The Amazon CEO, historically silent on the climate change issue and his company’s role within it, announces his personal vested interest — but critics
and Amazon employees want more.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced
Monday via Instagram he is
committing $10 billion of his own money to launch the Bezos Earth Fund — a fund
devoted to fighting climate change, which he now calls "the biggest threat to
our planet."
Bezos — currently the world’s richest
man,
according to Forbes — has historically been largely silent on the subject of
climate change, which has prompted a group of passionate Amazon employees to
publicly call him out for it, and walk out in
protest,
on a number of occasions.
He seemed to finally respond with the launch in September of “The Climate
Pledge”
— a commitment to meet the goals outlined in the Paris Agreement by 2040, 10
years early. Amazon was the first signatory of the pledge — co-founded with
Christina Figueres’ new initiative, Global
Optimism — which also called on other companies to
join the commitment to be net zero carbon across their businesses by 2040. In
announcing the launch of The Climate Pledge, Bezos proclaimed that Amazon was
“done being in the middle of the herd on this issue — we’ve decided to use our
size and scale to make a difference.” But aside from the initial announcement,
no further information on The Climate Pledge — including new signatories,
progress on the commitment, or even a website — could be found as of press time.
But in an apparent effort to show he’s personally willing to show up to the
climate fight, Bezos says his new Earth Fund will be a “global initiative [that]
will fund scientists, activists, NGOs — any effort that offers a real
possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world.” While other
philanthropic heavyweights such as Bill
Gates
have pledged money to help foster sustainability solutions, the Bezos Earth Fund
represents one of the largest known individual financial pledges, according to
The Chronicle of
Philanthropy.
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Amazon employees — who have responded to his historic lack of response on the
climate crisis by forming their own group, Amazon Employees for Climate
Justice — commented on the announcement via
Twitter that
while they applaud Bezos’ philanthropic gesture, “one hand cannot give what the
other is taking away;” and asked pertinent questions, including: “When is Amazon
going to stop helping oil and gas companies ravage Earth with still more oil and
gas wells? When is Amazon going to stop funding climate-denying think tanks …
and climate-delaying policy?”
As Dimitar Vlahov, Director
of Knowledge and Insights at Sustainable Brands, commented: “It's a good
gesture, but Amazon has done a lot more damage than $10 billion worth of
philanthropy can correct — let's hope Amazon as a company does more soon, and
hopefully the $10 billion will be invested effectively into real solutions.”
To Vlahov’s point, while billions have now been committed to the climate fight
from some of the world’s biggest financial institutions — including Bank of
America,
Blackrock,
Goldman
Sachs,
JPMorgan
Chase
and the World
Bank
— when will we begin to have visibility into the resulting investments and
their
impacts?
Published Feb 18, 2020 7am EST / 4am PST / 12pm GMT / 1pm CET
Sustainable Brands Staff