being suffocated). Also, a major seafood certifier pledged to require companies that sell under its label to no longer use eyestalk ablation — the ghastly practice of cutting out female shrimp’s eyes to accelerate reproduction.
Emerging support for shrimp welfare also had a moment of relative virality on The Daily Show (and I’d be remiss not to mention on Vox.com and Vox’s Unexplainable podcast).
Arguably the biggest animal cruelty problem in the world is invisible to the naked eye; it’s how animals’ very genetics have been tweaked to make them grow bigger and faster — especially chickens — which can cause them to suffer terribly.
The head of a chicken industry group went so far as to say that the animals’ “existence is painful.”
The good news is that this year, according to Coefficient Giving’s Lewis Bollard, some large chicken companies and grocery stores in Europe committed to switching to slower-growing breeds with fewer health problems — changes that will reduce the suffering of hundreds of millions of animals annually.
However incremental most of these changes may be, they were hard fought for through intensive campaigning, coalition building, and public persuasion. They prove that these animal industries’ economic and political power doesn’t make them invincible, and that change for animals is possible through smart advocacy and new technologies. Here’s to hoping even more is accomplished in 2026.
This story originally appeared in Vox’s Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
2025-12-19 20:00:00
今年最引人注目的政策书籍《丰裕》（也许你听说过？）给我留下深刻印象的第一点，是一个几乎无人提及的细节。这本书的封面描绘了一个未来图景：地球一半被密集的住房、清洁能源和其他技术覆盖，以满足人类的所有需求，而另一半则作为生物圈的保护区，供野生动物、森林和连续的荒野生存。这是一个美丽的生态现代化愿景，表明保护我们所谓的“自然”是繁荣的一部分，而且这种保护与经济持续增长是相容的。它也以视觉方式反驳了那些认为我们必须在两者之间做出选择的人。
那么，我们该如何实现这一点？目前，美国及其同行国家已经非常富裕——从人类历史的任何角度来看都是难以想象的。也许我们会觉得，我们已经发展得足够了，环境危机如此严重，以至于应该通过缩小经济和摆脱无用的物品来拯救地球。我理解这种愿景的吸引力，但我认为它是一种幻想，而且在政治上是灾难性的，更不用说与人类自由相悖了。一个经济不再增长的世界，将看到对越来越少资源的更加残酷的竞争，而这种世界并不一定对地球更好。
但这并不改变核心问题：气候变化和自然世界的破坏对人类和非人类生命构成了严重的即时威胁，而我们目前并没有做好应对的准备。虽然这些现实很难调和，但必须以与自由民主原则一致的方式加以解决。我们不应故意缩小国家收入，而是应寻找经济中最不高效的领域，并找到一条既能获得最大经济效益，又能对环境造成最小损害的路径。如果在原则上能够实现经济增长而不破坏地球，那么我们就应该努力让这种增长朝着最有益的方向发展。
• 肉类和乳制品，加上我们对汽车的极端依赖，是两个巨大的资源浪费领域：它们产生大量排放并占用大量土地，但对经济增长和人类福祉并不是必需的。 • 将饮食转向植物性食物，并减少对汽车的依赖，可以像一个巨大的碳捕捉项目一样，为我们争取时间来实现脱碳。 • 减少对汽车的依赖可以大幅削减交通排放，提高土地利用效率，并使美国人更健康、更安全，而不会牺牲繁荣。当然，我们需要加快可再生能源的发展，并尽可能实现电气化。但要真正实现经济增长与环境影响的脱钩，我们需要改变两个美国社会中根深蒂固且效率极低的方面：对肉类和汽车的依赖。改变这些现实在美国的文化和政治中几乎是异端的，因此这一观点在气候政治中几乎从未被提出，但其重要性不容忽视。要做到这一点，我们需要重新审视那些我们常常视为默认选择的权衡。
你可能已经知道，汽车和动物性食品对地球有害——它们共同贡献了全球和美国温室气体排放的大约四分之一。全球范围内，畜牧业消耗了超过三分之一的可居住土地（这是我们行星危机中的一个关键因素），而在美国的下48州，这一比例达到了40%。汽车依赖导致的郊区扩张则进一步侵占了城市边缘的剩余土地。我们显然需要食物和交通，但肉类和汽车将地球资源转化为这些基本需求的方式远不如植物性食品、步行、公共交通等替代方案高效。在一个受气候变化限制的经济中，我们没有浪费资源的空间。
牛肉每卡路里产生的温室气体排放量大约是豆类的70倍，是豆腐的31倍；鸡肉则是豆类的10倍，是豆腐的4到5倍。在美国，每英里铁路运输的温室气体排放量大约是开车的三分之一，而步行则完全不排放。尽管我们的食物系统仍然效率低下，但美国在过去一个世纪中成功地大幅减少了用于农业的土地，同时生产了更多的食物。如果我们不再那么依赖肉类，我们还能做得更多。
我们可以将对汽车的依赖视为美国社会中另一个巨大的资源黑洞。交通运输是美国温室气体排放的最大来源，而汽车则是其中最大的贡献者，占美国总排放量的约16%。全球范围内，燃油车正在逐渐退出市场，这对气候变化和致命空气污染都是好事，但美国在汽车电动化方面却越来越落后于其同行国家。然而，仅仅将燃油车换成电动车并不足以解决汽车带来的环境问题。2020年的一项重要研究指出，即使在现实可行的电动化速度下，电动车的增长也无法满足气候目标，即便全面普及，电动车也不是零排放的。它们的制造需要大量能源，尤其是那些重电池，还需要大量钢铁和关键矿物。这些稀缺资源也是我们实现电网脱碳和建设其他绿色基础设施所必需的。
这并不是说电动车对气候没有好处——它们显然比燃油车更好。但正如该研究的首席作者在一篇评论文章中所指出的，“真正的问题是，你是否真的需要一辆车？”问题不在于汽车的存在，而在于我们对汽车的全面依赖。在美国，大多数地方都没有其他便捷的交通选择。而我们的目标是用最少的资源换取最大的经济收益。以数百万人的两吨金属盒子（汽车）为中心组织社会，显然不是最优解，而原因远不止汽车本身的排放。汽车依赖的都市形态迫使我们建设分散的社区，即所谓的郊区扩张，这需要更多的土地。据一项估计，截至2010年，美国仅用于停车的面积就相当于新泽西州的大小。我们的城市和郊区仅占美国土地面积的3%，但它们对环境的影响却很大，破坏了野生动物和生态系统赖以生存的栖息地。此外，美国的住房扩张程度如此之高，以至于一些郊区社区延伸到了周边农村地区，占据了未计入3%的额外土地。
从经济角度来看，汽车依赖所导致的低密度单户住宅模式，将宝贵的土地资源浪费在了低效用途上，加剧了全国住房短缺问题。汽车并非住房短缺的唯一原因，但没有大规模的汽车依赖，我们很难将如此多的土地用于低效用途。与此同时，美国人因依赖汽车而付出了高昂的代价，包括昂贵的基础设施和每年数以万计的交通事故死亡。城市规划者有时会说，美国优先考虑汽车而非人——如果一个外星人来到地球，可能会认为汽车是地球上的顶级物种。从某种意义上说，这确实成立——我们为汽车保留的特权使得满足基本的人类住房需求变得更加困难，这使我们变得更贫穷，并削弱了城市聚集效应，使城市变得不那么动态和高效。一项广受引用的研究估计，从1964年到2009年，住房供应限制，尤其是在高生产率城市中，使美国经济增长减少了36%。想象一下，如果洛杉矶将住房数量和人口翻倍，并在高速公路已满负荷的情况下，让数百万居民步行、骑自行车和使用公共交通，那么该市的GDP会是多少？
此外，由于汽车和动物产品都具有很高的负外部性，减少我们对它们的集体依赖的好处远不止经济或环境层面。美国人将花费更少的钱来管理慢性疾病，并减少过早死亡（在肉类和乳制品方面可能如此，在汽车方面则肯定如此）。我们还会减少对动物的折磨和杀害（以及减少人们不得不从事这些工作的数量）。我们还能帮助保持抗生素的有效性，甚至可能预防下一次大流行。
带来工业现代化的经济增长是一种令人敬畏的力量：它为我们提供了丰富的选择，使过去被视为繁荣象征的残酷生活方式（如煤矿开采或捕鲸）变得过时。繁荣可以具体地通过收入增长和寿命延长来衡量，但同时也是我们不断讲述的关于什么是美好生活以及愿意为此做出何种牺牲的故事。在汽车方面，我们或许已经种下了另一种故事的种子。在美国这样一个热爱汽车的国家，要推翻汽车的主导地位仍是一场艰难而艰难的斗争，我不一定乐观，但交通改革自然地从我们已经知道需要解决住房短缺的变革中产生。
减少驾驶里程的最佳方式是允许在有需求的地方建设更高密度的住房，尤其是在已经具备无车或低车生活条件的城市区域（当然，这并不是非此即彼的选择——我拥有汽车并能理解它的便利，但我的驾驶里程大约只有美国人的四分之一）。住房充足运动正在赢得改变政策所需的智力辩论。也许最关键的是，我们知道许多美国人希望住在这些地方——美国最受欢迎的住房往往位于步行可达的社区。如果我们能轻松地在增长中的城市中心建设大量住房，人们就会搬过去。然而，动物农业则是一个不同的故事。除非有革命性的细胞培养肉类突破，否则减少对动物产品的依赖将更加困难。我们能够证明，放弃肉类并不会让我们错失经济增长，但说服人们减少肉类消费不是一种牺牲，这仍然是植物性饮食运动尚未解决的问题。至少，我们应该将公共资金投入到肉类替代品的研究中。有许多聪明的政策建议可以引导消费者做出正确的选择，但要让这些政策成功而不是引发严重反弹，人们必须真正想要这些改变。为此，我鼓励大家尝试低肉或无肉饮食，这在大多数美国地区比摆脱汽车依赖更容易实现。目前，我们的畜牧业和汽车产业浪费了本可以用于实现可持续工业现代化的资源。我们之所以增长得不够，是因为我们浪费了太多资源在汽车和肉类上。重新夺回其中的一部分能力，将使脱钩的数学计算变得不那么残酷，使我们能够自由地构建我们所能想象的任何其他事物。我们没有保证会做出这个选择，或者及时做出这个选择——但这个选择是我们的。本系列得到了Arnold Ventures基金会的资助。Vox对本报道内容拥有完全的自主权。
The first thing that struck me about this year’s most talked-about policy book, Abundance (perhaps you’ve heard of it?), is a detail almost no one talks about.
