Shifting political headwinds and escalating energy demands are shining a spotlight on Big Tech’s backpedaling on climate commitments. Companies like Meta and Microsoft, who were once vocal about their clean energy goals, are now pivoting towards dirty fossil fuels, pointing to deepened corporate complicity in an era of silence on climate action. Tech titans such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have lined up to buy access to the new administration and have remained largely silent in the face of the new administration’s attacks on clean energy.
This is a sharp pivot from Trump 1.0 when these companies overwhelmingly spoke up against the decision to leave the Paris Climate Agreement. This time: crickets.
A recent survey among U.S. adults indicates growing unpopularity for figures like Mark Zuckerberg, coinciding with deeply concerning trends in corporate behavior that appears to support an increasingly unlawful and autocratic federal administration. While Zuckerberg assures employees that the company is “holding true to its values,” he has also made it clear that a “productive partnership with the U.S. government” is a priority amid dramatic policy shifts. In recent weeks, Meta has ditched its fact-checking program; rolled back hate speech protections; cut back diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and is full steam ahead with a $10 billion, 4 million-square-feet natural gas-powered data center in Louisiana that fuels pollution and accelerates fossil fuel reliance.
Even though nearly 70% of the world’s 500 largest companies have a public climate commitment, the world’s largest tech companies, once leaders in the corporate climate commitment space, are abandoning their emissions targets. In light of this alarming about-face, tech workers should ask themselves if they support their company’s currying favor with a billionaire-led agenda that undermines environmental protections, rolls back climate rules, scrubs scientific databases and clean energy funding, and accelerates the production of climate change disinformation.
If not in support of these trends, employees should actively use their influence to engage coworkers and press their leaders for responsive action. Some may decide that they can no longer be complicit in their employer’s backtracking on climate action, and will choose to leave—but we believe there is still opportunity to change companies from within.
In the past, Silicon Valley employees have engaged a number of tools to exercise internal advocacy muscles: employee walkouts, protests, open letters, petitions. And those tactics sparked change. More recently, employees can follow the example of internal employee advocates such as those in Microsoft’s Sustainability Connected Community who have been elevating climate policy as a top company priority. Their advocacy led to Microsoft’s first Sustainability Policy Alignment Report last year focused on U.S. trade associations, spotlighting the company’s misalignment with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which consistently works to block climate policy progress). As a result, Microsoft committed to addressing lobbying misalignment, stating “we will redouble efforts to engage with the trade association to drive closer alignment in their advocacy for a more sustainable future.”
Employees have organized events and educational webinars to engage coworkers and raise awareness, invited meetings with company leaders, sent emails to decision makers, asked questions at town hall meetings, and posted calls to action and engagement opportunities on internal message boards.
This year, employees across companies such as Alphabet, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Pinterest, and Salesforce are also exchanging ideas and sharing best practices in order to amplify positive action.
For those who choose to leave their company, advocacy might look like former tech employees who have launched a new Enabled Emissions Campaign, a global effort to curb the use of advanced technology for increased fossil fuel production. Those with inside knowledge of how AI is being developed might choose to speak up on how “We’re Wrong About AI,” as Will Alpine, a former Microsoft employee who built tech behind ChatGPT, did last month.
Over these next four years, it will be essential to hold the line on climate action and clean energy deployment—and while employees should actively work for change, corporate leadership and investors must ultimately take responsibility and step up. Employees, however, have a critical role to play and should hold companies accountable when they don’t. Sustainability professionals should especially be empowered to provide reasoned and diplomatic calls to action that are in line with what science tells us about planetary boundaries. If you’re a sustainability professional, now is the time to publicly commit to advocating for climate policy, as more than 1,000 have done by signing the LEAD Statement.
Big Tech leaders have previously acknowledged the climate crisis and been major buyers of renewable energy. With the growth of AI data centers, they should be advocating for clean energy rather than doubling down on continued dirty fossil fuel dependency.
Leaders and employees must leverage their influence by continuing to prioritize clean energy action and supporting the development of the clean energy infrastructure. This includes supporting the maintenance of federal clean energy tax credits, upholding federal pollution and energy efficiency standards, prioritizing energy efficient and clean energy powered AI, and elevating climate-related financial risk as a serious and material risk to businesses and communities, especially the role of extreme weather events.
There has never been a more important time to speak up. The decisions made by corporations today will have a profound and lasting impact on our environment, our society, and our future. There is no time to wait.
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