Of all of the executives who have cozied up to President Donald Trump over the past two months, Mark Zuckerberg has appeared perhaps the most eager.In the weeks before Trump took power, the Meta CEO scrambled to ditch his company’s fact-checking program, rolled back hate speech protections, and took an ax to Meta’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (reportedly with the blessing of Trump’s current deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor Stephen Miller). The billionaire founder has named Joel Kaplan, a former energy executive and a prominent Republican, to the role of vice president of global public policy and, on the night of Trump’s inauguration, Zuckerberg — who President Trump once said could spend “life in prison” — wrote on Instagram that he was “optimistic and celebrating.” Zuckerberg has since tried to assure Meta’s left-leaning employees that the company is holding true to its values, but in an all-hands meeting in January, he stated plainly, “We now have an opportunity to have a productive partnership with the United States government, and we’re going to take that.”The question now is just where Meta’s climate goals will fit in this partnership. Since taking office, President Trump has used executive orders to pause tens of billions of dollars in environmental and energy spending and stop all new wind energy permits from going forward. He has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and declared a “national energy emergency” designed to speed up approvals for energy projects — that is, with the exception of renewable energy projects. The courts will ultimately decide the fate of these orders. But as Zuckerberg strains to stay in the new president’s good graces, the White House’s fossil fuel boosterism could complicate Meta’s climate commitments. That’s particularly true given that those commitments were already on shaky ground in the midst of the energy-sucking boom in artificial intelligence.While Zuckerberg has never made climate action his primary cause, in a speech to Harvard graduates in 2017, he did call on the class to join in “stopping climate change before we destroy the planet.” And Meta has worked hard to do its part. Since 2020, the company has achieved net zero emissions throughout its operations, thanks to a combination of renewable energy credits, carbon removal investments, and the direct use of solar and wind energy to reduce its emissions. By 2023, it had the largest renewable energy portfolio of any corporate buyer in the country, and just last year, it struck what it said was a “first-of-its-kind” partnership to power its data centers with geothermal energy. But beyond accounting for its operational emissions, the company has also committed to achieving net zero emissions throughout its value chain, from the copper wires spiraling through these gargantuan data centers to the construction materials used to build them.That’s a far more challenging goal,
Mer. Feb 12th, 2025