The book’s cover art sketches a future where half of our planet is densely woven with the homes, clean energy, and other technologies required to fill every human need, liberating the other half to flourish as a preserve for the biosphere on which we all depend — wild animals, forests, contiguous stretches of wilderness.
It’s a beautiful ecomodernist image, suggesting that protecting what we might crudely call “nature” is an equal part of what it means to be prosperous, and that doing so is compatible with continued economic growth. It’s a visual rebuke to those who argue that we must choose between the two.
How would we do it?
The US and its peer countries today are spectacularly rich — unimaginably so, from the vantage of nearly any point in human history — and it might be tempting to think that we have grown enough, that our environmental crisis is so grave that we should save our planet by shrinking our economy and freeing ourselves from useless junk. I understand the pull of that vision — but it’s one that I think is illusory and politically calamitous, not to mention at odds with human freedom. A world where economic growth goes into reverse is a world that would see ever more brutal fighting over shrinking wealth, and it is far from guaranteed to benefit the planet.
Yet that doesn’t change the essential problem: Climate change and the destruction of the natural world pose grave immediate threats to humans, and to the nonhuman life that is valuable in itself. And we are not on track to manage it.
It’s not easy to reconcile these realities, but it is possible and necessary to do so in a way that’s consistent with liberal democratic principles. Instead of deliberately shrinking national income, we can seek out the areas of greatest inefficiency in our economy and chart a path that gets the most economic gain for the least environmental harm. If growing the economy without torching the planet is feasible in principle — and I think it is — then we should fight for it to grow in the best direction possible.
• Meat and dairy, plus our extreme dependence on cars, are two huge efficiency sinks: they produce a big share of emissions and devour land, and they aren’t essential to economic growth or human flourishing.
• Shifting diets toward plant-based foods and freeing up land could act like a giant carbon-capture project, buying time to decarbonize.
• Reducing car dependence would slash transport emissions, make land use more efficient, and make Americans healthier and safer — without sacrificing prosperity.
We’ll need to build out renewables at breakneck speed and electrify everything we can, of course. But some of the most powerful levers we have to decouple economic growth from environmental impact challenge us to do something even harder — to begin outgrowing two central fixtures of American life that are as taken-for-granted as they are supremely inefficient: our extreme dependence on meat and cars.
Changing those realities is so culturally and politically heretical in America that this case is almost never made in climate politics, but it deserves to be made nonetheless. And doing so will require examining the trade-offs that we too often treat as defaults.
It’s probably not news to you that cars and animal-based foods are bad for the planet — together they contribute around a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions both globally and within the US. Animal agriculture also devours more than a third of habitable land globally (a crucially important part of our planetary crisis) and 40 percent of land in the lower 48 US states, while car-dependent sprawl fragments and eats into what’s left at the urban fringe.
We obviously need food and transportation, but meat and cars convert our planet’s resources into those necessities much more wastefully than the alternatives: plant-based food, walking, public transportation, and so on. And in a climate-constrained economy that still needs to grow, we don’t have room to waste. Beef emits roughly 70 times more greenhouse gases per calorie than beans and 31 times more than tofu; poultry emits 10 times more than beans and four to five times more than tofu. Mile-for-mile, traveling by rail transit in the US emits about a third as much as driving on average, while walking doesn’t emit anything.
For all that resource use, animal agriculture and autos are not indispensable to our economy or to our continued economic growth.
The entire US agricultural sector, plus the manufacture and servicing of automobiles, make up a tiny share of our GDP; like other advanced economies, America’s is largely service-based, employing workers in everything from health care to law firms to restaurants and retailers like Amazon and Walmart. Of course, agriculture, energy, and manufacturing are foundational to everything else in the economy — without farming, Chipotle and Trader Joe’s would have no food to sell, and more importantly, we would starve. To say that agriculture isn’t a major part of our economy isn’t to say that it’s not really important to having an economy.
But it is, unsurprisingly, those foundational parts of the economy that disproportionately drive resource use and environmental impact — and because they’re a small share of the economy, we have a lot of room to change their composition without crashing GDP.
