The day after President Donald Trump won back the White House, the leaders of a climate action coalition backed by Apple and hundreds of other corporate giants put out defiant statement vowing to “fight for the future Americans demand and deserve.”
The message from the America Is All In coalition last November was a rebuke of Trump, who had campaigned on undoing the Biden administration’s historic efforts to reduce U.S. reliance on oil, gas and coal.
But as Trump’s second administration started to take shape in the weeks after the election — with conservative firebrands picked to lead agencies like the Department of Justice and the Office of Management and Budget — the tone softened from “America Is All In,” and its top corporate supporters stepped back from the group.
None of the coalition’s leading technology, retail or industrial companies signed the group’s open letter in December reaffirming its commitment to the Paris Agreement, the international climate pledge the coalition was created to defend. The nonsigners included Walmart, Siemens and Apple, the world’s most valuable company, whose policy chief Lisa Jackson was co-chair of the coalition at the time. She stepped down as chair in January, the same month that Apple CEO Tim Cook attended Trump’s inauguration.
Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of policy, stepped down from one of the top strategy positions at the America is All In climate coalition in January. | Lisa Leutner/AP
Corporate leaders’ retreat from public climate advocacy doesn’t mean companies have abandoned their environmental goals, experts said, but top executives are afraid to talk about those targets in a conservative-dominated Washington. Trump has once again moved to exit the Paris Agreement, eviscerated dozens of climate programs, fired thousands of federal workers and rooted out diversity initiatives.
“People are pretty freaked out,” said Kaya Axelsson, an American research fellow at the United Kingdom’s University of Oxford, where she works with executives and regulators on climate targets. “Being loud and proud might be risky for companies right now.”
America Is All In didn’t answer questions about its disengaged corporate membership.
“The benefits of clean energy investments are undeniable for American communities and businesses, and America Is All In is determined to make sure they continue,” Elizabeth Lien, the coalition’s program director, said in an email. “We’re making sure the U.S. stays all in on a clean energy future.”
Apple noted that Jackson and the company remain active in the coalition.
“Lisa is proud to continue her leadership with America Is All In as part of the Leaders Circle,” Apple spokesperson Sean Redding said in a one-line statement.
Walmart and Siemens didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Who is still in?
Originally known as We Are Still In, the coalition launched in June 2017 after Trump first announced he was pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, the international deal involving nearly 200 nations that seeks to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
The coalition launched by bringing together more than 1,000 leaders of U.S. states, cities, businesses and universities who declared to the global community that “we are still in” the Paris Agreement and would continue to reduce the nation’s emissions of planet-warming gases.
It created an online platform where members could outline actions they were taking to contribute to the Paris goals during Trump’s first term. Facebook and Microsoft were among the big businesses that offered submissions. It also hosted events at global climate talks and partnered with another initiative called America’s Pledge to showcase that climate progress was possible without federal leadership.
When former President Joe Biden took office in 2021 and rejoined the Paris pact, the coalition rebranded as “America Is All In,” a nod to the government’s renewed fight against global warming. It continued to advocate for ambitious climate targets and climate-focused legislation.
Members join America Is All In by filling out an online form and committing to uphold the goals of the Paris Agreement. The coalition holds regular webinars, strategy sessions and trainings, and hosts events during international climate gatherings. It also issues statements supporting climate action that members have the option to sign on to.
It now claims to include over 5,000 members, more than half of which are from the business community. The vast majority of members have been with the coalition since signing the initial declaration in 2017. More than 90 percent of them are small- and medium-size businesses, with over 200 large businesses included.
Yet corporate giants like Apple and Walmart have an outsize influence on the coalition — and the planet — due to their lobbying muscle, market power and enormous emissions.
America Is All In remains a “big-tent movement,” said Lien, who is also senior director for federal climate policy at the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental group. The coalition is an initiative of WWF and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
She noted that dozens of companies including major industrial firms like Siemens, Constellation Energy and Ford visited the Capitol last week for an annual lobbying push backed by America Is All In. This time, they urged lawmakers to maintain the federal tax credits under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
But Microsoft and several other corporate giants skipped the lobbying event, after participating in 2024.
