Politics
Amazon Ships The Planet Back, Bezos Buys It a $10 Billion Apology Card
By Sean Vanity, . BSN Network. Satire.
Jeff Bezos announced this week that his Bezos Earth Fund has distributed approximately $2.4 billion in climate grants since 2020 and remains on track to deploy a full $10 billion by 2030, a commitment his spokespersons have described using words like "historic," "visionary," and "a testament to what one person can do when sufficiently motivated by a profile in The Atlantic."
Amazon, the company that made Bezos the wealthiest human being on a planet he has since chosen to save, generated an estimated 68.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2021 alone. The Earth Fund's entire ten-year, $10 billion pledge works out to roughly $145 per metric ton of Amazon emissions. For context, a verified carbon offset on the voluntary market runs between $3 and $50. Bezos is not buying offsets. He is funding research into why offsets exist.
Elon Musk, who understands optics the way a house fire understands curtains, called the announcement "very cool" on X before returning to his regularly scheduled content about population collapse.
The Fund has distributed grants to more than 80 organizations across six continents, including groups working on clean energy, land conservation, and what one grant summary described as "behavior change at systems level," which is a way of saying they are paying people to make PowerPoints about making better choices, to show to other people who are also making PowerPoints.
"We are mobilizing solutions at the speed and scale the climate crisis demands," said Andrew Steer, president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, in a statement that did not include a comparison to Amazon's shipping volume.
Amazon's emissions grew 18 percent between 2019 and 2021, which is also a form of mobilizing at speed and scale.
The company has its own pledge, called The Climate Pledge, which Bezos co-founded in 2019 with a commitment to reach net-zero carbon by 2040, ten years ahead of the Paris Agreement. Amazon has since added more than 450 corporate signatories to the pledge, grown its fleet of delivery vehicles by several hundred thousand, and opened fourteen new fulfillment centers in the American Southwest, a region the Earth Fund has separately identified as a critical drought zone.
Insiders familiar with Bezos's thinking say he sees no contradiction between running the world's largest logistics operation and funding the people trying to clean up after it. This is what is sometimes called "systems thinking" and sometimes called "having two phones."
The $10 billion, if fully deployed, would represent the largest private commitment to climate action in history, slightly ahead of the Bloomberg Philanthropies climate portfolio and significantly ahead of whatever you did last Earth Day.
Five percent of it will be spent by 2024. The remaining 76 percent is scheduled for the years after the current batch of climate scientists have already said things will get interesting.
Bezos, for his part, has not commented publicly on the emissions comparison. He was photographed last month aboard his 417-foot yacht, which travels with a support yacht, which is presumably what the Earth Fund is.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.newsweek.com/jeff-bezos-earth-fund-climate-amazon-emissions-12514098