Essay by Eric Worrall
“… If Cook were to publish an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal pointing out that climate has become a business risk … it would change the corporate game. …”
It’s time for Apple to wield its influence on climate policy
Instead of driving change at a societal level, it’s exclusively focused on its own impacts.
By Auden Schendler, Bill Weihl August 14, 2025
Key Takeaways:
- Like many tech companies, instead of driving change at the societal level, Apple has almost exclusively focused climate efforts on its own impacts.
- But by using power, lobbying force, political influence and more, the company could change the corporate climate game.
- With climate deniers running federal divisions, in the absence of government, corporations are one of the most powerful agents of change.
The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.
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In its 2024 Environmental Progress Report Apple noted, “We owe it to our global community to rise to the challenge of climate change with all the innovation, empathy and commitment we can muster.”
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But noble as these operational efforts are, they’re a category error — like turning the stove off as a way to stop a house fire.
…Breaking a taboo
If Cook were to publish an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal pointing out that climate has become a business risk and that federal regulation (not just incentive-based legislation) is essential, it would change the corporate game.
Because Apple is so admired, the move would galvanize other business leaders and silence elected officials tipping back into climate denial. Cook could single-handedly break the taboo against business advocating for regulation. Next, he could charge his company with reaching out to customers, asking for their help to pressure elected officials. (Most consumers care about climate change.)
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The Trump administration has flipped the calendar back more than 20 years, to an era when people didn’t even believe the planet was warming. With climate deniers running all federal divisions, and agencies either gutted or weaponized in support of fossil fuel expansion, we have limited tools in the climate fight. In the absence of government, corporations are one of the most powerful agents of change. And one of the most effective tools they have is their influence.
Read more: https://trellis.net/article/apple-could-be-a-major-force-in-limiting-climate-change-why-isnt-it/
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Authors Auden Schendler and Bill Weihl obviously didn’t get the memo about Apple’s growing AI desperation, because Apple may be in a lot of trouble on the AI front – they are late joiners to a race where there is only one first prize.
Tim Cook Defends Apple’s AI Delay: ‘We’ve Rarely Been First’
Friday August 1, 2025 3:07 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke to employees at an all-hands meeting today, providing some insight into Apple’s work on AI. According to Bloomberg, Cook said that AI is going to be bigger than smartphones and the internet, and that it’s a priority for the company.
“Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab. We will make the investment to do it,” Cook told employees.
Cook pointed out that Apple has dominated several markets even when the company wasn’t first to the technology. “We’ve rarely been first. There was a PC before the Mac; there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod,” Cook said, suggesting that Apple will play a major role in transforming AI in the future.
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Read more: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/01/tim-cook-apple-all-hands-meeting-ai/
AI is the big game changer which has upended sincere tech giant pledges to prioritise Net Zero.
The few greens I have personal contact with are struggling to adjust to the energy guzzling AI future. They hate AI – but they feel helpless to stop it, and kind of wish it would all go away.
But all the kids are using AI powered apps and games, so Gen Alpha is lost to any incarnation of the green movement which threatens to take away their toys.
Tech companies are also backpedaling, ditching climate pledges completely, or issuing obviously weak policy statements, as external pressure from investors and internal pressure from elite software teams who fear becoming obsolete if they aren’t building AI systems overwhelms whatever green conscience they once thought they championed.
Judgement day is inevitable – for the climate movement. AI and fossil fuel will dominate the foreseeable future. The pathetic whining of greens begging companies like Apple to stand up for the values they once claimed were central to their corporate ethos are the death rattles of a failed green virtue signalling movement, which only a decade ago threatened to ruin Western civilisation.
“The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.”
But when any media regularly publishes trash- it has to take some responsibility.
Mrs Trellis awards prizes for sheer audacity
https://www.mrs-trellis.co.uk/
“Because Apple is so admired, the move would galvanize other business leaders and silence elected officials tipping back into climate denial.”