Coalition touted to investors
Apple and other big technology firms, whose fortunes and priorities drive international markets and shape Washington policy, have previously highlighted their work with America Is All In for investors — but now have stepped back.
“When it comes to taking action on environmental challenges, collective action matters. Which is why we’re also making public commitments alongside our partners to signal the kind of change we are working to create,” Apple said in a 2022 report on its green initiatives. “This includes our role as a signatory to America Is All In.”
Apple mentioned the coalition again in its 2023 environmental report and last year noted that Jackson, who was former President Barack Obama’s first EPA administrator, had been appointed as co-chair of the group where she steered the group’s strategy. She is currently a member of its 16-person leadership committee, a role that involves serving “as ambassadors for this coalition,” according to the America Is All In website.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, told investors last year that the coalition “has provided an overarching structure for the broad and diverse collective of American institutions that remain committed to acting on climate.” In 2023, the social media company disclosed that it had “a dedicated manager for external engagement, who owns and maintains relationships with federal policy-influencing coalitions such as America Is All In.”
In recent years, sustainability reports from Microsoft and Amazon have also highlighted the tech companies’ involvement with the coalition.
Representatives from Microsoft, Google and Amazon spoke at the America Is All In pavilion at the United Nations’ COP29 climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, shortly after Trump’s win.
Now Apple, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have fallen silent as the president and his Republican allies in Congress prepare to gut subsidies for electric transmission, utility-scale battery storage and other climate spending programs that many Silicon Valley leaders had previously argued were necessary to zero out their emissions of carbon dioxide. Instead of forcefully speaking out — as they did during the first Trump term and much of the Biden era — all four companies or their CEOs have acknowledged donating at least $1 million to the president’s inauguration fund.
Amazon didn’t respond to a list of questions about its involvement with the coalition. Meta and Microsoft declined to comment.
In a February blog post by Melanie Nakagawa, Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, the company reiterated its commitment to “advocate for the expansion of clean energy solutions,” adding that Microsoft would continue to collaborate with “industry peers, partners, and with policymakers to maximize our impact in pursuit of our shared goals.”
‘They’re going to face blowback’
Environmentally minded firms that are seen as altering their corporate strategy to appease Trump run the risk of angering potential customers, according to David Victor, a professor of innovation at the University of California, San Diego, School of Global Policy and Strategy.
“Many of the companies that appear to be walking back from climate commitments and walking back from all kinds of other things that they said before — about social engagement, about truth and so on — they’re going to face blowback from their communities and from their employees,” Victor predicted. “It’s all happened so quickly they haven’t begun to really see the force of that blowback.”
One member of America Is All In has begun to feel the heat: Tesla. Elon Musk, the electric-vehicle maker’s billionaire CEO, spent at least $288 million to help elect Trump and other Republicans during the 2024 elections. Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency are leading the president’s blitzkrieg on federal climate programs.
As a result, Tesla vehicles and dealerships have become targets for protesters who are angry at the way Musk has taken a chain saw to the federal workforce and put public services at risk. The protests — combined with sharply declining sales in Europe, California and other key markets — have caused Telsa’s valuation to shrink by around 40 percent since the beginning of 2025.
Trump on Monday came to the defense of Musk, whose fortune is mainly based on his Tesla holdings, and promised to buy one of the company’s EVs.
Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Even if Trump hadn’t won back the White House, many tech giants were already offtrack to meet their climate goals due to the surge in energy and computing capacity needed to run new artificial intelligence programs, according to Victor of UC San Diego. Those emission-reduction targets will now be harder to hit, with Musk and many Republicans targeting tax credits that sought to limit climate change.
“What they have to do is articulate a vision of climate action that is economically sensible,” Victor said of the Silicon Valley leaders. “In this environment of fear and chaos, it’s really hard for them to articulate that view because it’s going to change from week to week.”
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