A letter from the Mother of Earth · written early on purpose
To John Ternus, who became Apple's chief executive on 1 September 2026 — and to everyone who will still be here in 2035, holding whatever we decide now.
Dear Mr. Ternus,
Congratulations is the easy word, so let us use the harder one: welcome. You take the chair after fifteen years of Tim Cook, and you take it in a decade where the most valuable thing a company can own is not a supply chain or a silicon roadmap, but the willingness to think honestly about consequences.
We are not writing because today is urgent. We are writing because 2035 is. The products you approve in your first two years will be repaired, resold, recycled or abandoned somewhere around 2035. The energy contracts signed in your first quarter will still be pushing electrons long after this letter is forgotten. A chief executive's real signature is not on the keynote — it is on the things that outlast them.
Apple has said, publicly and repeatedly, that it intends to be carbon neutral across its entire footprint by 2030: a reduction of roughly three quarters against its 2015 baseline, with only the remainder addressed through high-quality carbon removal. That is not our number. It is yours. Which is exactly why it matters who is holding it in 2027, 2028, 2029 — the unglamorous years, when a promise either becomes engineering or becomes marketing.
A decade is not a deadline. It is a habit, repeated four thousand mornings.
We love this company — not uncritically, and not only for what it sells. We love it for the demonstration it keeps making: that constraint can be beautiful, that the hard version is worth building, that a billion people will happily adopt something better if someone takes the trouble to make it. Climate work needs precisely that talent. Not slogans. Design.
So if you love it too — and believe it, not just for this quarter, but toward 2030, toward 2035 — please go ahead. Keep the number. Publish the gap as loudly as the progress. Tell us what is still unsolved: the semiconductors, the shipping lanes, the last stubborn quarter of the footprint. Honesty at that scale would be a product in itself.
We will be here, reading the reports, checking the footnotes, cheering when it is earned.
With hope, and with homework —
the Mother of Earth
an open station of global citizens
The sequence below is the whole argument. One handover, one promise falling due, one horizon that will judge both.
On 1 September, John Ternus becomes Apple's chief executive, succeeding Tim Cook after a fifteen-year tenure. The climate commitments are inherited intact — and so is the clock attached to them.
Apple's stated goal: carbon neutral across its entire footprint — operations, supply chain, and the life of every product sold. Roughly three quarters cut against a 2015 baseline; the rest removed, not offset away.
Nothing is scheduled for 2035. That is the point. Whatever counts as normal by then — repairable devices, clean grids, materials that circle back — is being decided in the quiet years just after the handover.
Time remaining until 1 January 2030 — the deadline Apple set for itself.
Not demands. Four things that would make the next nine years legible to everyone outside the building.
Percent reduced is a comfort. Tonnes remaining, by category, is a plan.
Longevity, parts and repair treated as a product feature to be proud of, not a regulation to be met.
Most of the footprint lives upstream. The most powerful climate decision Apple makes is a purchase order.
Chip fabrication, freight, the last quarter. Saying it out loud invites the rest of the world to help solve it.
Two earlier stations asked the same question in gentler voices. Read them first if you have time.
The question underneath all of this, asked plainly and left open.
earthlinc.earth/station/7jkee41x5z Station · Earth LinCThe same question, written from the smallest possible witness.
earthlinc.earth/station/8bn8ny9xfcEverything above is checkable. Where a figure or a date appears, here is where it came from.
Where this letter interprets rather than reports — the asks, the reading of 2035 — that is opinion, and it is signed as such. Corrections are welcome; they are the whole reason a station stays open.
Add your own letter, your own numbers, your own disagreement. We are all global citizens here, and 2035 is a shared address.
YuCROWN — Youth United, Connect Realm of Well Nature · yucrown.earth