If we shifted a chunk of our food production away from meat and dairy and toward plant-based foods, for example, the already economically tiny ag sector might shrink somewhat. Meanwhile, we would save a lot of greenhouse gas emissions and land, and it would be reasonable to infer that the food service and retail sectors, which make up a significantly larger share of US GDP than agriculture does, would function all the same because we’d still eat the same number of calories and buy the same amount of food. With less meat consumption, the US might even have a significantly bigger alternative protein sector, with cleaner, better jobs than farm or slaughterhouse work.
Which is not to say there wouldn’t be any losers in the short run — job losses and stranded capital in industries that are regionally concentrated and politically powerful. But those transitions can be managed, just as we have been managing the transition away from fossil fuels.
This is exactly what decoupling — the idea that we can grow richer while decreasing emissions and other environmental impacts — looks like. The US, like a lot of other developed countries, has largely managed that in carbon emissions from energy consumption, which have fallen around 20 percent since 2005, even as the economy has grown about 50 percent in real terms. Agriculture has become more efficient, too, but it still lags on decoupling; the sector’s emissions are mostly flat or rising. Road transport tells a similar story: cars and trucks have gotten more efficient, but total emissions from driving are still stuck near their mid-2000s levels.
Admittedly, it’s easier to decouple for energy than it is to change the way we eat or move around. A megawatt is a megawatt, whether it’s produced by coal or solar, while switching from steak to beans is not the same experience. But learning how to use resources more efficiently is, after all, a big part of how wealthy nations have become wealthy, including in these tougher sectors. Despite how inefficient our food system still is, the US has managed to significantly decrease how much land it uses for farming over the last century, while producing much more food. We could go much further if we weren’t so reliant on eating animals.
Now, you might be thinking, so what if American GDP doesn’t depend on meat and cars? People like them, and they’re part of what it means to be rich and comfortable in the modern world. And you would have a point. No one would say that heating and cooling shouldn’t exist (well, the French might) just because they use a lot of energy and make up a tiny share of the economy.
But every choice we make in the economy is a trade-off against something else, and everything we spend our limited carbon budget on is a choice to forgo something else. Our task is to decide whether high meat intake and extreme car dependence are worth that trade — whether they make up for their toll on the planet in contributions to our economy or to our flourishing as human beings.
We can start with animal agriculture, because however bad for the planet it looks on first impression, it’s actually worse.
Estimates of the livestock industry’s greenhouse gas emissions range from around 12 to 20 percent globally; in the US, it’s around 7 percent (despite the lower percentage, per capita meat consumption is substantially higher in the US than it is globally — it’s just that our other sources of emissions are even higher). But those numbers don’t account for what climate scientists call the carbon opportunity cost of animal agriculture’s land use.
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Recall that farming animals for food takes up a massive amount of land, because we need space for the animals and for the crops needed to feed them. Meat and dairy production hogs 80 percent of all agricultural land to produce what amounts to 17 percent of global calories. Much of it could instead be rewilded with climate-stabilizing ecosystems, which would support biodiversity and also happen to be among our best defenses against global warming because of how good they are at sequestering carbon.
How big would the impact be? The canonical paper on the carbon opportunity cost of animal agriculture finds that a 70 percent reduction in global meat consumption, relative to projected consumption levels in 2050, would remove the equivalent of about nine years of carbon emissions, while a global plant-based diet would remove 16 years of emissions; another study concludes that a rapid phaseout of animal agriculture could effectively freeze increases in all greenhouse gases over the next 30 years, and offset most carbon emissions this century.
It’s worth pausing to appreciate just how miraculous that is. Freeing up even some of the land now used for meat and dairy turns it into a negative-emissions machine better than any existing carbon capture technology, giving us a carbon budget windfall that could ease the phaseout of fossil fuels and buy time for solving harder problems like decarbonizing aviation. This is as close as it gets to a free lunch, as long as you’re willing to make it a vegan lunch.
We can think of car dependence as the other big resource black hole in US society.
Transportation is the top source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, and cars are the biggest source within that category, accounting for about 16 percent of all US emissions. Globally, gas-powered cars are in retreat — a very good thing for both climate change and deadly air pollution, though the US is increasingly falling behind peer countries in auto electrification.
Still, if it were just a matter of swapping out gas-guzzlers for EVs, auto transportation wouldn’t be an obstacle to truly sustainable growth. But EVs alone aren’t a silver bullet for repairing the environmental problems of cars.
One influential paper on the subject found as much in 2020, concluding that, at any realistic pace of electrification, EV growth wouldn’t be enough to meet climate targets, and even with universal adoption, EVs aren’t emissions-free. They take lots of energy to make — especially those heavy batteries — and an enormous amount of steel and critical minerals. These are scarce inputs that we also need to decarbonize the electric grid and build other green infrastructure.
That isn’t to say that EVs aren’t better for the climate than gas-powered vehicles — they absolutely are. But as the lead author of that paper wrote in an accompanying commentary, “The real question is, do you even need a car?”
The problem is not the existence of cars, but our total dependence on them. In most of the country, Americans have no other convenient transportation options. And remember, we’re trying to optimize for the least resources used for the most economic upside. Organizing society around the movement of hundreds of millions of two-ton metal boxes is… obviously not that, and the reasons why go well beyond emissions from the cars themselves. The car-dependent urban form that dominates America forces us to build things spread far apart — sprawl, in other words — which forces us to use more land. As of 2010, according to one estimate, the US devoted a land area about the size of New Jersey to parking spots alone.
Our cities and suburbs occupy less than one-tenth as much land as farming — about 3 percent of the US total — but they still matter for the environment, fragmenting the habitats on which wildlife and ecosystems depend. Plus, housing in the US is sprawling enough that some exurban communities stretch across outlying rural counties, occupying an unknown additional share of land that’s not included in the 3 percent figure.
Perhaps most damaging from an economic perspective, the sprawling development pattern that car dependence both enables and relies upon has driven the misallocation of valuable land toward low-density single-family homes, driving our national housing crisis. Cars are by no means the sole reason behind the housing shortage, but without mass car dependence, it would be vastly harder to lock so much of our land into inefficient uses. Meanwhile, Americans pay dearly for car dependence in the form of costly infrastructure and tens of thousands of traffic deaths each year.
Urbanists sometimes like to say that the US prioritizes cars over people — that an alien arriving on Earth would probably think cars are our planet’s apex species. In some senses, that’s certainly true — the privileges that we’ve reserved for cars make it harder to meet the basic human need of housing, which makes us poorer and diminishes the agglomeration effects that make cities dynamic and productive. One widely cited paper estimated, astonishingly, that housing supply constraints, especially in the highest-productivity cities, cut US economic growth by 36 percent, relative to what it would have been otherwise, from 1964 to 2009. Imagine how much higher the GDP of Los Angeles would be if it doubled its housing stock and population and, with its freeways already maxed out, enabled millions more people to get around on foot, bike, and transit.
And, of course, since autos and animal products are both very high in negative externalities, the benefits of reducing our collective dependence on them go well beyond the strictly economic or environmental. Americans would spend less money managing chronic disease and die fewer premature deaths (in the case of meat and dairy, probably, and in the case of cars, undoubtedly). We would torture and kill fewer animals (and fewer people would have to spend their working lives doing the killing). We would help keep antibiotics working, and we might even prevent the next pandemic.
The growth that brought us industrial modernity is an awe-inspiring thing: It’s given us an abundance of choices, and it’s made obsolete brutal ways of life that not long ago were a shorthand for prosperity, like coal mining or the hunting of whales to make industrial products. Prosperity can be measured concretely in rising incomes and lengthening lifespans, but it’s also an evolving story we tell ourselves about what constitutes the good life, and what we’re willing to trade to get it.