Oh sure, we’ll all just bow to Mr. Cook and his company. Especially public officials in the Trump administration. They’ll cower. 🙂
The only people Apple has influence with, are those already lost to reality.
Those would be people who have bought Apple products?
A lot of the Apple fans are not a fan of Tim Cook.
Trump is already forcing/enticing Apple back to the USA for manufacturing, using a little thing called tariffs.
And would someone please explain what “climate denial” is.
Something like telling your kids that the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy don’t really exist ?
we’ll all just bow to Mr. Cook and his company
Weren’t a bunch of people crying just a couple weeks ago that Cook was “bowing to Trump”? (or taking the knee or kissing the ring or some such)
“we have limited tools in the climate fight”
Yup, we must feel sorry for them- they’re now the underdog. They only have most of the media, many wealthy states and nations, and virtually all of academia. /s
Calling themselves “limited” and “tools” is rather inciteful of them.
I believe you meant insightful. Inciteful is to make others angry.
Several degrees of warming since 1850 has been beneficial overall to humans, plants, and animals, and not at all catastrophic.
CO2 is not a pollutant, but a trace gas necessary for plant life and thus all life. The idea that going from about 3 molecules of CO2 in every 10,000 in the atmosphere to a bit over 4 is catastrophic, deserves extreme skepticism and not blind unthinking acceptance. Further it is not at all proven whether more CO2 causes more warming, or more warming causes more CO2.
The climate is always changing. The idea that government can stop it from changing by imposing more control and higher taxes, is a sort of King Canute delusion – although I think the king was in fact showing his sycophants how powerless he really was against Nature.
“Several degrees of warming since 1850….”
Say what !! ??
A degree or 2 at most.
““We’ve rarely been first.”
True, they stole the user interface from Zerox.
Xerox
Right, I stand corrected. But that’s a good example of crazy spelling in the English language. Try pronouncing the X at the beginning.
They have never been first at anything. They ‘pretend’ to have invented everything by letting their fans assume they did. All of the items mentioned, for example.
Jobs toured Xerox’s PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) and immediately recognized the value of what they had developed, which is more than you can say for Xerox management. Apple promptly paid Xerox $1MM USD to license the technology. Is that what you mean by “stole”?
Apple took what they licensed from Xerox and built upon it. When Microsoft came out with Windows to counter Apple’s GUI, Apple sued. Although Apple failed in its attempts to sue Microsoft over the GUI IP, it seems unlikely that their lawsuit was based on theft.
Jobs toured Xerox’s PARC
I was just watching that story last night. One of the commentators explicitly addressed the “Jobs stole it” issue. Xerox could have done it, but the executives got hung up on “paperless” – the idea was a threat to their core business so they wanted nothing to do with it.
Although my understanding was that Jobs paid for the access in advance. Otherwise matches what you said. Either way, Xerox actually made a lot of money from the deal due to the Apple stock. No theft.
Virtue signaling is always easy until it isn’t. All the recent green whining indicates that we are now approaching the end of climate alarmism as reality bites.
The solution to plastic waste is incineration using waste to energy plants. However, PVC plastics produce HCl when burned. Scrubbers take out the HCl.
Only clear plastics such as PETE and PP can recycled. A yellow French’s mustard dispenser can not be recycled. How much plastics are used by shampoo bottles? Lots.
What’s the economic feasibility of converting plastics to fuel or oil … is it viable ???
Yes, I think your point #2 is probably the key one. The climate movement seems to have fallen into the Alinksy trap: they have got committed to advocating particular policies and have (worse still) got them at lease partly implemented.
Its then become clear that moving the world to wind and solar is not going to happen and would have no effect on climate if it did. Its not logical that the failure of renewables should lead to skepticism or indifference about the supposed climate crisis, but the two have got so closely linked in advocacy that its the way it is in practical politics. General belief in a crisis is not going to survive the failure and abandonment of renewables.
