Jeff Bezos commits $1 billion to conservation as Amazon destroys the world

Jeff Bezos is donating $1 billion of his $10 billion climate philanthropy pledge to guard biodiversity and carbon-saving forests within the Andes, the Congo Basin, and the tropical Pacific Ocean. After nearly three decades main Amazon, which has an unlimited and rising carbon footprint, Bezos appears intent on forging a brand new id as an environmentalist and maybe the world’s most beneficiant financier within the struggle towards local weather change. And that expensive trip to space he just took? Bezos says it was enlightening.

“Nature is our life help system and it’s fragile,” the billionaire stated Monday at a press convention. “I used to be reminded of this simply this July once I went into area with Blue Origin. I’d heard that seeing the Earth from area adjustments one’s perspective of the world, however I used to be not ready for simply how a lot that might be true.”

Whereas the fundraising effort is definitely notable, Bezos’s dedication to defending the atmosphere serves as a stark reminder that a lot of his legacy and largely untaxed fortune was constructed by firms which have staggering carbon footprints. Amazon’s carbon emissions have grown yearly since 2018, and final 12 months alone, when world carbon emissions fell roughly 7 %, Amazon’s carbon emissions grew 19 percent to 60.64 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s roughly equal to burning 140 million barrels of oil.

Amazon has moved to scale back its dependence on fossil fuels, like committing to electrifying its delivery vehicles, and it has recruited dozens of firms to signal its Climate Pledge, a company dedication to succeed in net-zero emissions by 2040. However for now, Amazon stays reliant on huge fleets of polluting supply automobiles, wasteful packaging, and even a new fleet of jet-fuel-powered planes to maintain speedily delivering stuff to impatient internet buyers.

In the meantime, Amazon Net Providers (AWS) makes use of huge quantities of power to maintain its servers on-line. In 2019, Greenpeace accused the cloud computing company of abandoning its pledge to make use of one hundred pc renewable power and stated that among the largest AWS information facilities used simply 12 % renewable power. And at the same time as different firms, like Google, have moved away from offering some cloud services to fossil gas firms, AWS nonetheless lists Shell, Hess, and BP as clients.

Bezos is technically now not a part of Amazon. However Blue Origin, the non-public spaceflight firm he owns that lately took him to area, has raised environmental concerns. Whereas the area rocket firm has used carbon-free fuels — specifically, a mix of liquid hydrogen and oxygen — making these fuels is still environmentally costly, and environmentalists warn that Blue Origin rockets still leave behind particles that may hurt the ambiance.

So when seen from a sure perspective, Bezos’s environmental philanthropy feels a bit like an effort to wash up a large number his firms helped make.