With cars, at least, we might have the seeds of a different story. Dethroning the automobile in car-loving America remains a grueling, uphill battle, and I wouldn’t necessarily call myself optimistic, but transportation reform flows quite naturally from the changes we already know we need to make to solve our housing shortage.
The best way to reduce the number of miles we drive is to permit a greater density of homes anywhere where there’s demand for it, especially in the parts of cities that already have the affordances of car-free or car-light life (and it’s definitely not all or nothing — I own a car and can appreciate its conveniences, while driving maybe a quarter as much as the average American). The housing abundance movement is winning the intellectual argument necessary to change policy in that direction. And maybe most crucially, we know many Americans want to live in these places — some of the most in-demand homes in the country are in walkable neighborhoods. If we make it easy to build lots of housing in the centers of growing cities, people will move there.
But animal agriculture, barring a game-changing breakthrough in cell-cultivated meat, is a somewhat different story. It’s one thing to show that we’re not missing out on economic growth by forgoing meat, and quite another to persuade people that eating less of it isn’t a sacrifice — something the plant-based movement hasn’t yet figured out how to do. At bare minimum, we ought to be pouring public money into meat alternatives research. There’s no shortage of clever policy ideas to nudge consumer choices in the right direction — but for them to succeed rather than backfire terribly, people have to want it. And to that end, I’d encourage anyone to discover the abundance of a low- or no-meat diet, which is an easier choice to make in most of America than escaping car dependence.
Right now, our livestock and our automotive herd squander the resources that could be used to make industrial modernity sustainable for everyone. We grow less than we might because we waste so much on cars and meat. Reclaiming even a fraction of that capacity would make the math of decoupling less brutal, freeing us to build whatever else we can imagine. There’s no guarantee we’ll make that choice, or make it in time — but the choice is ours.
This series was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
2025-12-19 19:00:00
尽管在儿童保育行业工作了25年，克里斯坦·罗梅罗（Crystal Romero）从未见过像新墨西哥州如今这样剧烈的变化。她说：“二十年前，我不得不去二手店和庭院销售市场购买教室用品，自己动手打磨并重新粉刷。”如今，罗梅罗和她的丈夫经营着位于阿尔伯克基地区的Early Learning Academy，旗下有四个保育中心，并计划在2026年再增加两个。该机构拥有约165名员工，服务近700名儿童，罗梅罗表示他们是该州薪资最高的儿童保育项目，所有员工都享有完整的福利，包括健康、视力、牙科和退休保险。今年10月，她宣布将给所有员工每人每小时加薪5美元，这一决定得到了员工们的热烈反响。这一切都得益于新墨西哥州对儿童保育的投入，首先是通过《美国复苏计划》的资金，然后是提高儿童保育补贴，现在则是通过全州范围的儿童保育计划。虽然该计划仍有不足之处，例如补贴未能覆盖所有符合条件的家庭，且州内可能缺乏足够的保育服务提供者，但其努力值得称赞。州政府的补贴可以支付全职保育服务的费用，即使孩子每周只来几天。通过分析她的平均每日出勤记录，罗梅罗能够在不增加员工数量的情况下招收更多学生，同时不违反州规定的教师与儿童比例。她还保留了一些“替补”员工，以便员工可以休息，当有更多孩子来时，也能提供适当的照顾。
随着政府资金的增加，儿童保育行业不仅提高了员工薪资，还吸引了更多商业投资。随着利润空间的扩大，儿童保育中心现在能够增加支出，成为更有吸引力的客户。同时，这些中心也更受投资者青睐，尤其是私人股权投资公司。这些公司通过汇集资金投资企业以最大化利润，通常在短期内运作。虽然私人股权投资公司长期以来在儿童保育领域有所参与，但2022年《美国复苏计划》向儿童保育中心注入大量政府资金后，它们的影响力显著增强。如今，由投资者支持的连锁机构控制了约10%至12%的许可儿童保育市场，通常瞄准高收入人群以收取更高的费用。追求利润并不一定与儿童保育相冲突，有时甚至可以成为增加儿童空间或教育工作者岗位的动力。在罗梅罗的例子中，这促使她扩大业务并支付员工有竞争力的工资。然而，像开放市场研究所这样的监督组织则对某些由投资者主导的连锁机构的快速增长表示批评，认为这些机构过于注重最大化入学人数和降低运营成本，可能损害保育质量。在某些情况下，私人股权投资公司购买了保育中心的股份，随后拆分中心以提高盈利能力，例如出售土地并要求中心以租赁方式回购，同时减少员工工时和学生名额，导致员工流失率上升。
随着儿童保育行业获得更多关注和利润，倡导者希望设立一些规则来防止利润追求损害保育质量和稳定性。马萨诸塞州提供了一个解决方案。当该州将每年4.75亿美元的儿童保育补助资金永久化后，利安特（Elizabeth Leiwant）帮助制定了针对大型营利性机构的限制措施，包括对大型营利性项目的补助资金上限（占总补助资金的1%），要求一定比例的资金用于员工工资和福利，以确保合理的薪资水平，以及每个项目点都愿意接纳获得州补贴的儿童。马萨诸塞州的规则并不区分由投资者支持的机构，如最大的儿童保育连锁公司，和营利性机构，如罗梅罗在新墨西哥州的机构。唯一的区别是规模：这些规则适用于在该州拥有10个或以上分部的保育机构。利安特指出，该州最大的儿童保育和课后服务提供商——青年商会（YMCA）是一家非营利组织。她的目标是让保育机构能够维持生计，但首先应关注保育项目的质量，确保提供优质的教育。如果在保证质量的基础上获得利润，那是很好的事，但这应该是最后一步，而不是第一步。
罗梅罗为她所做的一切感到自豪，并认为Early Learning Academy的扩张是成功的。她认为，保育质量是推动成功的关键因素。对她而言，员工的待遇是首要任务，而州政府的大量资金使她能够做到这一点。她说：“员工的幸福和被妥善对待，会直接影响到我们的孩子和家庭。如果员工不开心，后果将由家庭承担，我不能接受这种情况。”这项工作得到了巴恩姆家族基金会的资助。Vox Media对该报道内容拥有完全的自主权。
Despite working in child care for 25 years, Crystal Romero has never seen a shift like the one taking place in New Mexico. “Twenty years ago, I had to furnish classrooms by shopping at thrift stores and yard sales, sanding things myself and repainting them,” she said.
Today, Romero and her husband own and manage Early Learning Academy, which consists of four child care centers in the Albuquerque region; they are under contract to add two more locations in 2026. With approximately 165 employees and close to 700 children enrolled, Romero says they are the highest-paying child care program in the state, and all employees are eligible for full benefits, including health, vision, dental, and retirement. In October, Romero announced, to cheers and shrieks, that every staff member would get a $5 an hour raise.
All this is possible because of New Mexico’s investment in child care, first through American Rescue Plan dollars, then through higher child care subsidies and now with the state’s universal child care program. (The program isn’t perfect, as subsidies aren’t reaching all the families that qualify and the state may not have enough providers to meet demand, but it’s a laudable effort.)
The state’s subsidy pays for full-time child care, even if children only show up for three or four days each week. By studying her average daily attendance records, Romero is able to enroll more students while keeping her staffing levels the same, and without going over the state-mandated teacher-to-child ratios. She keeps floaters on hand to allow her staff to take breaks, so in the rare event of more students showing up, she can still provide appropriate cover.