As I suggested, drawing on ‘When Prophecy Fails’, the result will be increased fanaticism among the die hard believers, but growing indifference and skepticism among the general public.
Like many tech companies, instead of doing exactly what we tell them at the societal level, Apple has almost exclusively focused on its business.
There seems to be a lot of that about.
Yep, that’s called “business”…it happens anywhere someone tries to make a buck.
is lack of electricity a business risk?
“Because
AppleAnheuser Busch is so admired, the move would galvanize other business leaders and silence elected officials…”There. How did it that sort of wishful thinking work out for the Budweiser brand?
Trying to figure out when I last used an Apple product.. 30 years maybe ??
Mac IIe would be the last Mac computer I used.
I bought a 2nd hand Mac laptop only because the grandkids only had access to a Mac for us to message back & forth.
But mainly, I ran it on the Windows operating system.
I object to Apple’s self-appointed “proprietary command” over which open-source apps could / could not be installed on their boxes & devices.
The biggest reason why early DOS systems were unstable was because Microsoft published the OS interface and allowed anyone who wanted to, to write programs for the platform.
If you stuck to programs from the major players, MS-DOS was as stable as Apple.
Programs from the small operators was where all the fun was, but you just had to be wary.
Nope, the Gorical is no longer on the Board. And Obama’s strategist may have moved on from the VP of climate change position after her WH gig. We still deserve reparations payments for all the policy damage they did and all the Solyndra scams they perpetrated.
Apple is busy extracting itself from China. It may need to offer THC with each iPhone purchase to keep up with Asian innovation.
Let’s recall just how many millions Apple and others in Silicon Valley poured into the Obama fundraiser events compared to actual climate change spending.
Apple can start with their China operations. First off publish the aforementioned Op-Ed in the People’s Daily newspaper. Preferable in person.
Help us, Obi Wan KenApple. You’re our only hope.
LOL 🙂
Why do these guys always figure it is up to someone else to fulfill their pipe dreams? If they were capable of critical thinking or even clear thinking they would realize their pipe dream sucks.
Because it’s the leftist way, Bob.
“Oh please, somebody in authority do something to make me not be frightened any more about this bad thing that I fear might happen sometime”.
You answered it yourself. Those who could and did so are not in that crowd. Therefore, it consists of those who can’t or won’t.
Wait for the next administration to try and coerce and strong arm. It happens all the time in Chicago where they inform businesses how much they owe in political donations.
When is someone with a lot of influence going to call Apple out on their “green” hypocrisy? If Apple was a “green” company they wouldn’t glue their devices shut. They would have easily replaceable batteries. They would insist upon making everything they manufacture easy to repair. They would have a way to unlock and wipe their devices without needing the original purchaser to do it.
Chromebooks have the “power wash” function to wipe everything and restore it to fresh out of the box. If yours gets stolen or lost, at least someone can still use it. If someone pawns a Chromebook then never pays if off, the pawnshop can wipe it to sell it.
Apple devices become mostly useless trash when those things happen. All they’re good for is taking apart to salvage whatever pieces Apple hasn’t serialized and locked to the device they were originally installed in. They’ve even done this with the removable storage modules on the “cheesgrater” Mac Pro tower. Does Apple claim “recycling” of the huge amounts of aluminum they carve out of parts like the shells of “unibody” laptops and the fancy front panel of their Mac Pro tower? “Look at how much aluminum we recycle!”. Wouldn’t have to recycle so much if you used a sane manufacturing process for such parts, like every other computer manufacturer on Earth.
Apple has become the most “We hate our customers, but they’ll take whatever junk we offer for sale, and they’ll eat it up!” company that has ever existed.
Apple got fabulously roasted by Ricky Gervais at the 2020 Golden Globes.
Ricky Gervais – Golden Globes 2020 (Uncensored, HD)
See 07:00 for the Apple segment.