For the last five months, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has had a seat at the table in the Trump administration, serving on a number of the scientific advisory panels that exist to prevent the president from sending the planet hurtling toward its own destruction (or at least provide some political cover for when he inevitably ignores them and does it anyway). That might be about to change, though, with the King of Silicon Valley issuing a Twitter ultimatum to the President of the United States: Pull out of the climate change-focused Paris Agreement, and Musk intends to walk/hover/fly away.
Trump has been playing coy about whether he’ll pull the U.S. out of the Agreement, which calls on nations across the globe to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the hope of curtailing climate change. Ratifying the country’s involvement in the accords was one of the last things Barack Obama did during his eight years in the Oval Office, with enforcement measures coming into effect just four days prior to the 2016 election. But Trump ran on a platform that denounced the Paris Agreement, leaving environmentalists concerned about the plan’s fate. They questioned Musk about his own status in an administration that views basic science as fake news junk, and he was forced to take a stand:
Trump will reportedly render a verdict on the Paris Agreement “over the next few days,” at which point we’ll see how much impact Musk really has, or if he’ll have to resign himself to heading back to the lab, desperately searching for a back-up planet for humanity before this one angrily tweets itself to death.