As part of its community program, ELA hosts an annual event where every child gets a brand new pair of shoes. “Nikes and Air Jordans,” she explained. “We gave away 500 at this location,” she says, of the original Early Learning Academy in west Albuquerque. This year, they sponsored a Make-A-Wish request for a child in their community with a brain tumor and paid $8,500 to send the family to Disney World. Her staff lounges have free snacks and leather recliners, and photos along the wall where she and her husband are pictured at local university basketball games and community events on behalf of their organization.
Child care has long been an industry known for slim margins. But an influx of government funding can change the business model of any sector — and New Mexico isn’t the only state changing the economics of owning and operating a child care center.
Vermont has invested in child care through Act 76, which has increased the number of families qualifying for subsidies and raised the subsidy rate for providers. Massachusetts has set aside $475 million per year for grants to child care providers. Connecticut created the state’s Early Childhood Education Endowment to expand access to child care, funded by up to $300 million annually from the state budget’s surplus with the option to add funds each year.
“As more public money becomes available in child care, that is going to be what attracts different players,” said Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow at Capita. (Haspel is also a fellow at the Better Life Lab at New America, where I work.) “It does pose a policy challenge — how does [providing child care] square with profit-seeking?”
Increased state funding has done more than raise salaries at local child care centers. It’s also attracted an influx of interest from businesses. As child care providers grow their profit margins, they are now able to increase their spending and become more lucrative customers. And as child care centers become more profitable and have opportunities to expand, they also become more attractive to investors.
Specifically, child care centers have attracted increased interest from private equity. Private equity groups pool financial resources to invest in a business with the intention of maximizing profit, often in the short term. They have long had a role in child care, but became a more prominent force in 2022, when the American Rescue Plan directed significant government funds to keep child care centers afloat. Today, investor-backed chains control between 10 and 12 percent of the licensed child care market, and typically target higher-income populations so they can charge higher fees.
Profit-seeking isn’t inherently at odds with child care, and can be one of the drivers in adding more spaces for children or jobs for educators. In Romero’s case, it has motivated her to expand her business and pay staff competitive wages.
But watchdog groups like the Open Markets Institute have been critical of rapid growth spearheaded by certain investor-backed chains, with their heavy emphasis on maximizing enrollment and minimizing operational costs. Both factors can come at the cost of quality care.
In some instances, private equity groups have purchased an ownership stake in child care centers and then proceeded to dismantle them to promote profitability. The groups sell the land and then require the center to lease it back, while pushing for maximum enrollment and cutting staff hours and student spots, leading to high turnover.
As their share of the market has grown, the investment-backed chains have also taken on a larger role in influencing policy. A 2022 New York Times article found that even though a consortium of investor-backed chains publicly supported the child care provisions in Build Back Better, during meetings with senators and staff, the group “reacted skeptically” to a plan to subsidize tuition for middle- and upper-income families, and raised concerns in its financial disclosures that the legislation would lead to limited profits.
Another group whose interest in child care has grown alongside the state and federal funding is the educational technology sector. EdTech businesses, some of which have the support of venture capital, have proliferated in the last five years, according to Elizabeth Leiwant, VP of public policy and research at Neighborhood Villages, an early education systems change organization based in Massachusetts.
“As providers have more money to spend, they are looking for ways to do things more effectively and efficiently,” Leiwant said.
Some EdTech offerings, like bookkeeping software, can be extremely beneficial to providers, Leiwant says, many of whom got into the work because of their background in early childhood education and may be less prepared or thrilled to manage the business aspects. But Leiwant has also been contacted by venture capital funders looking for feedback on technology that provides educational curriculum for classrooms, or targeted advertising to connect parents to available child care spots. Leiwant notes that there were far fewer such EdTech products — and certainly less venture capital interest — before substantial government funds created a new market. “It led EdTech firms to pay attention to this space in a new way,” she says.
Across the country, most child care providers make slim profits. Workers make low wages; the average pay is $15 an hour, and most states still put only a small amount of funding into their child care systems. What Romero is doing — expanding, making money, paying her staff well, and providing generous benefits — is a relatively new phenomenon, and not everyone is thrilled about it.
Romero gets “lots of flack from people who say you are using state money to get rich.” But she believes these critiques uphold a double standard. Child care is one of many industries, including health care and education, that receive state or federal funding. Plus, child care work is disproportionately performed by women of color and at wages so low that workers often experience food insecurity and qualify for public benefits. It is often underrepresented in media coverage and in popular culture, TV, and movies. It wasn’t until the Covid-19 pandemic that child care began showing up in news stories as a necessary part of a functioning economy. “I don’t see any other industry that receives state money that feels like they can’t do well,” Romero says.
But as child care gets more attention and becomes more profitable, advocates hope to create guardrails to prevent profit-seeking at the expense of quality and stability. One solution comes from Massachusetts. When Massachusetts made its annual $475 million in child care grants permanent, Leiwant helped create restrictions on larger for-profit firms. These include caps on the amount of grant funding that large for-profit programs can receive (1 percent of total grant funds), requirements to spend a certain percentage on staff salaries and benefits to ensure decent wages, and a willingness to enroll children who receive the state subsidy at every program site.
Massachusetts’ rules do not distinguish between groups that are investor-backed, like the largest child care chains, and private for-profit institutions with multiple locations, like Romero’s (in New Mexico). The only distinction is the size: the guardrails are in place for child care providers that have 10 or more locations in the state. Leiwant said that one of the largest child care and aftercare providers in the state, the YMCA, is a nonprofit organization.
The goal is that providers can make a living, Leiwant said. “But first you should be paying attention to the quality of the program you are providing and having quality education. If you make money on top of that, it’s great – but that is the last rung, not the first rung.”
Ultimately, Romero is proud of the work she has done and the expansion of Early Learning Academy. She believes the quality of the product is what drives their success. For her, compensating and taking care of her staff is the top priority, and the substantial state funding allows her to do that.
“Staff come first before our families, because if they are happy and treated right and feel safe and secure, that is going to be received with our children and families when they enroll,” she said. If not, it leads to burnout. “If the staff are not happy, the families will reap the consequences, and I can’t have it.”
This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
2025-12-19 07:25:00
2025年6月18日，一名抗议者在美国最高法院外举牌支持跨性别青少年接受性别肯定治疗。| Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
本文出自《The Logoff》，这是一份帮助你了解特朗普政府动态的每日简报，不会让你被政治新闻淹没。点击此处订阅。
欢迎来到《The Logoff》：特朗普政府正在加剧对跨性别美国人和性别肯定医疗的攻击。发生了什么？卫生部长罗伯特·F·肯尼迪三世于周四宣布，联邦政府将采取措施阻止跨性别未成年人获得性别肯定治疗，包括青春期阻滞剂、荷尔蒙治疗或手术。肯尼迪的卫生与公众服务部提出了两项规则：一项将禁止为提供跨性别未成年人性别肯定治疗的医院提供联邦资金，包括禁止其参与医保（Medicare）和医疗补助（Medicaid）；另一项则将阻止联邦资金用于为未成年人提供性别肯定治疗。该政府仍需完成规则制定程序，这些措施才能最终实施。
背景是什么？对跨性别美国人——无论是他们参与公共生活还是仅仅存在——的攻击已成为特朗普第二届政府的核心特征。今年1月，特朗普总统通过两项行政命令，攻击“性别意识形态极端主义”，并称性别肯定治疗为“化学和手术性残害”。上个月，最高法院也允许特朗普政府执行一项新的护照政策，要求护照必须以持有人出生时的性别发放。
为什么这重要？这些拟议的政策变化与专业医学建议背道而驰。美国医学会（AMA）、美国儿科学会（AAP）等主要医学机构都支持跨性别未成年人获得性别肯定治疗，这种治疗通常包括青春期阻滞剂和荷尔蒙治疗，而非手术。
好了，现在是时候“下线”了……本周，我的同事Dylan Scott向我（以及Vox早间简报《Today, Explained》的读者）介绍了这个精彩的故事：“一个宏大的圣诞理论：《大青蛙兄弟圣诞奇缘》是《圣诞奇遇记》的最佳改编。”现在，亲爱的读者，我将把这个故事传递给你们，因为它非常有趣。（如果你想找一些节日活动，我强烈推荐阅读狄更斯的原著《圣诞奇遇记》。）祝你度过美好的夜晚，我们明天再见！
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: The Trump administration is escalating its attacks on transgender Americans and gender-affirming health care.
