Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA), has decided to quit President Donald Trump’s high-powered business advisory panel to protect Trump’s announcement to pull out of the Paris climate accord.
“Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world,” Musk said on Twitter.
Musk, who is also CEO of SpaceX, was part of Trump’s economic advisory board and Manufacturing Jobs Initiative.
The president’s Strategic and Policy Forum was established in December 2016. The forum includes high-powered executives who are supposed to “meet with the president frequently to share their specific experience and knowledge as the president implements his plan to bring back jobs and Make America Great Again.”
Other business executives – including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, General Electric Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai – also expressed disappointment with 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,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post.
“For our part, we’ve committed that every new data center we build will be powered by 100% renewable energy. Stopping climate change is something we can only do as a global community, and we have to act together before it’s too late,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Paris Climate Deal
The Paris Agreement, signed by more than 190 nations in December 2016, is designed to put the world on track to avoid climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2°C.
The agreement brings all nations into a common cause to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects, with enhanced support to assist developing countries to do so.
The deal’s main aim is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
In addition, the agreement aims to strengthen the ability of countries to deal with the impacts of climate change.
