• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, June 2, 2017

Many major U.S. business leaders joined world leaders in bemoaning the folly of President Donald Trump’s announcement yesterday that the U.S. is “getting out” from the Paris Agreement on climate change. 

“The backlash from leaders of large U.S. corporations contrasts with Trump's statements saying the agreement's restrictions would hurt American jobs and businesses,” report Ben Adler and Rebecca Leber for ABC News. 

Stressing “climate change is real,” the CEOs tended to assert that they would continue to honor the precepts of the accord notwithstanding the government’s position.

“Industry must now lead and not depend on government,” tweeted General Electric chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt.

“Trump said he wanted to negotiate a better deal for the United States, and the administration said he had placed calls to the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Canada to personally explain his decision,” Michael D. Shear reports for the New York Times. “…But within minutes of the president’s remarks, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy issued a joint statement saying that the Paris climate accord was ‘irreversible’ and could not be renegotiated.”

Disney CEO Robert Iger and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, meanwhile, announced that they would quit the President’s business advisory over the decision.

The withdrawal, announced with Trumpian fanfare on the White House lawn after much advance drama, did serve to steal media time and space from ongoing probes into his administration’s connections with Russian hackers and mobsters, the revelation late Wednesday that White House had granted ethics waivers to a record 17 staffers (including a retroactive one to senior advisor Steve Bannon) and the ongoing decline of the President’s support — even among right-leaning voters.

“It’s not just environmentalists who are concerned,” Abigail Abrams and Lucinda Shen report for Fortune. “Experts say pulling out of the deal could harm American businesses, and CEOs had been asking Trump to stick with the deal since the President announced he was close to making his final decision. Even oil giants such as ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips were among the companies that expressed support for the accord ahead of Trump’s announcement.”

The criticism was not universal, of course. 

“Some were supportive, particularly the coal industry which seems likely to be the most direct beneficiary of Mr. Trump’s climate and energy strategy,” reports Ed Crooks for Financial Times. “But the critics often argued that the structural shift in world energy markets towards renewables and away from fossil fuels would continue, regardless of Mr. Trump’s decision.”

The decision to join Syria and Nicaragua — which feels the agreement is not tough enough — as the only countries to not agree to the accord, is being viewed as a victory for the alt-right views of Bannon and the pro-fossil-fuel agenda of Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt, the former attorney general of oil-and-gas dependent Oklahoma. He has called climate change a “hoax” in the past but dodged a question by CNN’s Jake Tapper about it yesterday. 

It also fulfills a frequently made campaign promise that plays to Trump’s  xenophobic base, observers points out. 

“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” Trump said yesterday.

A “fiery” debate within the White House failed to sway the President, Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker and Michael Birnbaum report for the Washington Post.

“Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, reached out to chief executives and urged them to call her father to make their pro-business case for staying in the accord. She even personally appealed to Andrew Liveris, the head of Dow Chemical, asking him to spearhead a letter with other CEOs — which ultimately ran as a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal in May — directly appealing to Trump to stay in the agreement, according to a person familiar with the effort,” they write. “But in the end, it was not enough.”

Trump did not always feel this way, if past actions he presumably approved can be trusted as expressing his position.

The president and his three adult children in The Trump Organization signed an open letter to President Obama and the Congress in 2009 urging that the U.S. “serve in modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our planet” as leaders from 192 countries were gathering in Copenhagen to “determine the fate of our planet,” Ben Adler and Rebecca Leber reminded readers of Grist a year ago.

Published as a full-page ad in the New York Times, the petition cited an African proverb: “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”