What happened? Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Thursday that the federal government would take steps to block access to gender-affirming care for transgender minors, such as puberty blockers, hormones, or surgery.
Kennedy’s Health and Human Services Department is proposing two rules: One would target federal funding to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to minors by banning them from participating in Medicare and Medicaid. The second proposed rule would block federal dollars from being spent on gender-affirming care for minors.
The administration still has to go through the rulemaking process before either measure is finalized.
What’s the context? Attacks on trans Americans — both their inclusion in public life and their mere existence — have become a core feature of the second Trump administration. In a pair of January executive orders, President Donald Trump attacked “gender ideology extremism” and referred to gender-affirming care as “chemical and surgical mutilation.”
Last month, the Supreme Court also allowed the Trump administration to enforce a new passport policy requiring passports to be issued with the holder’s sex at birth.
Why does this matter? These proposed policy changes are diametrically opposed to professional medical advice on the subject. The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and other major medical associations all support access to gender-affirming care — which most often consists of puberty blockers and hormones, not surgery — for minors.
This week, my colleague Dylan Scott introduced me (and readers of Vox’s morning newsletter, Today, Explained) to this wonderful story: “A Grand Yuletide Theory: The Muppet Christmas Carol is the Best Adaptation of A Christmas Carol.” Now, dear readers, I’m passing it on to you, because it’s a delight. (I also highly recommend Dickens’s original A Christmas Carol, if you’re looking for seasonal activities.) Have a great evening and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2025-12-19 06:30:00
2025年11月18日，一名男子在华盛顿国会大厦外举着写着“现在就公布文件！”的标语。| Celal Gunes/Anadolu 通过 Getty 图片提供
“埃普斯坦文件”可能终于要公开了——至少部分文件会公开。周五是司法部必须在国会通过一项法案后30天内披露有关已故金融家杰弗里·埃普斯坦（Jeffrey Epstein）的调查材料的最后期限。尽管仍有疑问，即哪些材料可能被保密或删除，但几乎可以肯定我们会看到一些内容。在截止日期前，我与 Vox 每日通讯《Today, Explained》的同事安德鲁·普罗科普（Andrew Prokop）进行了交谈。我们讨论了埃普斯坦丑闻如何占据特朗普第二届政府的中心位置、可能公开的内容，以及其他相关话题。以下是经过删减和润色的对话内容，您可以通过此链接订阅该通讯，以获取更多类似对话。
为什么埃普斯坦丑闻成为特朗普政府的焦点？他们自己制造了这一局面。除了少数高度关注的右翼网络支持者外，很少有人再谈论埃普斯坦案件。这些右翼支持者深信政府掩盖了一个巨大的阴谋，而如果特朗普赢得2024年大选，他就能揭开这个阴谋。当特朗普当选后，他的司法部长帕姆·邦迪（Pam Bondi）试图讨好这些右翼影响者，邀请他们到白宫，并赠送了所谓的“埃普斯坦文件”文件夹，但这些文件夹中并没有任何新的信息。这成为了一次巨大的尴尬，也引发了人们质疑：政府是否在试图掩盖某些事情？
自那以后，有关特朗普与埃普斯坦关系的更多信息不断被披露。虽然这种关系早已为人所知，但很多人似乎没有真正关注过。现在，司法部被要求公开哪些材料？
司法部和联邦调查局对埃普斯坦进行了两次不同的调查。第一次是在2000年代中期，调查内容涉及佛罗里达州的性交易活动；第二次是在大约十年后，即2019年左右，纽约的调查最终导致埃普斯坦被捕并入狱，他在审判前去世。在这些调查过程中，调查人员获取了大量证据，这些证据政府可能仍然掌握着。通常，这类调查材料不会公开，但鉴于埃普斯坦案件的特殊性质，外界要求他们披露更多信息。共和党众议院领袖曾试图阻止这一过程，但一旦法案获得多数支持，各方都争相要求公开，现在甚至包括特朗普本人。
该法案要求司法部长在30天内公开所有与埃普斯坦、吉斯莱因·麦克斯韦（Ghislaine Maxwell）或与埃普斯坦犯罪活动有关的个人相关的未分类记录、文件、通信和调查材料。不过，该法案也存在一些漏洞：如果某些记录可能妨碍正在进行的联邦调查或起诉，可以暂时保密，但必须严格限定范围。因此，问题在于司法部是否会以诚意对待这一要求，是否会公开所有内容，还是声称存在大量例外情况？
从这些文件中我们能了解到什么？埃普斯坦拥有许多名人和权势人士的朋友，他拥有一座私人岛屿和私人飞机。一些受害者表示，他们被转卖给了其他男性，并指认了其中的一些人。因此，埃普斯坦文件的公开将回答最大的疑问：调查人员在调查埃普斯坦是否将女性或女孩贩卖给其他有影响力、有权势的男性时得出了什么结论？他们是否认为这些指控毫无根据？是否认为证据不够明确，无法证明？或者他们是否认为埃普斯坦确实做了这些事，但出于某种原因没有起诉？
另一个问题是关于特朗普与埃普斯坦之间的关系。我认为我们对这段关系已经有了比较清晰的认识：他们经常参加聚会、活动，与模特交往，表现出基本的性别歧视和骚扰行为。但目前还没有可信、可证实的指控表明埃普斯坦曾将女孩贩卖给特朗普。显然，我怀疑特朗普政府会公开任何对特朗普不利的新文件。
在文件公开之前，人们还应该知道什么？
在调查过程中，调查人员会发现很多内容并不成立。人们告诉他们各种各样的事情，但这些说法往往缺乏可靠依据。因此，这次文件公开可能包括很多听起来很吸引人但缺乏证据支持的材料，这些材料是调查人员从他人那里获得的，但无法核实。你曾提到，埃普斯坦丑闻已成为所有阴谋论的源头，使得特朗普政府难以轻易否认。这是如何发生的？
埃普斯坦丑闻之所以能引起广泛共鸣，是因为它涉及多个层面。一方面，它涉及“权势精英掩盖性犯罪”的普遍观点；另一方面，它也与“#MeToo”运动相关。反犹太主义者喜欢这个故事，因为埃普斯坦是犹太人，他的许多朋友也是犹太人。而一些“MAGA”（美国优先）支持者则希望这些文件能揭露一些民主党人是性犯罪者，应该被监禁。而“#Resistance”（反对特朗普）人士则认为特朗普本人是丑闻的核心，他们希望借此制造一个损害特朗普的丑闻。
无论谁在关注，都会提出一些未解的问题。这些问题因人而异，但人们会问：“杰弗里·埃普斯坦是否与情报机构有关？还有哪些人参与其中？他真的是自杀吗，还是有阴谋让他闭嘴？他如何赚钱？”虽然已有大量报道，但我认为永远无法彻底解答这些问题。即使埃普斯坦文件公开，它们也只能引发更多疑问，一个接一个的阴谋论将不断涌现。
The “Epstein files” are maybe, finally, coming out — or at least, some of them are.
