Over the last decade or so, a group of America’s wealthiest individuals, largely from the tech industry, became some of the world’s biggest climate champions, pledging billions in highly public campaigns.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, committed $10 billion of his own money in 2020 to start the Bezos Earth Fund, a charity focused on climate and nature issues.
Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, has put more than $1 billion toward a campaign to close coal plants and block petrochemical plants.
Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder, poured billions of his fortune into Breakthrough Energy, an umbrella organization working to address climate change.
Laurene Powell Jobs created a foundation to promote climate solutions and said it would spend $3.5 billion. Marc Benioff, the co-founder of Salesforce, spun up an initiative to plant a trillion trees.
And big tech companies, from Google to Meta to Amazon, made ambitious pledges to reduce emissions and support clean energy.
But over the past few weeks, many of these voices have gone quiet as President Trump has slashed environmental protections, promoted planet-warming fossil fuels and taken steps to dismantle American climate policy.
On his first day in office, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord, set in motion plans to open Alaskan wilderness to drilling and mining, halted federal approvals for new wind farms, told federal agencies to stop subsidizing electric vehicles, and paused approvals for renewable energy projects on public lands. Since then, his assault on climate initiatives promoted by the Biden administration has continued.
With the exception of Bloomberg, none of the leaders, including Bezos, Gates, Powell Jobs and Benioff, have made statements opposing the Trump administration’s actions. Silicon Valley’s major tech companies that have committed to reducing their emissions have also been silent.
None of the executives or companies mentioned responded to requests for comment for this article.
The silence from this slice of the billionaire and technology world was in line with the deferential posture of much of the rest of corporate America.
Instead of loudly and vociferously opposing Trump, as was often the case during his first term in office, many business leaders across industries have opted to court the president, or at least remain silent as he has upended not just climate policy, but foreign policy and the federal bureaucracy as well. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google were among the companies that donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee.
“Companies and business leaders are going to find that they need to decide what their red lines are,” said Aron Cramer, chief executive of BSR, a group that promotes corporate sustainability efforts. “I’m not sure they’re doing that right now.”
A reversal from Trump’s first term
The muted response marks an about face for these billionaires.
In 2017, when Trump withdrew from the Paris accord for the first time, many tech moguls spoke out against 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,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Facebook.
Tim Cook, the Apple chief executive, wrote on Twitter in 2017 that the “decision to withdraw from the #ParisAgreeement was wrong for our planet.”
And Sundar Pichai, the Google chief executive, wrote on Twitter that he was “disappointed” with the decision to withdraw.
Even Elon Musk opposed the move. “Climate change is real,” he wrote on Twitter in 2017. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”
This time around, Zuckerberg, Cook, Pichai and Bezos attended Trump’s inauguration. Musk is working closely with Trump to slash the federal work force, and Trump has put the Environmental Protection Agency in his cross hairs.
In the days before Trump was sworn in for his second term, Gates dined with the then president-elect at Mar-a-Lago and declared himself “impressed” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Also before the inauguration, Powell Jobs held a “Demo Day” event showcasing some of her charitable endeavors, but steered clear of politics.
It is unclear what, if anything, will cause executives and companies to speak out. During the first Trump administration, there were episodic flare-ups as corporate leaders reacted to actions on immigration, climate and white nationalism.
This time, Cramer of BSR said, Trump is moving much faster and the stakes are much higher.
“Events are moving so quickly and so unpredictably with such volatility that I don’t think the strategy of staying quiet is going to be of lasting benefit,” he said.
‘What you are for’
None of the billionaire-funded foundations or tech companies I reached out to said they were changing their plans to fight climate change because of Trump. All said they remain committed to reducing their own emissions and supporting climate solutions.
In January, Bloomberg said his charity would step in to help fund the United Nations climate body following the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement.
“The American people remain determined to continue the fight against the devastating effects of climate change,” he said in a statement, lamenting what he called “a period of federal inaction.”
The muted response from some of the companies that had previously spoken out on climate issues raises the question of how the rest of the corporate world will respond as Trump’s assault on Biden’s climate policies continues, and possibly begins to take an economic toll in red states.
Cramer said he expected to see major corporations champion projects they cared about, while steering clear of criticizing the president.
“It needs to be about what you are for, not who you are against,” he said. “Those are two different things.”
Trump is freezing money for clean energy. Red states have the most to lose.
In less than three weeks, President Trump has thrown the U.S. clean energy industry into chaos, with much of the economic damage hitting Republican states and districts. The Trump administration has frozen federal grants and issued executive orders that have halted federal approvals for wind and solar projects.
Trump and Republicans in Congress are also working to repeal the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Roughly 80 percent of the private company investments from that bill are in Republican congressional districts, where they are creating a once-in-a-generation manufacturing boom.
The uncertainty is delaying projects and halting investments in areas that voted for Trump, including:
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In Montana, a biofuels plant did not receive on time a $782 million payment it was owed, the first part of a $1.67 billion federal loan guarantee.
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In Georgia, $1 billion in projects to modernize the power grid are on hold.
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In Nevada, a half-dozen large solar projects on federal lands are caught in a permitting freeze.
— Lisa Friedman, Brad Plumer and Harry Stevens
NOAA is told to make list of climate-related grants, setting off fears
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s leading climate science agencies, has been ordered to identify grants related to global warming and other topics targeted by President Trump’s executive orders, raising fears that those grants are at risk of being canceled.
The instructions were issued on Thursday at the direction of the Commerce Department, which includes NOAA, according to a copy of the document viewed by The New York Times. NOAA staff members were given a list of all “active financial assistant awards” at NOAA and told to identify which of those grants could be “potentially impacted” by one of Trump’s orders. — Christopher Flavelle, Austyn Gaffney and Raymond Zhong
More climate news:
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Most nations have missed the deadline to file what the U.N. says are “among the most important policy documents governments will produce this century,” The Associated Press reports.
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After falling by more than a third in 2023, deforestation last year in Colombia may fall to some of the lowest levels in more than two decades, Reuters reports.
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Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary, said on Sunday that she would recommend to President Trump that he “get rid of FEMA the way it exists today,” per The Washington Post.
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