Tech titans directed a wave of criticism at President Donald Trump’s move to abandon the Paris climate agreement — eight years ago.
When he did the same thing this week, they ignored it.
The differences between 2017 and now are stark: Heat-trapping emissions continue to rise globally, and disasters are accelerating.That comes as the tech industry’s energy needs have grown in part because of power-hungry data centers related to artificial intelligence and other technologies. One result is a closer connection between a president who champions fossil fuels and executives in Silicon Valley who appear less willing to question his move to abandon the global climate pact.
“Optimistic and celebrating,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said minutes after Trump ordered the nation’s exit from the Paris Agreement.
Zuckerberg’s post — while not a direct response to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris deal — included an American flag emoji and a grinning photo of him with his wife Priscilla Chan in black-tie and formal attire. They were preparing to co-host an inaugural ball for Trump, who last year threatened to jail the Meta CEO.
The heads of Apple, Microsoft and Google, meanwhile, offered “congratulations” to the president and reportedly donated millions of dollars to his inaugural committee.
“Eight years ago many tech leaders rightly condemned Trump’s withdrawal from Paris,” said Bill Weihl, Facebook’s former director of sustainability who later founded the environmental advocacy group ClimateVoice. “Their silence now is cowardly, complicit in reinforcing the status quo fossil fuel economy, and shows that they care more about their own profits than the American people.”
Apple, Google and Meta didn’t respond to requests for comment. Microsoft declined to provide a response.
“Silicon Valley is embracing President Trump because they have been failed by the Democrats’ weak and incompetent leadership for the last four years,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement. “American energy is being unleashed.”
The president has linked his campaign pledge to promote oil and gas development with a desire — shared by many in Silicon Valley — to “win the A.I. arms race with China (and others),” as Trump put it when selecting former North Dakota Gov. Doug Bergum to lead the Interior Department and a planned National Energy Council. Trump sees the production of additional fossil fuels as key to achieving the country’s AI aims. (Former President Joe Biden also prioritized the development of artificial intelligence but sought to power the technology with new renewable energy installations.)
Trump has already recruited OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to spearhead a $500 billion AI and data center megaproject known as Stargate. The energy sources for the initiative haven’t been announced.
“It is clear that everyone’s afraid to offend the president,” said David Victor, professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California, San Diego, who spoke with POLITICO’s E&E News from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Logically, it’s because they’re worried about retaliation, and they’re worried about keeping whatever favors they think they can get from government.”
The tech industry’s new approach to Trump was led by Elon Musk, the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla and another one-time critic of the president’s climate policy. He was joined by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who during the Biden administration committed $10 billion of his personal fortune to launch an eponymous environmental group. Both billionaires attended Trump’s second inauguration, along with Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. Amazon spokesperson August Green said the online retailer remains committed to reaching net-zero carbon emissions across its globally operations by 2040.
Tech and Trump, no longer on the rocks
Trump has long been skeptical of international institutions and deals. He found the United Nations-brokered Paris Agreement particularly irksome.
Trump initially deliberated over leaving the climate pact from the outset of his first term, and several of his close advisers and Cabinet members argued against it. They reasoned that it would be better to have influence over the rules governing emissions and clean energy than to be outside the process.
Cook, the Apple CEO, privately lobbied Trump to uphold the deal. Publicly, his company signed onto an open letter — along with Google, Microsoft and Facebook — that urged the president to stay in the 2015 Paris pact.
Trump didn’t.
The reaction from Silicon Valley following his June 1, 2017, announcement that he was leaving was quick and critical. Musk quit the White House’s business councils, and other tech CEOs took to social media to criticize the decision.
“Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement is bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and it puts our children’s future at risk,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook at the time. Cook tweeted that Trump’s move was “wrong for our planet.” Pichai said he was “disappointed with today’s decision.” Microsoft’s Satya Nadella added that “climate change is an urgent issue that demands global action.”
They all joined a coalition in 2017 that eventually became America Is All In, a group of leaders from states, cities, businesses and beyond that has vowed to help the United States achieve its promised emissions reductions. Facebook and Microsoft even submitted climate action plans that outlined their proposals for reducing carbon emissions.
In 2020, Microsoft shocked corporate America when it made a “carbon negative” commitment for the end of the decade, promising to remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it emits. Apple, Google and Facebook all followed with more modest carbon neutrality pledges for 2030.
The next year, Joe Biden became president and immediately rejoined the Paris Agreement, making climate action a pillar of his administration. When the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, providing hundreds of billions of dollars for climate and clean energy projects, many tech companies redoubled their efforts to decarbonize.
At the same time, the giants of Silicon Valley were pouring billions of dollars into developing AI applications — and the data centers and energy infrastructure needed to run them. Microsoft’s emissions have jumped 29 percent since the company announced its carbon negative pledge in 2020. Google’s emissions have soared by 67 percent over the same period.
“As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute, and the emissions associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment,” Google said in its 2024 environmental report.
Silicon Valley sours on Biden
While many technology firms welcomed Biden’s climate policy, they sharply differed with him on other issues that are central to their profitability. The Biden administration took a hard line against tech consolidation, opening antitrust cases against Google and probing Microsoft and the chipmaker Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company.
Biden also sided with labor in a high-profile unionization drive at Amazon and criticized the company and its founder for not paying more in taxes amid a spike in inflation. Bezos responded by accusing the White House of “misdirection.”
The Biden administration publicly sparred with Musk as well, who eventually became the biggest financial supporter of Trump’s campaign, despite their differences on climate policy.
When Trump won back the White House, Bezos and a steady stream of other tech executives flew to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to meet with the Republican leader, who rejects the basic tenets of climate science.
Analysts and advocates expect the companies to continue pursuing their decarbonization commitments in the second Trump era, albeit with less vigor and fanfare.
“Investors and companies understand that the demand for energy is changing, and that diversified businesses are poised to be the energy companies of the future,” said Kirsten Spalding, vice president of the investor network at Ceres, a group of institutional investors advocating for climate action.
She doesn’t put too much weight on the withdrawal from Paris, arguing that what happens on the ground is what matters: “It’s like putting a billboard up, but it doesn’t actually change the work,” Spalding said.
Victor, the University of California professor, said there is a disconnect between what’s happening in Silicon Valley and Davos, the exclusive Swiss conference featuring many of the world’s biggest corporations.
Executives who attended the conference this week talked up corporate efforts to deploy carbon capture technology and invest in battery storage and solar.
Meanwhile, “their bosses are kissing the ring,” Victor said.
Trump, in his own speech to the Davos crowd Thursday, told them how he would unleash America’s “liquid gold” and build new fossil fuel-fired power plants to run data centers.
Then he took questions from corporate heavyweights. No one asked about climate change.
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