Friday is the deadline for the Justice Department to disclose materials from its two investigations into deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein after Congress passed a bill last month requiring it to do so within 30 days. There are still questions about what materials could be withheld or redacted, but it’s extremely likely we’ll see something.
Ahead of that deadline, I spoke with my colleague Andrew Prokop for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained. We talked about how the Epstein scandal took over the second Trump administration, what could be released, and more. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below, and you can sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.
How did this become the all-consuming story of the Trump administration?
They really did it to themselves. No one was really talking about the Epstein case anymore except for a relatively small group of highly engaged online right-wingers who deeply believed there was a vast conspiracy the government was covering up, and that if Trump won the 2024 election, he could blow the lid off that conspiracy.
Then Trump wins, and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, tries to pander to these right-wing influencers by inviting them to the White House and giving them these binders that were supposedly the Epstein files, and they contain absolutely nothing new. It’s a huge embarrassment, and it raises the question of, kind of like, what’s going on here? Is the administration trying to hide something?
Since then, there’s been this drip, drip, drip of revelations about Donald Trump’s own closeness to Jeffrey Epstein, something that had long been known, but I think that a lot of people hadn’t really focused on.
What specifically is DOJ being compelled to release?
The Department of Justice and the FBI investigated Jeffrey Epstein during two different periods. One was in the mid-2000s — an investigation run in Florida about sex trafficking there — and about a decade later, around 2019, there was a New York-based investigation that eventually resulted in Epstein’s arrest and imprisonment, where he died before trial. As part of those investigations, investigators obtained a lot of evidence that the government presumably still has.
Typically, this investigative material is not released. But because of the nature of the Epstein case, there was this pressure that they needed to disclose more. Republican House leaders tried to stop this from happening, but once it was clear the bill had a majority, there was a stampede, and now everyone claims they supported it, including Donald Trump.
The bill calls for, within 30 days, the attorney general to release and make publicly available all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials that relate to Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, or individuals named in connection with Epstein’s criminal activities.
There are some loopholes in this; records that would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution could be withheld as long as such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary. So the question is, how much good faith do they approach this with? Are they going to put everything out there, or are they going to claim that there are a lot of exceptions?
What could we learn from the files?
Epstein had all these famous and powerful friends. He had this private island, private jets. And some of Epstein’s victims say that they were trafficked to other men as well, and have named certain of those men. That’s the biggest question that could be answered by an Epstein files release: What did investigators conclude when they checked out these claims that Epstein was trafficking women or girls to other prominent, influential, powerful men? Did they look into this and conclude there’s nothing to it? Did they conclude it’s too hazy and they couldn’t prove anything? Or did they conclude, Yeah, we think he actually did, but for whatever reason, we’re not going to bring charges?
Then the other question is about Trump and his own closeness to Epstein. I think we have a pretty clear picture of this relationship: It involved a lot of going to parties, going to events, hanging out with models, and this sort of basic sexism and harassment that they both demonstrated during this period. There hasn’t been a credible, corroborated claim of Epstein sex-trafficking a girl to Trump. Obviously, I would be skeptical that the Trump administration would release new files that have negative revelations about Donald Trump.
What else should people be aware of before the files come out?
As part of an investigation, investigators find a lot of stuff that doesn’t hold up. People tell them all kinds of things, and they don’t really have any good basis for it. It is quite possible that this release will include a lot of juicy-sounding but dubious material that people told investigators, but that investigators themselves couldn’t corroborate.
You’ve written about how this has become the mother of all conspiracy theories, in a way that makes it really hard for the Trump administration to dismiss. How did that happen?
There’s a particular way the Epstein scandal can resonate with just about anyone. There’s the generic “it’s powerful elites behind sex crimes” angle. There’s a #MeToo angle. Antisemites love this because Epstein was Jewish, and many of his friends were Jewish.
The more MAGA people were hoping that the Epstein files would reveal that a bunch of Democrats were criminal sexual abusers and should be sent to jail. And the #Resistance people now see Trump’s own culpability as the center of this thing, and they want a scandal that hurts Donald Trump.
There are these unanswered questions that anyone can point to. Those are different questions, depending on who you’re talking about, but they’ll ask, “Oh, is Jeffrey Epstein tied to intelligence services? Who are the other men involved? Did Epstein really kill himself, or was there some kind of conspiracy to shut him up? How did he make his money?”
There’s been a lot of reporting on these topics, but I don’t think there will ever be enough to establish definitive answers for the people who continue to have these questions. Even when the Epstein files are released, they’ll only feed more questions. There’s just going to be one conspiracy theory after another.
2025-12-18 23:30:57
特朗普政府多次将联邦科学家边缘化，并拆解长期存在的科研机构，将政治不满转化为对科学规范的攻击。该报道最初由Inside Climate News发布，现作为Climate Desk合作的一部分转载。许多受影响的人认为，此举是特朗普总统对科罗拉多州州长贾里德·波利斯的个人政治报复。
消息传出，国家大气研究中心（NCAR）位于博尔德，计划被拆分，部分职能转移至其他地方。消息传出后数小时，科罗拉多州被取消了1.09亿美元的联邦环境与安全资助，而特朗普在椭圆办公室仪式上曾公开批评波利斯为“软弱可悲的人”。白宫预算办公室主任罗素·沃UGHT在社交媒体X上发布声明，宣布该中心将被取消，但他在周三未回应进一步的询问。
特朗普与波利斯之间的矛盾源于科罗拉多州前县选举官员蒂娜·佩特斯被监禁一事，她因在2020年大选后向特朗普盟友非法提供投票机访问权限而被判有罪。一位匿名白宫官员告诉《华盛顿邮报》：“显然，科罗拉多州州长不愿意与总统合作。”
与NCAR有关的科学家对这一中心——全球气候、天气和野火研究的重要支柱——面临成为特朗普政治斗争牺牲品的风险感到震惊。NCAR杰出学者凯文·特伦伯特在一封电子邮件中写道：“有一种理论认为，此举旨在给科罗拉多州长施加压力，以允许特朗普的赦免请求。”他补充说：“关闭NCAR将对整个科学界造成重大打击，并对未来的几十年产生影响。”
NCAR成立于1960年，由国家科学基金会管理，为北美129所大学提供最先进的数据和技术资源。合作伙伴依赖NCAR的超级计算机、高度装备的飞机和地球系统建模。NCAR开发了Dropsonde设备，用于飓风探测飞机测量热带风暴的温度、气压和湿度。例如，NCAR为美国军方提供实时气象预报，如在阿拉斯加的格里利堡反导弹系统站点，还进行了有助于改善野火行为预测的计算机建模。
气候科学家凯瑟琳·海耶在X上表示：“NCAR可以说是我们的全球母舰。”她指出，几乎每一位研究气候和天气的科学家，无论是在美国还是全球，都曾通过NCAR的大门并受益于其卓越的资源。
美国国家科学基金会（NSF）的大学大气研究协会（UCAR）主席安东尼奥·布萨拉奇表示：“NCAR不仅是国家宝藏，更是国际宝藏。”UCAR共有1450名员工，其中830人隶属于NCAR。据科罗拉多大学莱德商学院的研究，NCAR和UCAR是科罗拉多州超过30个联邦资助实验室和机构的一部分，每年对该州经济产生26亿美元的影响。
波利斯在一份声明中表示，科罗拉多州尚未直接从特朗普政府获得有关NCAR计划或《科罗拉多太阳报》报道的大量交通拨款被取消的信息。这些削减包括一项6600万美元的拨款，用于资助该州北部的关键铁路安全机制，1170万美元用于为弗洛伦斯市的车辆车队电气化，以及1170万美元用于科罗拉多州立大学普韦布洛分校研究如何用氢和天然气为铁路车辆供电。如果这些报道属实，波利斯表示：“公共安全面临风险，科学正在遭受攻击。”
他强调：“气候变化是真实的，但NCAR的工作远不止于气候科学。NCAR提供的数据帮助我们应对野火、洪水等极端天气事件，从而挽救生命和财产，防止家庭遭受毁灭性打击。如果这些削减继续进行，我们将失去在科学发现方面与外国势力竞争的优势。”
代表博尔德所在选区的众议员乔·内格斯在X上发文称，特朗普政府拆解NCAR的计划是“极其危险且明显带有报复性质的行动”。“NCAR是世界上最著名的科学设施之一，科学家们每天都在这里进行前沿研究。”内格斯写道，“我们将动用所有法律手段来反对这一鲁莽的指令。”
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
One of the world’s leading climate, weather, and wildfire science research institutions is being targeted for elimination in what many of those affected see as President Donald Trump’s political vendetta against Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.
• The Trump administration’s move to dismantle NCAR looks less like a budget decision and more like political retaliation, landing squarely in the middle of the president’s feud with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.
• Cutting NCAR isn’t a niche science fight — it touches nearly every corner of US weather and climate forecasting, from wildfire modeling to the computational backbone universities rely on.
• Scientists say you can’t separate “weather” from “climate” the way Trump officials suggest, and eliminating NCAR would make the country slower and less capable at both.
• The plan mirrors the broader Project 2025 push to sideline federal climate research, raising real questions about how the US intends to navigate a world of escalating extreme weather without its top-tier science infrastructure.
Word that the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder would be broken up, with some of its functions moved elsewhere, came hours after the cancellation of $109 million in federal environmental and safety grants for Colorado, and one day after Trump took time during an Oval Office ceremony to excoriate Polis as a “weak and pathetic man.” Russell Vought, the director of the White House budget office, announced that the center would be eliminated in a post on the social media site X on Tuesday evening. His office did not respond to a request for further comment on Wednesday.
Trump’s beef with Polis stems from the jailing of a former county election official in Colorado, Tina Peters, who was convicted of giving Trump allies unauthorized access to a voting machine in the aftermath of the 2020 election. An anonymous White House official told the Washington Post: “The Colorado governor obviously isn’t willing to work with the president.”
Scientists affiliated with NCAR expressed shock that the center — a linchpin in climate and weather research globally — is at risk of becoming collateral damage in one of Trump’s feuds.
“One theory is that this is designed to put pressure on the Governor of Colorado to allow the pardon Trump attempted to go through???!!!” wrote NCAR distinguished scholar Kevin Trenberth in an email. “Shutting NCAR would be a major setback for the entire community and would have impact[s] for decades to come.”
NCAR, founded in 1960 and administered by the National Science Foundation, provides state-of-the-art data and technology resources for 129 North American university partners. Partners rely on NCAR supercomputers, heavily instrumented aircraft and Earth-systems modeling. NCAR developed the Dropsonde, the equipment that hurricane hunter aircraft use to measure temperature, pressure, and humidity of tropical storms. The center does real-time operational forecasting for the military, for example, at the anti-ballistic missile systems site at Fort Greely, Alaska, and has done the computer modeling that has helped improve forecasting of wildfire behavior.
NCAR is “is quite literally our global mothership,” said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe in a post on X. “Nearly everyone who researches climate and weather — not only in the US, but around the world — has passed through its doors and benefited from its incredible resources.”
NCAR is “truly an international treasure, not just a national treasure,” said Antonio Busalacchi, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which manages NCAR for the National Science Foundation. UCAR has 1,450 employees, 830 of them at NCAR.
As of Wednesday midday, Busalacchi said he had received no word from Washington about the dismantling plan aside from Vought’s announcement Tuesday night, linking to an exclusive USA Today story that quoted him.
Aside from meeting any political aims, the elimination of NCAR would fulfill Vought’s goals of shrinking the size of government and rooting out climate science. “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” Vought said in his post on X, quoting verbatim the controversial conservative blueprint for the Trump administration, Project 2025, which he helped author.
He said that critical weather work would be moved to another location, but gave no details. Daniel Swain, an expert on extreme weather at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and an NCAR research partner, disputed the idea that the study of climate and weather can be separated.
“Increasingly, the science has demonstrated that there is no clean separation between weather and climate,” Swain said in a YouTube livestream Wednesday. “It’s the same atmosphere. It’s just different timescales.”
Swain said he is only able to do his work at the University of California because all of his computing needs are met by NCAR. “There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists all around the country that use those NCAR resources day to day to do their science, to conduct their visualizations,” he said. “It’s actually a very efficient process, in the sense that it centralizes what otherwise would be distributed, more expensive, complicated, and in many cases, therefore just wouldn’t happen at all.”
He noted the irony that the NCAR community was grappling with the news at the same time that Boulder has been under an extreme wildfire risk warning — the kind of warning that NCAR’s research has enabled. The local utility, Xcel Energy, preemptively cut power in the region as a result.
“If there are no major fires in the Boulder area, it is possibly at least going to be in part because these excellent weather forecasts regarding the upcoming event allowed the utilities to take preemptive action and prevent those branches and trees that might fall on power lines from igniting the fires,” Swain said.
NCAR received $123 million in funding from the National Science Foundation in the last fiscal year, accounting for one-half of its budget, according to Science magazine. NCAR receives other funding from the Pentagon and other federal agencies as well as from states and private sources. NCAR and UCAR are part of a complex of more than 30 federally funded laboratories and institutions in Colorado that have a $2.6 billion annual impact on the state’s economy, according to research by the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business.
Polis said in a statement that Colorado has not received information directly from the Trump administration about the NCAR plan or the cancellation of a wide array of transportation grants that was reported by the Colorado Sun. The cuts include a $66 million grant set to pay for a critical rail-safety mechanism in the northern part of the state, $11.7 million to electrify the Fort Collins vehicle fleet and $11.7 million to Colorado State University Pueblo to study how to power rail vehicles with hydrogen and natural gas.
If the reports are true, Polis said, “public safety is at risk and science is being attacked.
“Climate change is real,” he said. “But the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families. If these cuts move forward, we will lose our competitive advantage against foreign powers and adversaries in the pursuit of scientific discovery.”
In a post on X, Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), who represents the district that includes Boulder, called the plan to dismantle NCAR “a deeply dangerous & blatantly retaliatory action by the Trump administration.
“NCAR is one of the most renowned scientific facilities in the WORLD — where scientists perform cutting-edge research every day,” Neguse wrote. “We will fight this reckless directive with every legal tool we have.”